Friday, November 3, 2017

Berliner Geschichten

I had to transfer some recordings og older works to host them on my website, here is the recoding of the premiere of my composition Berliner Gschichten which I wrote in 1998/99, performed by the Ensemble Modern, conducted by Kasper de Roo with myself and Norbert Ommer doing the sound projection in the Grosse Sendesaal of the Hessische Rundfunk in Frankfurt.

Description:
In spring 1998 Mr. Bernd Leukert, head of the department for new music in the Hessische Rundfunk commissioned a work for a concert with the Ensemble Modern. During this time I was working in Berlin at the Berliner Ensemble (theatre) and very intensely experienced the power of this city.
I had a piece in mind which would permanently `morph´ - with parallel layers of morphing textures and dynamic, harmonic, rhythmical and timbral transitions distributed among different instrument groups - a floating music, hard to locate. I decided to move from Cologne to Berlin and started collecting the soundscapes of this city on my old NAGRA-recorder. Sounds from the different districts - Kreuzberg, Tempelhof, Mitte, Potsdamer Platz, subwaystations, urban people. These collected sounds, partially processed and modified soundbits are integrated into the piece by using a sampler and are dubbed by certain instruments or groups of instruments. This process takes away the profanity of those urban soundbits - sounds from a cigarette shop, turkish markets, chainsaws - everything turns into `music´.

This piece is dedicated to my wife Andrea.


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