Commission to Johannes Kalitzke

Music inspired by literature and language, but which does not include texts in the conventional sense (for example as singing or in melodramatic form), but in which the textual level is, as it were, absorbed into the sound, is presented in the concert Klangtexte – Textklänge by the oenm – Österreichisches Ensemble für Neue Musik in Salzburg. Johannes Kalitzke composes a concerto for percussion and ensemble for this occasion. "The basis for the musical characteristics of the piece are individual excerpts, words and syllables from a recording of Anna Livia Plurabelle from 1929, read by James Joyce himself. The tonal reflections of these individual vocal sounds in the solo percussion are expanded horizontally and vertically in the ensemble according to the mesostic method and developed into more complex structures. For example, scales are transformed into chords through discontinuous acceleration – and vice versa. Or voice sounds become spectral sounds through electronic overstretching, which overlap with the mixtures of the instruments. The multiplicity of the sense of writing is thus also transferred to the acoustic level. As in the text itself, historical musical building blocks are closely linked, simultaneously or successively, following the image of the omnipresence of collective memory in the semantic molecule." This is how Kalitzke describes his composition, commissioned by the oenm – Österreichisches Ensemble für Neue Musik and made possible by the Ernst von Siemens Music Foundation.

Further information:
oenm.at

Dates

November 24, 2023
Solitär, Mozarteum University, Salzburg