Moment

Hans Tutschku - Moment

Brief background from liner notes:

Hans Tutschku began to study music at an early age. In 1982 he joined the Ensemble für Intuitive Musik Weimar, playing synthesizer and live electronics. He studied electroacoustic composition in Dresden, and accompanied Karlheinz Stockhausen on several concert tours during 1989-91 for the purpose of studying sound diffusion. With the Ensemble für Intuitive Musik Weimar he has realized several multimedia productions, conceiving projected images and choreography for dance as well as the music. Together they have given numerous concerts in Europe, Latin America and Asia. Hans Tutschku has composed instrumental works, works for tape, works for musicians and electronics, and music for theatre, film and ballet.

Excerpts from liner notes by Tutschku:

extrémités lointaines

extrémités lointaines uses recordings I made during a four-week concert tour in Asia in the summer of 1997. I recorded city sounds, the music of churches and temples, and the songs of children in Singapore, Indonesia, the Philippines and Thailand. These unexpectedly rich sound worlds, quite different from ours, remain inscrutable even if they open doors for us.

... erinnerung ...

In recent years the use of speech has been a central compositional concern. In ... erinnerung ... (... memento ...) the recorded poem forms the starting point for acousmatic transformations. Apart from this text there is a second group of sources, which include bells and tam-tams. I used granular synthesis to cut the sounds into small pieces and played them back polyphonically to create dense sound textures. The resulting sonic intensity is a musical translation of the central phrase of the poem Yo os lo aseguro... (I assure you...) by Antonio Bueno Tubia: "I assure you/ the prison is there/ I recall it like a lash to the face."

Les invisibles

Les invisibles is a composition based on vocal and instrumental sounds which create a soundscape corresponding to the text. It was not my intention to illustrate or 'set' the text, although I do use speech as a sound source, and the comprehensibility of the text remains secondary. Les invisibles uses recordings of twenty-five short melodic gestures and five longer sequences, as well as a layered four-part vocal polyphony on the text of Es wird später [by Karl Lubomirski].

Sieben Stufen

Sieben Stufen (Seven Steps) uses the poem Verfall (Decline, Decay) by Georg Trakl (1887-1914). All sounds are derived from electronic manipulations of two recordings of the poem spoken by four different voices (two in German and two in French), as well as four German key-words sung in seven pitches and their four corresponding French translations in seven different pitches: Verfall-ruine (decline); Abend-au soir (evening); Glocken-cloches (bells); Vögel-oiseaux (birds).

Die zerschlagene Stimme

All sounds in Die zerschlagene Stimme are derived from the human voice and from percussion instruments. These sources were then transformed with the help of customized computer programs.

Tracklisting:

1. extrémités lointaines {16:42}

2. ... erinnerung ... {10:22}

3. Les invisibles {12:43}

4. Sieben Stufen {13:11}

5. Die zerschlagene Stimme {10:16}

(1) (2) [maybe reposted soon]