Chaines 2 Scenes
Trial of a role: requirement, concert, picture
1976 (11′28″)
Music for theatre
For tape and melodic instrument
The twelve-tone music and its post-serial legacy conveyed to the composer a logical-mathematical composition system as a basis for every musical idea. In the 1950s, this heritage was managed in Germany out of a need for national cultural independence. Today, such an intellectual attitude has been deprived of its motivation. The dodecaphonic series developed into an established quality prerequisite for ‘New Music’. Therefore, it is a task of the composer to examine, analyze, and attack this ideology. Too often, the composer tries to regain the lack of musical consciousness by means of a formula. Good music seeks harmony, a balance between ratio and emotion, a synthesis of play and security.
The ambivalence between the rational and emotional aspect should not be understood as action-reaction.
The photographer does not feel confronted with the duality of ratio-emotion: he is not a composer. However, he sees these aspects, which probably represent a reason why he associates a lot of effort with listening to new and electronic music.
1. On ‘Einbildung’ (Imagination):
The scene ‘Einbildung’ shows the role behavior of various participants in a concert. From the audience’s expectations, through the poses of the instrumentalist, to the serious appearance of the composer, different attitudes are displayed and demonstrated. The individual acts are interrupted by negative audience reactions, which are faded in via tape. The player (music clown) then falls into emotional outbursts, which form the basis for a new public presentation and representation. The mentioned character traits of a clown find an interpretation in this piece.
On ‘Vorbildung’ (Pre-formation):
In the first part of the composition ‘Chaines 2 scenes’, the photographer attempts to create contrasts through slide projection. This happens in juxtaposition of a children’s and doll’s world regarding their functions of human – object, skin – plastic, nature and artificiality. The photographer thus problematizes this with visual means. Simultaneously, a person, masked half as a clown and half as a human, experiences that they possess both puppet-like and childlike traits. This ‘half-human’ is meant to embody a synthesis of both worlds.
2. On ‘Konzert’ (Concert):
The contrast shown above is musically treated in the concert part. This happens through the juxtaposition of mathematically conceived structures (electronic music) with ‘primitive’ tone sequences (recorder music, reproduced by the ‘music clown’). The form of these tone sequences corresponds to the music of two-and-a-half-year-old children. ‘In the small child, we see the absence of tonality and sense of tonality. The child at two and a half years begins to sing at full volume, but ends barely audibly.
3. On ‘Abbildung’ (Depiction):
In ‘Abbildung’, the photographer (slide projection) depicts the face of the clown. In a spiral camera movement, the surface of the face is magnified until, at the end, for example, a wrinkle is no longer recognizable as a detail of a face, but only as a structure. Synchronously, a long-held tone changes into pointillistic sound textures (electronically generated).
