Akt Zeichnung (2005)
(for baritone and ensemble)

Akt Zeichnung was created during a scholarship at the Ensemble Modern Academy as a kind of “work in progress”. With the aim of exploring the physicality of the sung and spoken voice and their relationship to an instrumental context in a variety of compositional ways, various instrumental, vocal and electronic amplification techniques were tried out over a long period of time, and sketches and fragments of the piece were rehearsed and performed. Meanwhile, the results were continuously evaluated and processed at the desk. The final version of this work process, which oscillates between experimentation and reflection, will be presented this evening.

The combination of the human voice and instruments almost inevitably leads to the voice being strongly perceptible in the foreground. While playing an instrument is an artificial action, singing or speaking is the most natural means of expressing oneself musically; it is directly linked to a body that focuses attention. In addition to musical perception, there is another level that is much more concrete: the understanding of language.

This represents a discrepancy to my usual treatment of an instrumental ensemble, in which the tonal identity of the individual instruments is always subordinate to an overall tonality. And it is precisely this discrepancy that is the starting point of the composition: the singer moves tonally and linguistically on a ridge between dissolution in the ensemble and superficial independence. The dissolution takes place through the fact that the voices of the instrumentalists are included in the overall sound of the ensemble in a variety of ways. In addition, the rhythmic organization of the sounds imitates the natural articulation of speech. The singer is thus thrown into a counterpoint of echoes of various kinds, from which he only breaks out towards the end.

The sonority of the piece is also characterized by the use of electronic amplification, which brings out otherwise barely audible registers of the voice (such as whispering or speaking into the wind instruments).

The exploration of the physicality of the voice is the reason for the title Akt Zeichnung, which also indicates that a small theatrical action takes place within the music on the basis of the text: In 1963, the Argentinian author Julio Cortázar describes with playful irony in chapter 80 of his experimental novel “Rayuela” (here in the German translation by Fritz Rudolf Fries) the strange restlessness that arises when, in certain everyday situations (for example when cutting nails or washing hair), one's own body is perceived as a foreign body, as detached from the “I”: a floating incongruity that I associate with the compositional discrepancy between voice and ensemble.

Akt Zeichnung is dedicated to Wolfgang Stryi, who died too soon and who, like so many other composers, encouraged me with endless enthusiasm to write for double bass clarinet.

Elena Mendoza