Labor Day (2011)

LJ WHITE 

More (2015)

Natasha ANDERSON 

Games of Belief (2015)

Tonia KO 

Got Lost (2006)

Helmet LACHENMANN 

Poet: Erika Meitner

The way we sleep to-
gether is locational,
seasonal -- the way
you can buy useful things off
the roadside here in
summer passing through: peaches,
heirloom tomatoes,
squash, sweet corn, bait, antiques, rugs,
tie-dye, fireworks, guns --
your hand around the back of
my neck in the dark
above the covers the way
you'd hold a beer can,
near empty, out on the porch
before tossing it.

More is a fractured intermingling of situated relations to a female self. It uses fragments of the now axiomatically popular medieval song from Martin Codax, 'Ondas do mar de Vigo', in which a Galician fisherman's wife longs for her husband, yet to return from sea. Other text is triggered by inmates accounts of the institutionalised, gendered abuse dished out at the Hay Institution for Girls. More also conjures forth the voice of Anneliese Michel, a young German woman who died exhausted and malnourished as a result of exorcisms carried out in 1976, in counterpoint to the voices of the Catholic priests who tormented and tortured her.
As we move through this world of symbols, we come alive in quick-fire flashes of attention across the boundaries between sense and non-sense. The vocal subject of More is a fractured human who is one moment hysterical, the next quietly authoritative. She appears briefly as if a cantor intoning some ritual, the next a glossolalic savage enacting the physical process of internalising a punishing oppression. More foregrounds the ontological violence of experiences for which we have no language. The work is an etude on the excesses of body, text, flesh and feeling, under whose tangled net we labor to make meaning out of the meaningless. We are already full to bursting and still we cannot get - nor be - enough. The most ordered voice of the work repeatedly commands: 'still more'. —Natasha Anderson and Jessica Aszodi

My piece starts by confronting an acoustical reality of the piano: every key is connected to a long metal string that contains all harmonic partials of the fundamental note. By isolating these overtones, the performer essentially creates a series of arpeggios, a familiar trope to so much of piano music. This concept of arpeggiation, of leaping up and down the keys became a parameter that I freely manipulated by condensing and stretching intervals. Games of Belief is a loose set of variations over series of chords that expand outward from the opening cluster. Even as the texture changes dramatically, these chords serve as anchors for the listener. At the end of the piece, a descending melodic line guides our return to the acoustic overtones of the opening. The music is constantly striving - sometimes violently - and expanding in range, but at its center is a lyrical core. —Tonia Ko

According to pianist Stephen Drury, “Helmut’s music doesn’t want to give us what we already have, what we already feel good about. He wants to give us an experience we can’t imagine having. It’s the most beautiful thing in the world.” (Quoted in The Post and Courier, 6/1/2016). Using familiar acoustic materials (here: a piano, pianist, and singer), German composer Helmut Lachenmann’s works disorient, astonish, fascinate, and awaken one’s aural senses to previously unimagined worlds of sound. Though his music has often been seen as cold, inaccessible, or densely intellectual - there is simultaneously a child-like wonder, and a delight in discovery of timbres, sounds, possibilities - like snowflakes seen through the microscope, then on the end of one’s mittens.
Even when it seems on the brink of chaos, as if the musicians have become detached from reality, normalcy, and decorum - Lachenmann’s music requires both skill, care, and the will to learn and perfect new actions. “Sometimes I say to musicians, ‘Try to like it’. They laugh, but they understand.” (LA Times, 4/13/2008) In Got Lost, both singer and pianist make sounds in ways uncommon to their discipline, highlighting the musical possibilities of tongue clicks, cheek slaps, and unpitched vocal play that few Western composers have explored - none with such specificity as Lachenmann. On top of all this, he chooses three extremely different texts - a call to courage by Friedrich Nietzsche, a ridiculous love letter to ridiculous love letters by Fernando Pessoa, and a request regarding a lost laundry basket, found in a German elevator.
One may seek meaning from these juxtaposed words (which often occur in tandem - the singer attempting to perform two poems simultaneously) - but, as is often the case with Lachenmann’s music, it may be more fruitful to abandon the search for meaning - and take in the sounds instead. “Music is the same thing as a sunrise - it doesn’t say anything. It’s there, and you enjoy it” (Helmut Lachenmann, Post and Courier). —Liz Pearse