Schattenmusik

The title of Schattenmusik (Shadow Music), written for the Thin Edge New Music Collective from Toronto, does not indicate a direct transfer of visual laws to the musical medium, but should be understood as a metaphorical expression that can help find a way into the music through recourse to related experiences. Just as shadows point indirectly to something, the piece focuses on different types of sounds that inevitably accompany a conventional, “light-bathed” sound world, but often go unnoticed in its context: noisy sonic artefacts, darker shades of colour or minute micro-harmonic variations. Just as a photo negative contains the real image as its opposite, so too the gestures of the piece are intended to resemble an imprint of a traditional dramaturgy. Towards the end of the work, an unexpected way out of an extended passage of low, meandering streams of sounds that opens up because the most insistent of the three instruments – the violin – asserts itself and induces the others to join it in invoking a pitch centre, played with varying intensity.

Recording: 9.11.2019

Recording engineer: Dietrich Petzold