infotext:
Enigma for voice, percussion and prepared piano (1999) Enigma is an important example of the use of melody and line, parameters that the composer used very reduced after 1999. The composition of Enigma falls at a time when Mela Meierhans is intensively engaged with the oeuvre of the Austrian author Ingeborg Bachmann - also Orpheus sets Bachmann's poem of the same name to music. 1999/2000 is finally created Aa after an unnamed poem by the author and finally in 1999 the Enigma-Adaptation for voice, percussion and primed grand piano. Orpheus, Aa and Enigma Trio sums up Mela Meierhans in the Damelack song cycle zusammen. It significantly influences its formal structure. In the topos of the Enigma, the composer sees a »linguistic structure with paradoxical statements« and interprets it as a »lamentation«, a subject that the composer has repeatedly taken up to this day. The formal structure of the composition results from a key visual experience of the composer. »Suddenly the paper, the white one, was as thick as the text. I no longer saw the text as just text, but text and spaces as parts of a whole.« (Mela Meierhans) The basis of the three-part composition is to explore the relationship between text, pause and designed silence or designed empty space, i.e. to convert words and letters as well as spaces into sound. Triton for piano solo (1989) The five-movement work is dedicated to the pianist Laura Gallati, who premiered it in 1990. Triton is the first contemporary work by Mela Meierhans. The canton of Lucerne, where the composer lived at the time, awards a “work grant” as part of the artist promotion, for which the composer applies and wins. With Laura Gallati, member of the jury, begins a long-term friendship and collaboration that continues to this day. Triton is inspired by Arnold Schönberg's Six Little Piano Pieces op. 19, a central cycle for the composer and pianist Mela Meierhans. The Schönberg miniatures were created in 1911, part VI in memory of Gustav Mahler, who died that same year. Mela Meierhans transfers the essential features of the cycle, its six-part structure and the extreme brevity of the individual movements, to her piece. The composer weaves the sound of bells from Arnold Schönberg's work into the final movement. Mela Meierhans' title refers back to the interval focus of the work, the tritone. The musical gesture is determined by the sparing use of resources, a musical texture that is partially interspersed with pauses and colored by minimalist repetitions and sustained sounds. Aa for voice and percussion (2000) The five-movement work refers to an unnamed poem by Ingeborg Bachmann and was commissioned for the duo "canto battuto" (Eva Nievergelt, soprano / Christoph Brunner, percussion). With Aa Mela Meierhans takes the step into a new work phase. In the composer's work it marks the transition from melody and development to fragment and network structure, from vocal sound to noise. “[The] lines and melodies and layers […] started to impede and bother me. And the only way to destroy that was to first write it down differently.« (Mela Meierhans) opening and closing sentence, harmony and Ausklang, as well as the middle part, interlude, correspond formally and structurally with each other. Percussion and voice are tonally homogeneous. They stand out from Parts II and IV, which are completely different in their musical gestures. The text is only available as subtext. The composer creates a musical fragment for each word, which she separates into syllables and phonemes, changes their order and encodes the text in this way. The execution determines the singer. Three further vocal parameters are assigned to each fragment, which affect the dynamics, tone changes through glissandi, vocal technique and coloring. Due to the exact meter, which is binding for both instruments, the interplay is compositionally precisely defined. Here the composer determines the parameter duration of the fragment in seconds through several variations of the "Fibonacci series". Parts II and IV of the work are to be understood as interactive scores. The sound material results from converting selected letters into sounds. An important aspect of the composition is the experimental notation that is new to the composer's work. Aa is also a notation experiment. Her intellectual and creative background not only has an impact on this work, but opens up an entire creative phase that explicitly postulates the renunciation of lines and melodies. Orpheus for solo voice (1998) Orpheus after the poem to say dark by Ingeborg Bachmann is a piece for medium voice and open grand piano. The work precedes the chamber ensemble/electronic version of Enigma the first of a series of "lamentations" (cf Enigma). The execution of the composition has a scenic component: the singer sings into the grand piano - to create an echo - and realizes a dynamic range of variation by constantly changing the distance between the upper body and the strings. A flowing movement emerges, similar to a danced choreography. In this solo piece, the lament is concentrated in the figure of Orpheus, whose lyre the composer makes comprehensible through the vibrating strings of the grand piano. »At the time ›Orpheus‹ was created I was very intensively involved with circular breathing. Before ›Orpheus‹ I composed ›Na?‹ for horn and seven wind instruments, at the same time ›sacht ä‹ for ensemble with clarinet. That breathing was a big issue at the time.« (Mela Meierhans) Mela Meierhans places seven distinctive noisy events at the beginning and end of the piece. This is followed by the sung word »Orpheus«. Here the composer succeeds in a musical implementation of cyclical breathing: the singer takes big breaths of air and releases it at first unvoiced and airy, then with a strong air noise and finally on a sustained note in the chest voice. The strings vibrate analogously to the frequencies of the tones sung by the singer, so that a sound with changing pitch and dynamics can be heard from the grand piano and the singer's voice creates a polyphony. Through its direct, associative text conversion Orpheus an example of a particularly clear and close connection between music and text: the statement of the text is strengthened and expanded by the setting to music. The sung line in turn increases the amalgamation of text and music, because it gives Orpheus a vocal expression, the voice breathes for him, sings for him, embodies him. And she laments, weeps, loves - because she meets death. Cordes Ouvertes II for violin solo (1995/96, electronically edited version 1999) This work is a tribute to the composer's childhood. She gives a compositional expression to the memory of her first, clumsy violin playing at the age of three on the one hand and the big world of – especially contemporary – music of her father, the violinist, violist and performer Kurt Meyerhans. The home rehearsals of the "Amos Trio" founded by her father and his tape collages characterize Mela Meierhans' entire work. The work is a very personal homage to her father. Leslie Leon |
program:
Enigma 05:27 Leslie Leon, voice Triton 10:19 Laura Gallati, piano Aa 18:49 Leslie Leon, voice Orpheus 07:40 Leslie Leon, voice Cordes Ouvertes II 11:49 Lenka Župková, violin
total time: 54:05 |
Press:
02/2015
No. 12, October 2014 Desde hace 10 años, la compositora suiza Mela Meierhans ha centrado su actividad en la investigación de las lamentaciones funebres y los rituales luctuosos de las religiones monteístas. En esta muestra de su obra camerística sus inquietud artísticas y éticas encuentran acomodo en las articulaciones propias de la música para varios instrumentos de acuerdo con las consignas de la Segunda Escuela de Viena y, más concretamente, con la obra de Schoenberg. The resultado is an insolita fronda sonora donde se mezcla la arquitectura de vanguardia con la introspección metafísica.
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