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STEFAN SCHULZKI · CHAMBER MUSIC At the beginning of my work on piano concert I was looking for clusters of tones that usually combine the material of several major chords. The association of mirror-smooth mountain lakes made me think of a slow movement, the irritations of which should serve to build up a certain tension despite the contemplation. The following, fast section is also characterized by major and dissonances. This is followed by an accelerando lasting several minutes, which ends in a quasi-timeless section, and then another stepless time bend, this time in the other direction - from approx. 250 to approx. 12 beats per minute - and at the same time from the quietest to the loudest, where the events are as it were reach their maximum under a microscope. There, too, another “zero point” is reached before a short coda lets the opening material return in a new light. For the aDevantgarde festival project »A nasty song! Pfui!« Norbert Niemann wrote me specially Political song 2011 for dubbing. In the course of my considerations regarding the implementation, the stylistic devices of exaggeration and ironic exaggeration suggested themselves to me in order to sharpen the attention. The vocal part often requires lightning-fast switching between the most varied of emotional attitudes. These rapid changes in perspective can often be found in my music and can be understood as a message: you should never take your own worldview too seriously. One definition of the term "reflection" is: The brighter and larger a body, the more strongly its reflection shines on another body that is next to it. In a figurative sense, one could also say: The more extreme an event, the more it leaves its mark on a person's emotional biography. My Widerschein pieces are always about situations that, due to their intensity, leave visible or noticeable imprints even afterwards, and also on people who are not externally involved. For a project at the Augsburg Leopold Mozart Center with multiple settings, the composer Markus Schmitt encouraged me to also contribute a new setting of Goethe, and he gave me the one of all things Erlkönig vicinity. I've never hesitated for so long before taking on a compositional task, because it's simply impossible to ignore the Schubert classic... Rarely has it been so difficult for me to find other solutions that didn't seem significantly worse to me - and also one or the other I had to accept other similarities (e.g. fast piano triplets or the vocal gestures in »Dem Vater Grauset's«), because despite my efforts to find differences, I didn't want to be different from Schubert at any price ... in the end I had to At least try to set the text to music in the most independent way possible (no matter how difficult it was!) – and a strict avoidance of any similarities would have run counter to this intention, as would an unconscious or careless adoption of existing Schubertian solutions. The Three epigrams after Bertolt Brecht were created for a project at the Augsburg Brecht Festival, where the war primer was staged in its entirety in one evening. The 69 photos were projected, the accompanying Brechtian quatrains recited by the actress Rike Schmid or performed by choir, soloists and piano. In addition to the performance of existing compositions by Hanns Eisler and Paul Dessau, Augsburg composers (including Richard Heller, Michael Kamm, Wolfgang Lackerschmid and Tom Simonetti) were invited to set individual epigrams to music. The time and the room is a play by Botho Strauss, which in fragmentary images around the main character Marie Steuber - so my interpretation - tells in an artful and non-linear way about the difficulties of interpersonal communication and ultimately failed relationships. For his production at the Deutsches Theater in Berlin (2001/2002), director Jarg Pataki asked me to write independent music for the Debussy cast viola, flute and harp, which stylistically corresponds to my own music and at the same time the sensuality of Debussy and the precision united by weavers. He was generous enough to invite me to his farmhouse near Geneva in his absence. For three weeks in November I was able to read Stephen Hawking and Botho Strauss there, in seclusion, and compose the miniatures used as interludes, in which a series of tones is varied that refers to Debussy's famous Trio. Stefan Schulzki program:
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