Instrumentation: fl (afl), eh, cl (bcl), perc, pno, vl, vc
Premiere: 10.11.2017, Ensemble Haus, Freiburg im Breisgau

About the work:
Writing a composition with texts from Robert Walser was a long-existing desire. Since my youth, I’ve been reading his literature with a deep fascination for the rhythm and sound of his language coming with fine humour and a profound sense of contemplation that is omnipresent in his stories and permeates the formal openness of his narrations.

Walsers death is particularly well documented because he died during a walk outside and the police had to take forensic photographs of Walser’s death scene. I got fascinated by these photos. Not only because researchers in literature have shown that Walser «foretold» his death in his own books – Walser died walking on a promenade in the winter lying in the snow a bit like he’d chosen to die there – but also because the photos have a very poetic facette even though – or maybe precisely because – they were intended to be as factual as possible. The factual and the contemplative share the act of observation but their psychologic point of departure is completely different. Would it be possible to approach musically this expressivity of the factual, this aesthetics of the unintended?
As a participant of the ensemble recherche‘s project next to recherche, I had the great opportunity to have several workshops with these great musicians. This allowed me to deepen my knowledge about the relation between music and language, between the sonorous, the semantic and its musical exemplification in which I was deeply interested in that time.

- the contemplative
- the narration
- the factual
The contemplative and factual are approached by a specific form of notation resulting in each interpretation in a completely new constellation. Even though each note is written, there’s not a linear musical narration. But where the contemplative part demands the interpreters to play with a maximum of empathy for the music played by the other interpreters the factual part divides the interpreters into different groups of which one is indifferent and the other empathic. In the middle of these two different formal parts lies a traditionally outwritten section ‘wandering’ between pure instrumental subsections and those where the text is expressed as a combination of spoken and instrumental sounds.

[…] der Schnee knirschte unter seinen Schritten.

Die Tannen waren so voll mit Schnee beladen, dass sie ihre starken Äste herrlich zur Erde niederhängen liessen.

Was veranlasste diesen Menschen, sich hier in der bitteren Kälte, und an einer so einsamen Stelle im Tannenwald niederzulegen?

[…] etwas Unheimliches, […], dieses Gesicht verbergen mitten im Winter, […], es sich hier im Schnee bequem zu machen.

[…] das war sein Mund, sein Bart, seine etwas breite, gedrückte Nase, seine Augenbildungen, seine Stirn und seine Haare.

Die Natur sieht herab auf ihre Toten, die Sterne singen leise ihm zu Häupten, und die Nachtvögel schnarren, das ist die beste Musik für einen der kein Gehöhr und kein Gefühl mehr hat.

Siehst du, ich träume auch viel, und viele, viele Menschen, denen man es nicht zutrauen würde, träumen, aber du glaubtest, ein Recht zu haben auf das Träumen, während wir anderen nur träumen, wenn wir uns recht elend vorkommen, aber froh sind, es einstellen zu können.

Er hätte jubeln mögen in dieser eisigen, sternengeschmückten Nacht.

Was war denn ein Toter? Ei, eine Mahnung ans Leben. Weiter gar nicht. Eine köstliche zurückrufende Erinnerung und zugleich ein Treiben in die ungewisse, schöne Zukunft.

Robert Walser, Die Geschwister Tanner
(choosen fragments)