Aus... Am Grat

Sound as a bodily experience is deeply connected both to my musical world as a composer and to my initial musical training as soprano. The voice is the natural connection between sound and the sound of words. For that reason, using a poetic text has been an essential part of my musical research. Mandelatmen  - Respiro di Mandorla is the poetical text born from my collaboration with the Italian poet Elisa Biagini. Her work is characterized by a fragmented, but intense and self-contained language: throughout her collection of fragment-poems, words build a path, forming a continuous and twisting net. The apparent contradiction between the discontinuousness of the fragments and the continuity of the relationships between words has much to do with my compositional world. The text of “Aus...Am Grat” has one of these fragments as a structural backbone and as a seed for further ramifications. These ramifications are not only an inspiring poetical image but also, principally, a very concrete image of a real space and the possible development of the sonic potential. The word-sound does not spread out in a linear way, but it expands in different directions, in disparate layers of the structure: the structure of the piece, of the space, of the ensemble's sound projection.*ES IST ALLES ANDERS, ALS DU ES DIE DENKST, ALS ICH ES MIR DENKE,eppure sotto la pelle c’è luceintermittente, s’attiva allatua unghia-consonante, al ditoallungato della voce.*Piena è la borsa dell’occhiodi monete di tempo:la tasca è così apertain queste ore chesento il tintinnare.*AM ABSCHIEDSGRATmi sbuccioil respirare.Il fiatorammendato colfilo più scuro:d’abbandono.Text from  “MANDELN ATMEN – Respiro di mandorla”  by Elisa Biagini