8-channel fixed media 18:35
Annija Krivjonoka: voice
Leslee Smucker: violin
Siân Wassermann: voice (spoken introduction)
Nachts fand ich mich auf einer Heide
Starrend von Unrat und Staub der Sterne
Im Haselgebüsch
Klangen wieder Kristallne Engel
(from Georg Trakl’s poem “De Profundis”)
In 2016, I created the electronic composition Serenade commissioned by GRM. The entire composition was built around Georg Trakl’s poem “De Profundis”, which was virtuosically voiced/sung by Siân Wassermann. This recording was divided into more than a hundred words and syllables, all of which were individually processed electronically according to serial permutation schemes worked out in great detail.
Because the last verse of the poem was overlooked during the making of the recording, it does not appear in Serenade. It was therefore actually unfinished when it premiered in Paris in January 2017. There was a plan to record and add the last verse to the piece, but Serenade remained as it was and has since been performed many times and released on CD.
However, the idea of doing something with that last verse remained somewhere in the back of my head, and in the autumn of 2023, I asked Annija Krivjonoka to record the last verse of “De Profundis” after all. It took some time but suddenly there was a great recording: an interpretation of the text that is in itself a kind of composition with enormous expressive power. In a subsequent recording, Annija put more emphasis on the intelligibility of the text.
Despite the fact that the verse consists of four sentences with a total of only twenty words, the first recording has a considerable length. This recording was processed in the same way as Siân Wassermann’s recording for Serenade , but in addition it has been given a solo role in the final piece. Moreover, an alienating element in the composition is that the processed vocal sounds are frequently combined with voice simulations created with VOSIM generators.
A second solo role in Staub der Sterne is reserved for a recording made by Leslee Smucker, who, at my request, played the violin part from part 6 “Lied (ohne Worte)” of Arnold Schoenberg’s Serenade opus 24. The piece, then, to which the title of ‘my’ Serenade from 2016 already referred. The words from Annija’s second recording were processed to sound in chords derived from the violin part.
At the last minute, Siân also contributed. In contrast to her earlier recording, the phrases of the last verse of “De Profundis” were voiced by her now very neutrally. They were used as an introduction in Staub der Sterne.
Staub der Sterne was intended as a coda to the 2016 piece but ended up being almost three minutes longer than Serenade. The question remains: Is this phase two of Serenade?