a moment of silence

composition: Joanna Przybyla

mezzo – soprano: Nathalie Claude

 

22 September 2011, 18:30

St.Johannes-Evangelist-Kirche, Auguststr. 90, 10117 Berlin

 

A Moment of Silence, performed September 22 Sept. 2011, was a site-specific 12-channel spatial sound installation with chimes, voice and six-second delays relayed through sixteen speakers,
The project was carried out as a collaboration between the Technische Universitat and the Department of Sound Engineering of the Akademie der Kunste, Berlin. The sound engineers were Christian Jaeger and Petra Odvody. Recordings included : Leoni Wagner and Sophie May (cello), Thomas Boessl (violin), Johanna Regengogen (viola).

 

“At first, there is silence, emptiness and growing gesture-releasing tension. The sharp dissection of a plane has the ring of an isolated sound. Line makes its appearance, born of interference with non-existence. The gesture and its effect reveal the field of interference. In the same way, a sound is a recollection of silence.

 

An isolated sound makes music.

A single line is a drawing.

An isolated sound is audible only in silence.

A single line is visible only on a blank surface.

Sonority is the matter of sound.

 

Light is the constructive matter of drawing. Light gives substance to the plane and defines the shape of the line just like instrument gives sonority to sounds.

 

Each of these elements has a peculiar field of action but nothing is strictly isolated, demarcated, and categorical. Nor is there a point of departure and destination.

Once a sound has ceased, silence follows that may swell with another sound.”

 

Anda Rottenberg                                                             entire text at The Music of Light