Output details
35 - Music, Drama, Dance and Performing Arts
University of Durham
Die Kammersängerin - 21 Lieder, 3 ohne Worte - for high soprano and ensemble, on poems by Ernst Jandl
Die Kammersängerin was commissioned by the Ives Ensemble with financial support from the Performing Art Fund NL, and premiered on 8 May 2010. It was awarded the 2011 Matthijs Vermeulen Prize, the most prestigious Dutch composition award. The work, for soprano and ensemble, comprises twenty-one songs split into three groups of seven. They depict a morning, afternoon, and evening in the life of a soprano in the familiar surroundings of her home, although an equally valid interpretation is the triptych of youth, midlife and old age.
The work continues Rijnvos’ research into the exploration of contemporary art and sculpture and how techniques drawn from these disciplines can generate new and innovative musical forms. In Die Kammersängerin Alexander Calder’s mobiles provided a model for generating materials. The basic material consists merely of seven free-floating horizontal lines (rods), each containing six pitches (weighted objects). Calder’s mobiles enable a multiplicity of views through the movement of the rods and arrangement of the sculptural objects hanging from them. In Die Kammersängerin SuperCollider was used to generate all of the possible arrangements of the six pitches (objects). Of the 1,321 possible combinations, twenty-one unique solutions were chosen to become vocal lines. A similar process was followed for the conception of the harmonic material.
A selective filter was applied for determining the lyrics, taken from the complete poetic works of Austrian poet Ernst Jandl: since the egocentric Kammersängerin has only eyes for her own being, only poems mentioning bodily parts were taken into consideration. Out of fifty-six ‘corporeal’ poems, eighteen were selected. The first song exclusively uses the first letter of the alphabet: A, the beginning, the morning, the origin, der Atem (breath). The fifteenth song is sung on the last letter of the (Greek) alphabet: O (omega), the end, the night, departure, decease.
