Silent resistance (2018/19)

awarded the Kranichsteiner prize for Composition at the Darmstadt Summer Courses in 2018

created in collaboration with Stanislas Pili

This archival work is based on different recordings of “The King of Denmark” - Feldman’s “silent resistance” against Stockhausen’s modernist percussion work Zyklus. Feldman’s score is very open: everything from the instrumentation to the exact rhythms is up to the interpretation of the performer. In exploring a few key moments from the Feldman score and see how these are interpreted radically different by different performers, I want to shed light on the performer’s active role as an interpreter, and also as a co-composer in open scores like this one. 

While Feldman uses a large setup of various percussion instruments, this work is reduced to a small setup of three small speakers placed on three snare drums. These snare drums work as resonance chambers, through which the electroacoustic track, based on the different interpretations, is filtered.

While two of the snare drums/speakers are placed statically on each side of the stage to create a spatial dimension to the work, the percussionist uses one of the speakers to play on the snare drum in the middle of the stage – the sounds of and from the speaker are modified through the percussionist’s play with the speaker against the drum, mixed with actual sounds from playing with the hands. In this way, the percussionist goes in dialogue with the different interpretations: she literally plays with the sounds of them, through the playing with and around the speaker with her hands.

When working with these recordings, I also found that the ambient sounds of the rooms they are recorded in have a huge influence on the character of the original work. Feldman’s work is to be played without mallets, only with the hands, very soft, and the seemingly non-musical sounds from the concert hall bleed into the work in such a way that it is difficult, if not impossible, to discern what’s inside and outside the work. What is really the music? Just as important as the sound events in the work, are therefore the silences between them; accentuated and bound together from the percussionist’s movements between the different instruments.