MY MOTHER is a fish

Title MY MOTHER is a fish
Subtitle for vocal quartet and electronics
Year 2021
Instrumentation soprano, mezzo-soprano, tenor, bass and electronics with a 2 channel sound system
Duration ~ 13:00
Premiere 2021, November 21st
Premiere Details Solovoices
Location Gare du Nord, Basel

William Faulkner's "As I Lay Dying" has been on my mind for some time. I am fascinated by the content, language and form that Faulkner has given his novel. He often writes in the form of a stream of consciousness and thus enters the interstices of perception through language. There, different senses intermingle and rational ways of thinking fray into the edges of the surreal. These complex experiences, as well as Faulkner's particular narrative style, punctuated by flashbacks with their intersecting narrative threads, are a wonderful proposition for compositional exploration. Just as formative as the text, is the "instrument" which emerges from the wonderful instrumentation of the vocal quartet with electronics: here the interplay of the vocal sound and the sound of my self-developed synthesizer, controlled by a score, is in the foreground. On the one hand I was looking for the difference, the other, the synthetic, on the other hand I was always fascinated by the greatest possible mixture of vocal and frequency modulation based sound synthesis. Sometimes it is no longer possible to distinguish between human and non-human sound. Similar to Faulkner's streams of consciousness, yet in a very different, musical way, moments of rapture and perceptual shift occur in this process. The music presented here is a formally self-contained stage of a larger work, the development of which was abruptly interrupted by the pandemic, but may be experienced in the future.

© Micha Seidenberg