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Unter Wasser (1997-98) |
The music of Unter Wasser was originally conceived in 1994, when, within a couple of months, I saw Margret Kreidl's play which provides the text, and first heard both Marianne Pousseur and Ensemble Champ dÆAction. All created an immediate and deep impression, and became inextricably associated with one another in my thoughts; after three years the opportunity finally arose for this ôdreamö to be realised; detailed work on the composition began in the summer of 1997 and was completed about a year later.
As regards the relationship between text and music in Unter Wasser, a single word to describe it might be 'polyphony', understood in its widest sense. The music neither illustrates nor dominates. The text has its own existence as a play; the music, though not 'detachable' in the same way, constitutes a complementary structural/expressive strand. As with polyphony in the 'strictly musical' sense, one is invited to focus one's attention in different ways: on individual 'voices', on the totality formed of their interaction, on structural levels at varying degrees of 'distance' or 'magnification', and so forth. In Unter Wasser, a wide range of text/music relationships are invoked: these two 'polyphonic voices' might be at different moments in 'unison', or heterophony, or counterpoint, or contradiction, or might be totally indifferent to one another; they might be lovers or strangers or adversaries or mirror-images; they might be closely entwined or impossibly distant, or might just 'by chance' occupy the same time and space, and so on. Underlying these changing situations is a single overarching process (not without its own twists and turns, naturally) which could be described as a gradual 'submergence' of the voice within the music: in the sense of the vocal part being immersed in increasingly complex instrumental textures, and in the sense of the music itself behaving as if accumulating from the piecing-together of memories and impressions which motivates much of the text. Eventually the work reaches a point of exhaustion, running out of both music and words at the final point of absorption or submergence. But in another sense, it has come full circle, and the assembling of disconnected memories which forms the first act could begin all over again. Unter Wasser has a duration of about 55 minutes. It was commissioned by the Fonds voor de scheppende Toonkunst and Ensemble Champ d'Action, and is dedicated to Marianne Pousseur, Koen Kessels and the ensemble.
© Richard Barrett