Commission to Hannes Dufek

On 8 November 2024, the œnm – œsterreichisches ensemble fuer neue musik will be holding an concert in Salzburg with a programme dedicated to people who had to pay for their way of loving with their lives. For the concert, the ensemble has commissioned a work from the Vienna-based composer Hannes Dufek, which is inspired by Hans Henny Jahnn’s story Die Nacht aus Blei (1956), a nightmarish vision in which Eros and violence are unfathomably intertwined.

Hannes Dufek outlines his compositional idea as follows: “The new work makes metaphorical reference to the ultimately traumatic and prolonged final scene in a windowless cellar hole in Hans Henny Jahnn’s story Die Nacht aus Blei. This happens musically on several levels, which are connected to each other in a kind of interlocking. Similar to Jahnn’s text, where certain motifs appear in various guises, always veiled, always enigmatic, and lend the story its initially dreamlike, then nightmarish character, the principle of circularity is also to play a major role in the new composition. Musical material is arranged in loops, which are never intended to be exposed in their clear form, but instead always sound diffuse and quasi enigmatic through different techniques and variations. There is a regression into itself, a feeling of hopelessness, of the impossibility of progress; this occurs on an internal structural and large-scale formal level, but also in the local shaping of the sound itself. The individual elements should usually be closely interlinked vertically, via identical tones, connecting rhythmic structures or similar sound characteristics, for example, so that a subcutaneous network of loop structures is formed. In addition, the composition should have a kind of centripetal dynamic, a pull towards an undefined, dark centre. This should be perceptible from the outset, in a similar way to the narrative, and form the underlying gravity of the work, so to speak, but only manifest itself fully and very gradually over the course of the work. The development of this suction is to be staged on the one hand along physical components of experience through falling and accelerating movements, but on the other hand also set in motion through different lengths of the above-mentioned loops. At the end of this suction-like movement, at the innermost point, there is darkness, blindness, loss of light in this piece.”

The Ernst von Siemens Music Foundation supports the commission to Hannes Dufek.

Further information:
oenm.at

Date

November 8, 2024
Solitär of the Mozarteum University Salzburg