Commission to Yair Klartag

“Within the rigid structure of six miniatures, a complex network of relationships between sound and image, between live and recorded sounds, emerges. The video part is conceived musically – the documentation of the musicians and the music-making is set in abstract forms and processes that reflect essential human phenomena.” – This is how the Israeli composer Yair Klartag describes his work Six Memos from the Last Millennium, which he is composing for the Ensemble Recherche. The commission is made possible by the Ernst von Siemens Music Foundation.

With this work, Yair Klartag responds to Italo Calvino’s Harvard Lectures, which formulated proposals for the future in 1988. Each proposta in Calvino’s work has a catchword: Lightness, Quickness, Exactitude, Visibility, Multiplicity. While Calvino’s lectures were proposals for the future, Klartag’s composition is now a sonic-musical reflection of the past: each section of the piece is also under a catchword and refers to a major theme from the past. The various memos deal with politically charged terms by translating them into abstract sound and image structures. They take very strong and loaded terms – such as Silencing, Conservation, Authenticity, Individualism, Obedience – and translate them into abstract audio-visual relationships.

In the memo Silencing, for example, the cellist appears in the video playing the cello in a large open space. However, the video cello plays silently – so her playing gestures are visible but not audible. The live cellist playing on stage is only audible when the silent video cello pauses. The silent, recorded playing silences the audible, live performance. Each movement has a different, similar idea realised in the connection between the visual and the auditory.

Further information:
ensemble-recherche.com

Dates

February 3, 2024
ECLAT Festival, Stuttgart