Description

Lines, Drawings is a newer composition based on an older composition of mine, and there is a time gap of thirteen years between the two – …a gap that I did not want to overcome, but to make fruitful. The initial composition, 11 lines for string quartet, is dedicated to the design of linear processes in extreme reduction. In eleven sections, each lasting seventy-seven seconds, almost unison, occasionally split, sound lines run through the instruments positioned in a square. Like the outlines of a landscape on the horizon, these linear sound drawings remain shadowy in the first version. Originally, I just wanted to copy this piece after many years, but this process took on a life of its own and eventually resulted in a new composition. So I became interested in looking at these abstract landscapes up close and bringing the original lines up close, as if with a zoom lens, and looking at them from different perspectives. In this way, differentiated contours have developed where only rough outlines were visible in the first version, such as a linearly falling glissando or a static scale. The distance and proximity to the former sound configurations and the discovery of their possible inner life has thus become a central theme of the second version. The 11 lines ultimately became seven new compositions, characterized by the interweaving of abstract lines and polyphonically fanned out drawings. In an artificial way, they now stand in a relationship to one another like a frozen photograph in relation to a lived moment.

(Isabel Mundry, 2010)