Beschreibung II was commissioned by the festival SinusTon for the AsianArt Ensemble.
The piece was premiered on October 30 2016 at the Gesellschaftshaus Magdeburg.
Hong Yoo - Daegeum,
Naoko Kikuchi - Koto,
You-Jin Sung - Kayageum,
Matthias Leupold - Violin,
Chang-Yun Yoo - Viola,
Gabriella Strümpel - Violoncello,
Matthias Bauer - Double Bass,
Andre Bartetzki - Electronics and Projection
video recording at the Gartensaal of the Gesellschaftshause Magdeburg:
(camera: Andre Bartetzki, photo: Edgar Hartung)
In many regards the piece "Beschreibung II" (Description II) is a hybrid work which crosses composition and improvisation, electronic and instrumental sound, Eastern and Western perspectives, sound and picture.
The starting point for this work is a question by Ludwig Wittgenstein from his "Remarks on the Foundations of Mathematics" (which were written about 1940 mostly as a philosophical criticism on the foundations of logic and mathematics and which were compiled and published only posthumously many years later) :
Think that someone would say: "I want to listen to a composition that goes like this"
followed by a drawing of which Wittgenstein probably assumed that his contemporaries would hardly regard it as a form of musical notation.
But according to Wittgenstein this drawing could be taken as a "language-game", that is, an expression which as such seems to be sense-less but which does get some meaning through its usage.
For "Beschreibung II" I asked each musician of the ensemble to send me short recordings of their own solistic instrumental interpretation of this drawing. These recordings were then re-interpreted by me through electronic processings. I also derived formal and structural aspects for the entire piece from the recordings and from the original drawing.
Finally the musicians improvise according to the conditions obtained by the previous steps. By contrast the electronics is mostly fixed and the projection evolves gradually in real-time depending on the sounds from the instruments.