Elisabeth Schimana
Saturday 03.10. 21:00 - Haus der Musik
Elisabeth Schimana "Into the Sun"
Since the 1980s the musician and composer Elisabeth Schimana has been active as one of the Austrian female pioneers of electronic music with projects marked by a radical approach and equally unconventional aesthetics. In the field of tension between concept and experiment she often transforms extramusical construction principles into musical structures, translates scientific data into musical data. For Into the Sun she was inspired by research on solar oscillations. These conjure in her mind the “notion of the sun as a gigantic resonance body for acoustic oscillations”. In addition, there is “the awareness, when observing the processes on and in the sun, that one is always gazing at the past – a paradox when working with the medium of sound, which can always only be experienced in the moment.” She creates an 18-voice composition out of 48 pure tones, which are continuously transposed in time and frequency throughout the piece. She draws up tables with elements that she assigns names from particle physics and orders operations based on the Fibonacci sequence. The result is poetic and sensuous. What is essential here is always leaving space for ambiguity, for (re)action at the moment of performance.