invocation VI
1–5
in mia vita da vuolp
based on Rhaeto-Romanic texts by Leta Semadeni
for soprano and baritone-saxophone (2019)
The poetic brevity, phonetic harshness, and the topos of death, which is ever-present in Leta Semadeni’s poetry collection in mia vita da vuolp (In My Life as Fox), have inspired Furrer to write music in which saxophone and voice augment each other, both semantically and soundwise. In analogy to the poems, in these five pieces he undergoes a change of perspective from human to animal.
In the first piece in mia vita da vuolp (In My Life as Fox), we slink through the coppice as a fox, until this ends with the final shot of the hunter. The text is fragmented, dissected by Furrer’s kaleidoscopic approach, and only in a very few instances is composed of intelligible words. The saxophone follows these words like a descending shadow that perpetually changes its sound, thus modulating the text’s meaning.
The second piece, Algordanza vi d’ün chavà coppà / Reminiscence of a Horse Battered to Death, is a painful, dramatic requiem for a slaughtered horse; the language is sad, the experiences traumatic. Saxophone and voice share the anguished cry. In the third piece, Illas nots / During the Nights, it’s not clear whether the text speaks of human perceptions or those of an animal. – “During the nights / on the fringes of the village / where I live / on the fringe of things / the blades / of winter / snatch at me”. Here, the sound of the saxophone is divided into two separate layers, alternating between sound and noise in a way that allows them to become a vividly immediate form of onomatopoesis and a speech-like figure at the same time. The singer’s voice remains independent and keeps closer to the text’s prosody than in any of the other pieces.
Semadeni’s haiku-esque texts often hint only vaguely at what they speak about. The fourth piece, Kasimir ha il mal d’amur / Kasimir is Lovelorn, ends with the head of the black goat Kasimir sinking into the grass. In analogy, voice and saxophone time and again descend to the very depths of their tonal range – lovesickness as a circular echo-loop.
The fifth and last piece doesn’t adopt an animal’s perspective, but changes into that of the cosmos Aint il spazi / In Space. From this vantage point, the children become faintly visible as they move about the earth. The voice outgrows the saxophone’s multiphonics, amalgamating them to form a continuous flux. This music of a perpetual transition dissolves our somatic experience of time at its fringes.
6
La bianca notte for soprano, baritone and ensemble, based on texts
by Dino Campana and letters by Sibilla Aleramo (2013)
La bianca notte portrays an episode from the life of the poet Dino Campana (1885–1932) from the years 1916–17, when he met the poet and feminist Sibilla Aleramo (1876–1960) and fell in love with her; an amour fou. Furrer dramatizes Campana’s texts and letters by Aleramo, telling the story of an encounter between these two on the eve of a futurist event in Florence, to which, in the end, Campana was denied access. Campana was inspired by futurism, however he disapproved of its underlying political ideology. He remained an outsider, incapable of communicating with his surroundings, which were dominated by norms and ignorant conformity.
His individuality as human being and artist, and consequently his whole existence and mental health, suffered as a result of this conflict. In his poetry, signs of mental problems, culminating in schizophrenia, shine through. Furrer transforms this inner and social conflict into music. He translates the futurists’ fascination with speed, technology and accelerated linear progress into a cutting technique which is inspired by cubism and by Campana’s idea of a compressed narrative. Full of longing, the music tugs at the lovers with microtonal intervals and frenetic circumambulations. The ensemble turns into an acoustic and semantic resonance chamber of their chanted speech – the music tells the story that the text can’t talk about.
7
invocation VI for soprano and bass flute (2023)
invocation VI is the sixth scene from the opera invocation, which Furrer composed, based on a text by Marguerite Duras’s novel Moderato cantabile (1958), with additional texts by Juan de la Cruz, Ovid and Cesare Pavese. In Duras’s novel, a woman is murdered by her lover in a café – allegedly by her own request. Her death scream forms the musical nucleus of invocation.
In invocation VI, the bass flute turns into the voice’s resonance – as if it were an extension of the singer’s larynx. Flute and voice merge in percussive consonants, in rushing tapestries of sound produced by their breath, and in song, in such a way as to create a polyphonic sound – as if Vera Fischer’s flute had in fact become one or several voices of the singer Friederike Kühl. In abrupt changes of expression, from tender invocation to insistent demand, this sound shifts from scream to language – whispering, screaming and singing – to the words of the Spanish mystic Juan de la Cruz (1542–1591), which invoke Jesus Christ in yearning, poignant tones resembling nocturnal love poetry:
“Why have you wounded this heart (…) Reveal your presence, even if to behold you is my death”. (from the Canciones entre el Alma y el Esposo)
8
Spazio immergente III for soprano, trombone and strings (2019)
Spazio immergente III (Immeasurable Space) lets us plummet into nothingness, in an abyss reminiscent of H. P. Lovecraft. In his didactic po-em De rerum natura, the classical poet and philosopher Lucretius (ca. 99–55 BC) describes an apocalypse beyond anything hitherto envisaged by the human imagination in visionary and timeless verses.
The trombone, virtuoso herald of the end, fathoms the vastness of Lucretius’s immeasurable space into which it and the soprano aimlessly plummet. We can intuit it through chant, language, breath, mutual imitations and tonal colours that modulate each other. The strings are like harmonic echoes of the two solo voices, reinforcing their accents and expanding the space by inserting additional axes in all dimensions. Spazio immergente III is Furrer’s third musical attempt with this fascinating text.
“…that not like flames should the walls of the cosmos quite suddenly escape into the immeasurable void, … and nothing, no residue remains – desolate space.” (Lucretius)
9–11
Xenos III for two percussionists and strings (2010/2013)
A strange shadow follows the words by the poet and librettist Händl Klaus that percussionist Lukas Schiske speaks into the hide of his timpani – “because I, ever since the sun, as the wind that always blows, had turned…” Furrer has recorded this text, which revolves around the desert, the heat, foreignness, memories and death, in his own voice; and later, with the aid of the software SPEAR, artfully re-orchestrated the rhythm and formants of the recording for an instrumental ensemble. In this way, the ensemble becomes the projection of Furrer’s voice, it speaks like him – a resynthesis of his speech. Double bass and percussion phrase along these words.
The remaining musicians colour this phantom-like speech, become its echo, and translate it into an organic, musical movement. This produces a chimerical sound, in which Furrer’s voice, intoned by the ensemble, becomes the resonance chamber for Schiske’s spoken words. Heterophonic differences open up; the cadences turn polyphonic. In the course of the three movements, the resonance chamber becomes more dominant and grows in size, until Schiske’s speaking voice finally disappears in the second movement. Only its sound remains as part of the ensemble, which now intones wordless phonemes. In this process, the music increasingly deviates from its initial analytical accuracy. The inflection, which in the beginning appeared closely linked to the oral expression, now starts to develop independently, following a musical logic, starting to modulate the text, to resume its sound, and finally turning into a shrilly distorted shadow of the previously spoken words. The sound of the language itself becomes the narrator of intimate fears, mental states and emotions. ‘Xénos’ (ξένος) is ancient Greek and means: foreigner, or guest.