In Abeyance

Описание: In Abeyance (2021)
for ensemble

Commissioned by Ensemble KNM Berlin

This project took shape and gained momentum from the brilliant writing in Laurent Berlant's Cruel Optimism. In this book Berlant elaborates that in a time when the promises of historical linear consciousness, social progress and upward mobility are thwarted by the centrifugal and self-destructive forces of neoliberal capitalism, the idea of an "impasse," a "stretched-out present" that doesn't move forward nor backward, only sideways maybe… becomes a more apt metaphor for the situation of Western societies in late neoliberal capitalism. Translating this to the aesthetic realm, Berlant points to the importance of aesthetic forms that move in other ways than linearly forward, rather, holding the present moment open: "The impasse is a space of time lived without a narrative genre. … [It] is decomposi­tional—in the unbound temporality of the stretch of time, it marks a delay that demands activity." This is where Berlant introduces the image of the "animated still-life" which became the starting point of this project: "…living paralysis, playful repetition, or animated still-life has become a convention of representing the impasse".

"In Abeyance" is not a concert piece in a narrow sense. It is an attempt to create a sonic "animated still-life", a sound object of sorts, that exists in time and space and which is presented from various, ever so slightly shifting angles. To achieve this, it transposes the technique of a phasing sampler into the instrumental-acoustic realm. The score is the result of a long copy&paste process that assembled ever shifting "grains" of pre-existing notation into a new score. The sampled material is decidedly light-weight and trivial: It is an excerpt of Ralph Vaughan William's epilogue from his opera "Job". Roughly 2 bars (~10 seconds) worth of music are sampled and comprise all the material contained in the 42 minutes of "In Abeyance."

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Berlin, DE
October 29th, 2021