A scenographic and choreographic concert
Speelt! (Play!) is a project by clarinettist Benjamin Dieltjens in which he wants to investigate the theatrical possibilities of the music/musician.
The motivations behind the acoustic and spacial experiment is the experiment itself. The music doesn’t follow a general ‘story’ other than the music; the ‘playing’ gives meaning to itself. Just like hopscotch and countdown rhymes, the music is abstract: you can only hear or ‘play’ it.
PROGRAMME
Paul Craenen, Antwerp Encounter, creation
Steve Reich, New York Counterpoint (1985)
Serge Verstockt, A la Recherche du Temps, creation
Karlheinz Stockhausen, Der Kleine Harlekin (1976)
Starting point for Craenen and Verstockt’s compositions is the element of ‘counterpoint’ in the New York Counterpoint by Steve Reich. In this composition for clarinet and bass clarinet you can hear eleven musical lines: ten of these were recorded in advance, the eleventh is being played live. The piece consists of three parts (a fast one, a slow one and again a fast one respectively) that are played successively and without interruption. Because of the different ‘voices’ in the music and the shifts in time, the rhythmical patterns interfere with each other. This interaction creates a kind of confusion through which the listener looses his grip on the music and the course of time.
A la Recherche du Temps (In quest of time), the new composition by Serge Verstockt, follows the same principle and simultaneously confronts the audience – both acoustically and visually – with a piece of music that has been recorded in different time dimensions (accelerated, slowed down and real time). In the creation of Paul Craenen, Antwerp Encounter, the ‘shifts’ within the music are triggered by the spacial movements of a mobile element. Der Kleine Harlekin by Stockhausen also contains the idea of counterpoint, but this time within the opposition between the music and the movements of the clarinet on the one hand, and the choreographical score for the musician’s body on the other hand.
