4 percussionists playing 16 amplified cymbals
ca 35 min.
composition: 2024

commissioned by Colegio de España en Paris and CNDM-INAEM as part of the «Premio de Composición Musical» 2022

Lied ohne Worte—«Melody without words»—is a piece for a large ensemble of cymbals placed around the public. The idea of Lied ohne Worte, which is almost a genre in itself, takes on various interpretations here.

Lied ohne Worte proposes a listening experience without words, that is, listening solely to sound, without artifice. This listening focuses on the heart of sound: vibration, harmony, rhythm, the relationship to silence, the experience of time and space. The internal characteristics of sound also form its envelope, in an exchange between its inner world and its outer form.

The cymbals, devoid of words, nevertheless acquire a voice here: they become a choir, they bring forth a melody, a particular vibration, which is their word—revealed thanks to the percussionists, who extract different harmonics from them, from the low register to the extreme high register. They become a single, large cymbal that surrounds us, allowing us to feel ourselves within the sound. The act of listening thus becomes a listening from within oneself: each person, focusing on a harmony, a gesture, a percussionist, listens and constructs their own music from their own inner silence.

This music is therefore never the same music, whether from one performance to another, or even from one listener to another: the cymbals never produce the same sound, depending on their size, composition, position in the room, or how they are played; the musical material never takes the same form, as its contours are so blurred, vague and shifting. However, the experience of time and space remains the same: the characteristics of the piece’s composition are variable, but the listening experience and the temporality they evoke do not change from one performance to another; this is the essence of the work.

Lied ohne Worte is also an installation, an acoustic sculpture: the percussionists move around the audience to strike different cymbals, shaping the contours of the harmonic space. The piece evokes the appearance of elementary sound forms, brought to life by our listening, which emerge from silence or disappear into it. It sculpts an uninterrupted body of vibrations, air and space.

The idea is to make us feel several vibrations: the one that occurs inside the cymbals, the one that occurs inside our listening, and the one that occurs in the real space of the hall. This is how Lied ohne Worte takes shape: this vibration that is that of the air, of the intangible nature of sound.

Arxis Percussion Group, Rémi Le Taillandier (sound engineer)
Fondation Biermans-Lapôtre, Paris (FR), 29 Nov. 2024 — world premiere

images © Brendan Champeaux