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Svetlana Maraš: Firekeepers

für Trio und Ensemble

(2023/2024)

The more I work with sound and get fascinated with its flexibility and vastness of forms and structures, the least interest I have in recorded sound and fixed sound in general. For many years, I have been playing many concerts of live electronic music without recording any of the materials. I have built musical instruments and installations that within certain set of possibilities, always sound differently. This freedom of sound to take one of the shapes in a live performance, I find exciting, as it shows me how versatile and elastic the sound is. In this piece, I have implemented a lot that I have learned playing myself with digital technology, and in a way it is translation of my own process of working on a live set, to an ensemble-situation. To enable playability with instruments and with sound for every musician, extremely detailed structuring was needed, although the final form is not fixed on a timeline. For me, sound is an amalgamate of countless little gestures and transformations on multiple simultaneous planes, and as such, it reflects diversity and requires common effort by many agents. Therefore the idea of fire-keepers resonated wellit also emphasised fragility of musicians’ work and perspective that music is in essence, an act of togetherness, that’s at its final stage a shared listening experience.

Svetlana Maraš