Hans Thomalla: Nachtmusik

Nachtmusik–German for night music–is a musical exploration of night and of the sharpened sense of contrast that comes with it. Night is depicted not only as that period of quiet calm between wakefulness, dream, and sleep, but also as a time of vulnerability, of exposure, of nightmares and violence. While Nachtmusik emphasizes an immediate, if not intimate, experience of quietness and darkness, the analogy to the »Dark Times« that our society seems to move towards, to the ever-increasing social contrasts and contradictions, is of course present.

The piece begins in almost meditative calm. Musical common places consisting of soft scales whose echoes dissipate through the ensemble and of small and seemingly meaningless motives are juxtaposed with almost creature-like squeaks and squeals. The sounds seem banal at first, but they gradually gain contour as they develop into ever-more-clear musical gestalts.

 

The second movement forms a dramatic contrast to the first. It starts with a violent wall of noise, behind which only gradually images of musical memory begin to appear. These motives are initially masked, remaining almost inaudibly, but they increasingly step into the foreground, only to eventually become oppressive in their own way as the movement unfolds.

 

The musicians of Nachtmusik are distributed throughout the hall, creating an immersive sound experience going far beyond the traditional concert setup. It is the attempt to create a musical environment in which acoustic perception of space becomes an integral part of the musical experience, and in which the traditional way of playing unidirectionally to an audience is replaced by an acoustic situation, where the listeners quite literally are in the sound.

 

The piece is dedicated to the team of the German Academy Villa Massimo– to Julia Draganovic, Sebastian Springfeld, Julia Trolp, Thomas Höhne, Allegra Giorgolo, Ornella Aiello, Barbara De Santis, Floriana Donati, Esther Haentjes, Dennis Päschel, Agnese Picari, Annalisa Piersanti, Rosa Colucci, Ramona Iacovino, Alessandro Luzzi, Teofil Julian Lefter, Alessandro Gargiulo, whose ability to build a space and a community for utmost creativity and artistic concentration enabled me to write Nachtmusik during my year in Rome.

(Hans Thomalla)