Ying Wang: Schmutz

Ying Wang’s »Schmutz« for violin and ensemble (2018/19), premiered by Klangforum Wien at the Acht Brücken Festival Cologne 2019, plunges listeners into an extremely conflict-ridden environment in which a solo violin, mostly in the highest registers and with breakneck virtuoso double stops, is drowned out by repeated, massively triumphant tutti chords, without, however, allowing itself to be silenced. Paradoxically, a brief period of calm is achieved through the use of megaphones, from which only their own speechless noise is audible—a screaming silence in which the eponymous »dirt« of the coarse-grained ensemble sound echoes as much as its »loud self-dramatization,« which the composer addresses in her introduction: »Loud self-promotion dominates in stylish, linear ways, highways of escape. Beneath it, life. Me. Littered. Buried. Polluted. I am in danger of suffocating. From this small, everyday carelessness.«

 

While Ying Wang’s exploration of the lost voices of those refugees whose bodies were found in a truck in Essex in 2019 (music theater Lorry 39, 2021) resonates here, the increasing coverage of the solo violin by the electric guitar towards the end of Schmutz can be heard as a moment of technological criticism: »Plastic in the sea, oil in the feathers, noise in the ears, poison in the food, stench in the air, fear in the thoughts. This web of burdens, laid out by each individual, is spreading steadily.« The work is an allegory of the loss and regaining of (public and private) linguistic ability, of self-determination (and self-reflection) in an environment dominated by too many loud voices. In fact, at the end, the solo violin rises from its temporary silence to a delicate but determined solo once again in the highest registers, thus emancipating itself from the chatter of the present, accompanied only by the empty noise of megaphones.

 

Christian Utz
(Booklet accompanying the CD Ying Wang, ‘RE:Wilding’, Kairos, 2025)