Heute habe ich beschlossen is an arrangement of the 3rd scene from the 1st act of my opera Der Sprung. Der Sprung is based on a real story that was made into a libretto by the late German author and filmmaker Thomas Brasch. The libretto deals with the murder of a German professor of Jewish Studies committed in 1984 by a crazy, yet brilliant, philosophy student who converted to Judaism. It seemed that the holocaust had caused a distant afterquake in which the roles of victim and perpetrator were strangely distorted. The present scene, originally scored for tape, 3 keyboards, 4 female voices, 2 trombones and Jazz trio, features the fictitious diary of the murderess. Musically, her split personality is portrayed by using three different materials with strong allusions to popular music: a sort of avantgarde rock, quotations from medieval Sephardic (Spanish Jews) music and a piece by the Rolling Stones. The harmonic part of the first part is derived form the spectral analysis of the word “Oper,” whereas the last part was composed by a neural network morphing through the melodic space of three songs.
Info
Arrangement of a scene from the opera Der Sprung
Creation/revision date: 2003
Commissioned by November Music
Duration: 8’30”
Premiere: Maastricht, October 18, 2003 by Ensemble 88
Publisher: peermusic