Key of Presence

I composed Key of Presence during my artistic residence at the Villa Concordia in Bamberg. In the process the piece went through a major transformation in a way that was totally new for me.

The development of an artistic idea in a vacuum, a void and puristic space that turns into an idea by itself was unimaginable in the process of composing Key of Presence. Instead of a space there was just a revolving door to the present that guided things from the past, present and future through. A door to the transience that always reminded me of the fact that I’m working on something that is the embodiment of our own transitoriness.

The approach is an extramusical one, so I’m writing now about something that triggers the composition, but that is not the composition itself. A composition can never be, it’s always an idea that is transforming at every moment of resonance. The poem Something is Coming My Friend, written by the Spanish author Javier Salinas and posted on Facebook while I was conceptualising the piece, is also an analogy, a continuum of renewal. At the same time, the poem shows the approach to entering a new and unknown territory that appears in the Spanish accent of his recorded voice.

It’s like an audio fingerprint of transience: a phenomenon that has no place in our society today, even if we’re confronted with it every day. We’re asked to ignore the transience: with botox, huge databases, clouds, and social freezing we’re told to freeze the present.

Music is fleeting and transient, it is a continuum of disappearing, and its print is resonance. Nothing more and nothing less. Two piano players trigger resonances and create—in connection with live electronics—different spaces of reverb, closeness and distance. As live players they counteract the transience with all their possibilities and at the same time they’re the transience by themselves.

Brigitta Muntendorf