Uday Krishnakumar: Calafateando

for voice and brass quintet
from O’Karakino. music theater in 3 scenes

(2018–2021)

O’Karakino is an assemblage of various music theater elements that exist in a kind of multi-temporality. From a matrix of musical materials for a larger »opera« project Chromis, chromis, both a radio play and a live opera performance are to be created. The work takes as its starting point the writings of the historian Fernand Braudel on the Mediterranean, who observes processes on the surface of what he calls »la longue durée«, sometimes even geological processes, which are so slow that they elude the consciousness of human measuring tools. I am trying here to actually »compose« slow social processes such as hybridization, affinity, exclusion. This task of composing genres themselves, both the grammar/sound hierarchy and the performance practice, is a natural consequence of the experience of parametrization in modern music.

In Calafateando, a fisherman tells his companions by the sea of strange visions as he caulks his boat. Here, as in other episodes of the work, it is important that it is a fixed acoustic and dramatic situation (the boat is a resonating body) that does not move forward as in a typical plot–so no new information is learned over time. This temporality, which comes close to observed life, is composed in such a way that it can be extended three times slower and combined with other independent scenes. Thus, under different tempos, an essential substance of the work emerges in its various states of concentration.

Uday Krishnakumar

Uday Krishnakumar (*1979 in Chennai, India) studied composition with Chaya Czernowin, Brice Pauset and Philippe Manoury in California, Paris and Vienna and now lives in Berlin. He writes about his work: »Not because I feel a personal mission, but rather due to biographical coincidences and inclinations, I have always felt drawn to the countless ways in which man musicalizes acoustic phenomena. Starting from the premise that parametric thinking separates the physical movements required to produce sound from their hierarchical emanation and figuration, I reconstruct the slow social and cultural processes through which musical thought is constituted. These cycles of pieces, often revolving around a fictional genre of musical theater, attempt to develop differently contextualized musical traditions with their own compositional methodology and associated performance practices from the most elementary materials–workers’ songs and shouts or rudimentary instruments transformed from practical tools. The new genres are a confused and fragmentary archive of thoughts, echoes and prejudices that deny any notion of cultural heritage or identity. These ‘traditions’ are largely invented by the devoted artists I am fortunate to work with, who manage to connect the incommensurable instructions through a natural inclination to synthesize and communicate–to ‘sing’, so to speak.«

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Uday Krishnakumar: Calafateando

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