Isabel Mundry: Figura–Fragment 1

Figura is a composition about how the one shows itself in the other, how it is an inkling or trace or renewed form.

 

It is a piece that emerges in fragments, that grows slowly, also as a work in progress together with the two performers.

 

Significant impulses came from my exploration of music from oral cultures, including especially Gregorian chants and their echo chambers in later, notated works, all the way to the early Renaissance. In musical traditions that continue through an interplay of listening, remembering, and performing, sound gestures are not merely expressions, but equally imprints of something. They are gestures of absorption and transmission, passive and active at the same time. For a few years I have been working on techniques to stimulate comparable processes and forms in composing as well. With them I create gestures and shapes that return in other places and thereby reverberate, have a new effect or are first realized. At one moment they flow out of my hand, at another they become a strange counterpart to myself, because a mood from which gestures emerge is never repeatable. They oscillate between reaction and opening. In this piece, gestures and shapes unfold between two trumpet players who stand facing or facing away from each other in different constellations. Thus two complementary states are created, between a synchronized counting and a listening reaction.

 

»Archetype, image, simulacrum, mirage are meanings that always remain linked to figura,« writes Erich Auerbach and sees the formalization of this figure of thought above all in the works of Lucretius and Ovid.
Isabel Mundry