Ulrike Meinhof was certainly one of the most questionable people in the history of German federal republic (BRD). As an avowed leftist and former Konkret editor, by no means averse to an upper middle-class lifestyle, she became—through her affiliation to Gudrun Ensslin and Andreas Baader—a mythological figure, who descended into the Hades of the terrorist underground while abandoning her children; thus she became a constant fascination to some and hate person to others. An interview with Helma Sanders-Brahms featured in a film by Stefan Aust (who later became Spiegel chief editor and crossed paths with Meinhof for a while) zooms into the moment when the apparently deeply depressed Meinhof talks about the role of politically active women, examining the possibility to leave her family. It fluctuates between whininess on the one hand and agitational overemphasis on the other hand (in the television interview you can see her at some moment bending over to the microphone as if she were giving a press conference). Schwer ... unheimlich heimlich is a musical portrait that depicts the conflict of this person, oscillating back and forth between two sonic textures— one assertive and domineering, other fragile and delicate. In the performance, the musical material is entirely generated from the speech analysis of the interview, and displayed in real-time on the laptops of the four players. By using stochastic processes, it is nearly impossible for the musicians in many parts to predict what they will play in the next moment. The tension brought about by this uncertainty connects to the played-back statements and contributes to the atmosphere of the piece that plays on multiple levels with the title.

Schwer...unheimlich Schwer

Re:Guitar was composed in 1999 and premiered in Tbilisi, Georgia. This piece is an imaginary trip through different musical landscapes.
A chromatically descending line of natural harmonics serves as the basis for a constant metamorphosis that leads the listener through stylistic areas, which can be likened to jazz, European avant-garde, middle-Eastern folklore and Indonesian gamelan. Only once, at the very end, the piece reveals itself as a “real,” quasi classical, guitar piece.

Re:Guitar uses just intonation in which the strings are tuned to the overtones of a very low E. This tuning lends the guitar a particular resonance.

Re: Guitar

computermusik

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