BABEL – Oscillation between semantics and performativity in my vocal music
In my contribution, I’d like to examine the experimental use of voice and text in my vocal music based on the works Babel for solo speaking voice and Sprechblasen for soprano, percussion, electric guitar, and piano/sampler. The starting point is a long-standing compositional practice in which I have deliberately avoided semantically fixed text. Instead, I work with different forms of vocalization that either emerge from the alienation and filtering of concrete text templates or are designed to be asemantic from the outset. However, the asemantic fragments are not arbitrary. The texts often arise through processes of imitation: performers are asked to vocally imitate samples of noises or sounds; the results are then transcribed. In addition to pitches and rhythmic progressions, vocal articulations must also be specified. In other cases, singers lip-sync to recordings made in a language they do not understand – a form of filtering through non-understanding, in which language becomes sound. I am interested in two central directions here. On the one hand, there is the question of the “comprehensibility” of the asemantic: even if the sound texts used cannot be assigned to any conventional language, they can still perform communicative functions, especially in musical form. This raises the question of whether this results in approaches to universally comprehensible, possibly pre-linguistic forms of communication, and how the semiotic communication process changes in comparison to conventional language. Secondly, there is the performativity of such sounds: their tonal and physical production creates a dimension of experience that goes beyond the attribution of meaning and enables an immediate, intuitive experience. Using Babel and Sprechblasen as examples, I show how semantic ambiguities are deliberately blurred in order to open up multiple spaces for interpretation and experience. Specific vocal techniques, based on the imitation of electronic music, as well as open graphic forms of notation reinforce the physical presence of the voice and suspend language between meaning and action.