Their surfaces are posed, sculptural. Yet, they breathe. Eyes blink. Hands reach. Through screens and peepholes, in front and behind, gazes touch objects and will movement, an unveiling of the veiled. Lips blow on a flute, in and out the accordion bellows, and over the taut plane pluck fingers. Your instruments, your elements, our selves exploded into the world or drawn back to their origins. What are the contours — the start and end, the essence and obverse — of forms that play, and what principle of order can be ascribed to an ensemble, with all its constituent parts? Which traces of life remain in composed film frames? Antoinette Zwirchmayr’s collaboration with the Klangforum Wien, Austria’s famed soloist ensemble of new music, draws from French philosopher Jean Luc Nancy’s text The Extension of the Soul.
ALONG THE BODIES
composition for Antoinette Zwirchmayer's film about Klangforum Vienna _ 2020
The composition for every musician of Vienna’s famous Klangforum is based on a fragmentation of Georg Friedrich Haas‘ masterpiece In vain (which was written for Klangforum in 2001). By isolation singular timbres and combining them at certain moments with the very distant, almost ghostly ‚Gesamtklang‘ of the piece, this rearrangement provides a fragile but yet seducing musical layer for Antoinette’s portait-film about this magnificent ensemble for contemporary music.
