TIME:SPANS 2024

Brigitta Muntendorf
Trilogy for Two Pianos, Tape and Live Electronics (2014–18)

When I started working on Key of Presence at the SWR Experimentalstudio in 2014, I had no idea that this piece and the approach to paradoxes of presence, absence, and the moment would keep me busy for another four years. The original work, Trilogie für zwei Flügel, consisting of the three movements (Key of Presence, KreisIncrease, and Key of Absence), has grown into Trilogy for Two Pianos, Tape and Live Electronics, a 45-minute piano cycle . . . and pushes existing boundaries in piano repertoire in terms of the complexity of playing and interplay with electronics. During the composition of the trilogy, I always had a revolving door to the present in mind, through which musical reminiscences, associations, the representative or fictitious are channeled in and out as something past, present, and future. I wanted to create a reference system that defies all logic, takes on a life of its own, and unfolds its power as a dynamic system.

In Key of Presence (2014) the two pianists work their way through their material in a virtuosic fashion. Just as they press keys, they trigger contact microphones on strings or on the body, operate a fourth pedal, or act inside the piano. The more the sound and movement choreographies absorb them, the more the differences between live music, live electronics, and playback disappear—as if they themselves become personified disappearances. A poem (Something is coming my friend ) posted by the Spanish avant-garde writer Javier Salinas on Facebook in 2014, forms the text for Key of Presence as a proxy for all the spaces we try to avoid in the face of the fear of transience or any kind of passing nature.

KreisIncrease (2018) forms the center of the trilogy and refers to a piece that I deeply love: Bernd Alois Zimmermann’s orchestral work, Stille und Umkehr (1970). I didn’t want to quote that existing piece, nor deconstruct it, nor recontextualize its original messages. Even though I do draw upon its harmonies, its use of parallel tempi, and its cyclically recurring ideas, my question is whether and to what extent the significance of Zimmermann’s “resonances of sound and sound production within us” (Jean-Luc Nancy) can be translated using my own compositional systems of reference. KreisIncrease produces isolation through constant orbiting and allows stagnation to emerge as a recurring complementary, analog-stage stereo by the pianists. I could almost say that, in the search for something that could be called the ‘real’, KreisIncrease is the ‘unmasked’—in its complete staging.

In Key of Absence (2017), the word logos (word, speech) contained in the word trilogy inspired me to establish a kind of commentary function with the voices of the players, which act as an amplification and friction of the physical presence. The words they say are changed in various ways as the piece continues, such that they drift more and more into the realm of the absurd and the paradoxical. In addition, the players are confronted with musical quotes from the past, which suddenly redirect or interfere with the virtuoso piano-playing at various points, as if memory were the instance that could manifest presence.