Aesthetics

About the Aesthetics of Charlotte Seither

 

Time and Perspective

 

[...] Upon hearing Charlotte Seither’s compositions [...] our perception of time can become susceptible to change. If one would scrutinize sounding time through measurement, the methods of ascertainment could be seen to be juxtaposed - one in countable units and one as a mass of water or sand in flux. The act of perception compresses various layers of time into a “state of temporality”. It is on this temporal level that Charlotte Seither opens our field of vision into a tunnel-like construction that can direct our gaze either inward or outward. Once the compositional process has been set into motion, the rhythmic structures are made to contrast as sharply as possible. Yet, as the parameter of rhythm becomes transformed and minimized, the significance of temporal development tends to recede. The linear motion becomes trapped in a time warp - spatialized, but still contained. The experimental procedure ends in a vacuum of sound. At this point, all the musical impulses become subject to a distinct choreography of motion. As audible time expands, tension begins to accumulate and the velocity of the falling musical components becomes equalized, in spite of their conflicting directions. The compositional experiment anticipates our abandonment of a realistic perception of time. The parameters are redefined, and the listener confronts timelessness as a descent into the inaudible: the opening and closing of the temporal state helps to define the form of the composition. Closure, however, does not mean containment, out of which unity in turn develops, but rather relativization and transformation of time into an idiomatic cipher for the dissolution of tempo and rhythm.

Notes - Text - Content

 

As always, each notated piece of music is headed by a title, but Seither lends her titles their own semantic level within the overall texts. Rather than initiating the music, the title depicts, in restrained poetry, the underlying state of the piece it designates. After hearing the piece, the listener finds its contents reconfirmed in the title. As a rule, Seither’s titles emerge relatively late in the creative process. They supply a gentle accent, kindling associations that may later vanish as they come into conflict with other levels of communication. The point of these associations is not so much their content as the associative space that spreads out behind that content. The results are linguistic sound spaces of Italian, French, English or German, in which artificial words are heard, languages intermingle, and unidentified dimensions of meaning unfold. The term Kammersinfonie (”Chamber Symphony”), for example, initially suggests a music-historical context, only to be poetically reinterpreted with the addition of a static description, objet diaphane (”translucent object”). The description of the underlying idea of the piece is reduced to a linguistic cipher. Seither does not set pieces of literature to music. Rather than adapting the work of a poet or writer, her music “spits out the words again after using them to meet the needs of [my] composition. “The words deliberately remain unintelligible, thereby turning the level of language into an abstract dimension. The vocal sound is reduced to its acoustical component and functions on an equal footing with the music. Cognitive verbal space is shifted to another level of meaning, in favour of musical cognition. Along with verbal sonorities, Seither also makes use of the words found in performance instructions and expression marks. Normally, instructions to performers are designed to help them recreate the music in performance. In Seither’s pieces, however, the performers must first form an imaginative conception of the sound space. Only then do the verbal images converge spatially in surfaces and sound processes. Ultimately, the musical system reverts to the one-dimensionality of the performance’s instruction, but remains stabilized in its inverted temporal consistency.

Form as a Structural Process

 

In Seither’s music, temporal structure and textuality stand alongside other transformed parameters, such as timbre, dynamics and generic tradition, to constitute the essential components of the overriding form. As an entity, form cannot consist solely of additive, recurring or evolving sections, such as movements, recapitulations or developments: it must always exist in the totality of the piece. With the time redefined into a malleable substance, our perception of the formal elements and their states takes places introspectively. In a process of analytical reflection, Seither’s music brings about paradoxical climaxes in the unfolding and partitioning of form and motif. Elementary building blocks become audible, proclaiming a search for the music’s indivisible core. But the attention of the listener also becomes dialectically magnified beneath Seither’s microscope. The significant parts of her experimental communication, now bereft of tempo, volume and contents, are given an opportunity to expand, mutate, metamorphose and interchange. Ideally, the components of the composition draw on each other in the course of the piece. The need to end the musical process gives way to the opening of formal boundaries. To reach this goal, Seither, in a quiet revolution, deconstructs the music by sidestepping traditional rules of generic form, instrumentation and the treatment of words. But rather than being pulverized and obliterated, they are subjected to a process of fragmentation. Instead of destruction, we are presented with reinvention, omission of substitution as interfaces in a dualistic procedure: the musical substance must materialize in the very possibility of its disintegration. The requirements Seither places on the properties of her material are many and varied, and their exploitation is essential to her work. Only that which is capable of withstanding her idiomatic selection and scrutiny will achieve duration and musical coherence. As far as the compositional result is concerned, there are no direct ties to historical precedents or biographical constellations. Rigorous demands are placed on listeners and players alike in performance. Seither poses riddles to the auditory senses, riddles that are not decipherable through musical notation but must be solved primarily through the imagination. Rather than following instructions, she requires her performers to exert themselves in decoding the structures of the music. This may be followed by a virtual dialogue with the auditory faculty, which is confronted in turn by further riddles in the instrumentation (unusual instruments such as sub-contrabass recorder, accordion, noise makers and so forth). Seither dares to run great risks in the process of artistic communication. The clandestine structure of her music allows listeners to probe the shape of the work, all the same never to descry it as if concealed behind a veil. Conversely, the visible part of her compositions requires the auditory faculty, opening up the boundaries of perception. If a sense of music history forms part of the way we receive these works, the ever-present and authentic individuality of the composer remains paramount. We sense, between composition and performance, the ciphers of the Other alternating and interacting of the Self.

 

Laura Bettag, Translation by J. Bradford Robinson / rev. by Christina Ascher

 

(in: WERGO / Edition zeitgenössische Musik, Deutscher Musikrat, Solo CD Charlotte Seither, LC 6548 2, Booklet, p. 20-24).