Four walls, a ceiling and a floor
Is it a room? Is it a cell?
If not for window and for door
It might seem a part of hell.
(Rose Ausländer)
Bernhard Lang, a musical crosser of the avant-garde, recycles fragments and phrases of existing music in his “Monadologie” series, disassembles and processes them, and introduces them into a new musical cycle. Also in Monadology XVIII – Moving Architecture some things appear familiar. Loops, rhythms and pulsations emerge from mutating repetition patterns. Again and again from the beginning, restless, always new. Rampant currents grow, which set the room in motion and create movement. Move. Always on the move. Similar to Raimund Abraham’s futuristic-tribalistic-looking building of the Austrian Cultural Forum in New York, to which the composition refers directly. Floor by floor, Lang’s music climbs higher – along Rose Auslander’s poetry of homelessness – over the spine-like stairwell.
“The texts of the piece, sung as fragmented additive loops, describe a kundalini-like consciousness whose journey begins in the depths of the basement, a place of solitary confinement, and slowly ascends, elevator like, through longing and nauseating forms of homesickness and otherness and war, up to the very top floor, where a clarity is finally achieved.” (Daisy Press)
The versatile soprano Daisy Press (USA) lends the texts a multi-faceted voice and, in approaching the piece, draws on her wide-ranging musical repertoire, which, alongside contemporary classics (e.g. the long-standing cooperation with PHACE for Fausto Romitelli’s video opera An Index of Metals) among other things also from the comprehensive analysis of dhrupad (North Indian singing style) and a differentiated investigation of the songs of Hildegard von Bingen.
