Hans Tutschku

Moment gathers five works by the German composer Hans Tutschku, written between 1991 and 1998 in Weimar, Berlin and Paris. All were conceived for four or eight channels and are heard here in stereo versions made by the composer. The voice runs through every piece, spoken, sung or broken apart, often with a poem as its starting point.

extrémités lointaines, dedicated to Francis Dhomont and commissioned by the French State and the Ina-GRM, uses city sounds, church and temple music and children’s songs that Tutschku recorded on a four-week concert tour of Singapore, Indonesia, the Philippines and Thailand in 1997, arranged in 15 sections that keep the cultural context of each source. It received a Distinction at Prix Ars Electronica 1998. In … erinnerung…, a poem by Antonio Bueno Tubía about the memory of prison is granulated with bells and tam-tams into dense textures.

Les invisibles builds a soundscape around a text by Karl Lubomirski from melodic gestures recorded by soprano Donatienne Michel-Dansac, flutist Catherine Bowie, cellist Antoine Ladrette and percussionist Jean Geoffroy, organised entirely around the number five; it won 1st prize at the Prix Noroit-Léonce Petitot in 1997. Sieben Stufen, realized partly at Ircam, takes Georg Trakl’s poem Verfall in German and French through seven sections before the text finally appears, followed by a 49-second retro-coda. Die zerschlagene Stimme (1991), winner of the Hanns-Eisler-Prize, turns voice into percussion and percussion into speech, with fear placed close to the listener and hope further away.

Born in Weimar in 1966, Tutschku joined the Ensemble für Intuitive Musik Weimar in 1982, studied in Berlin, Dresden, The Hague, Paris and Birmingham, and took part in concert cycles with Karlheinz Stockhausen. Since 2004 he has directed the electroacoustic studios at Harvard University.

CD in Opak, empreintes DIGITALes IMED 9947, 1999.