Stephan Dunkelman (1956-2020) – Hanna’Duet (1998)
Even if I dance in silence, I can only do so with music.
My work consists of bringing together Time and animated Space. To develop expressions of space for the musical; to integrate them with existing expressions of time or, better still, to draw them in the course of production when new expressions of time are revealed. Modulate sound motifs chosen for their morphological or imaginary qualities by using their rhiza to energise them. To play with the mental images they suggest and thus perceive the nature of the animated phenomena that result from them. The spirit of the dance and the necessity of silence are the transmitters I have chosen to orient myself. Their presence is imposed and forgotten in the composition phase to let the spiritual guide the senses. So that between Heaven and Earth the listening is vertical. A course in concrete and acousmatic music has opened up a field of research for me in musical writing, the limits of which I do not yet perceive. Acousmatics, which to my mind is more a thought than a music, is a powerful vector for the creation of sound images and proposes a kind of “cinema for the ear”. Cinema for the ear, a formulation that takes on its full meaning in my work even for the strictly musical part. I would indeed define myself more as a music and sound design director than as a composer in the traditional sense of the term. If I found an excellent space for creation, the desire to create the instrumental illusion in my music quickly imposed itself in the development of my own writing and gradually led me to build them mainly from instrumental sound recordings whose raw materials are, except for birdsong, more dynamic and richer than those of the concrete world (natural or industrial sounds). I pay particular attention to the sound recording, both in the choice of materials and in the way it is done because, as in the cinematographic writing of Andreï Tarkovski in particular, I am convinced that the nature of the final result is decided not during the editing but during the sound recording. In addition to this specifically musical field of research, the music and sound creations created for visual artists (filmmakers, visual artists, choreographers) have been facilitated by the practice of this acousmatic thinking, developed and enriched through contact with these different artists. One feeds off the other and vice versa. Even if my musical activity remains primordial, being confronted with other modes of creation and thought has also opened me up to other forms of expression in the sound arts that have emerged as a result of the latest developments in thinking in this field and the technological innovations that are linked to it. These new technologies have allowed me to integrate a more incisive and dynamic poetics of Space into my work. Rather than considering it as an ornamentation or an additional audio processing parameter in the timeline, I prefer to pose it as a second constant in my writing, the first being the one most developed so far: Time. It is in this reflection that one must understand the sentence that begins and ends my note of intention at the beginning: “to solidarise Time and animated Space” and “So that between Heaven and Earth the listening is vertical”. I am indeed trying to script my music simultaneously from two constants, Time / Space, and to induce via listening a perception, or even a reading, of the sequence of events given to hear. (2018)
Hanna’ duet This short piece is a geometric replica, a simple reproduction of a segment of choreography. A group watches as a couple hesitates, and harasses them verbally: essence and existence in the ashes. Hanna’ Duet was realized in the composer’s studio in 1998 and premiered in November 2000 as part of the 7th “The Space of Sound” International Acousmatic Festival (Brussels, Belgium).