displaced (2020) for chamber orchestra by lularom published on 2022-02-28T10:17:13Z SWR Symphonieorchester Titus Engel, conductor World Première Recording, Donaueschinger Musiktage '20 Think of a sound, an acoustic impulse in a room. Together with the initial sound wave, you will hear its reverberation, the different reflections of the impulse by the concrete walls and surfaces of the room. Thanks to the reflections, you will perceive the room and will be able to get an idea of its size, content and characteristics. Moreover, these reflections constitute a concrete rhythmical pattern of delays of the initial impulse. In this sense, we can conceive sound as a relation between space and time by understanding space as a series of rhythmical patterns. 'displaced' is an aesthetic development of this idea in the form of a miniature for chamber orchestra. The piece is the mapping, projecting and time-stretching of the reflections of an imagined sound from two different points in the space of the Donaueschingen BaarSporthalle using an acoustic raytracing algorithm, i.e., a program to calculate these very fast reflections and their patterns. The spatial dimension in 'displaced' does not reside in the disposition of the instruments – all instruments are in the usual orchestra formation on stage – but in the piece’s conception of space in relation to time, and in the aesthetic perception of a ‘lived space’ (‘éspace vécu’), in which we as listeners reside and which we all experience. From the innumerable possible positions of sound emissions – and their innumerable reflection patterns in the Baar-Sporthalle – I take a few from an acoustic model of the space to use compositionally. This selection is a conscious compositional gesture intended to aesthetically explore a specific aspect of a place. Rather than acoustically representing a place, the piece makes the listener aware of the place by musically transforming, magnifying and projecting it. This place is also displaced to the stage and into the ensemble. That is, the place that we are experiencing at the moment of the performance is being explored and made audible by displacing its entirety to the area of the stage. The utopian topos of space in music is then revisited in 'displaced'. Utopia is not an ideal unreachable place but is rather the place that we inhabit and experience, which, having been aesthetically rethought and redistributed, can reveal new possibilities.
