schlitzen – paramyth 2 for stringquartett by Clemens Gadenstätter published on 2020-03-03T19:21:39Z schlitzen / paramyth 2 (String quartet #2) When we listen, we understand what we hear by projecting it onto tactile conceptions and experiences: sensations that we receive (or imagine receiving) through our skin allow us to comprehend that which is heard through a "polymodal mapping." Other corporeal reactions are also inscribed into the understanding of audio signals: shrinking away from a stimulus, a cramping up. The same is true for visual experiences (garishness; or a remembrance of the middle panel of Grünewald's Isenheim Altarpiece), spatial projections (high, wide), and taste sensations (sweet). Schlitzen / paramyth 2 takes its point of departure this method of "understanding" what we hear, processing it, making it our own. Schlitzen (slits) are both an experience of the injured skin (pain) as well as a bodily activity as well as an experience of vision. These experiences, which we internalize from early on in our lives, trigger events in our perception – be they sonic, tactile, or visual. "Along" this trigger I develop material, out of the string quartet idiom. Furthermore I strive during the compositional process to create a 'stretto' for this comprehension mode of listening via polymodal projection ("mapping") with itself, thereby developing the structure, form and ultimately the entire musical conception parallel to the sounds as a process of this mode of comprehension. To compose music means, for me, to develop a comprehension of listening. To combine this material with a comprehensive experiential horizon (e.g. slits) is the first step toward transcending the latter. Ultimately I arrive at a transformed experience of my self, or an experience of a transformed self, if you will. This procedure allows me to generate a fluid, flexible, yet concise system of sound-embedded tactilities, affects, sensations, memories, emotional impressions, etc. To work on this systematization is simultaneously to engage with my own experiential possibilities. CG 7/14
