900presente führte «The Key to Songs» auf
Das am Conservatorio della Svizzera italiana beheimatete Ensemble 900presente führte am 26. März in Lugano und am 27. Mai in Florenz im Rahmen des «Maggio Elettrico» Morton Subotnicks «The Key to Songs» auf. Der Komponist war zu Gast und beantwortete ausführlich einige Fragen zu diesem 1985 entstandenen Werk und zur zeitgenössischen elektronischen Musik (in Englisch).
Where did the inspiration for your piece «The Key to Songs» come from?
That was more than 30 years ago; at that time, from the late ‘70s until the ’80s, ballet companies were doing my music. Every piece I wrote that was recorded was done by ballet companies all over the world. I loved seeing them, and I wanted to write a piece for ballet, but they never commissioned any, because they just took my music after I wrote it and danced to it. So I decided that I would write an imaginary ballet. I got a book by Max Ernst, one of the collage books, Une Semaine de Bonté (1933) and I took pictures from it. It was like photographs of a dancer flying through the air.
It was a surreal book, so there were very strange, surreal poems underneath each of the pictures.
I imagined what the ballet would have been like before and after he was up in the air and I made the music and my own choreography.
One of the pictures in Ernst’s book was called The Key to Songs, and it had nothing but little dots, no words. To me «The Key to Songs» was Schubert. So I picked a fragment by a Schubert song, you hear it, the strings play it often, and it gradually turns into something else. And I used that for the title The Key to Songs.
The funny thing is that once recorded it became a ballet! (smiling). 3 or 4 companies were dancing to that. I eventually wrote 3 imaginary ballets and they got all choreographed!
