900presente performed "The Key to Songs"
Ensemble 900presente, based at the Conservatorio della Svizzera italiana, performed Morton Subotnick's "The Key to Songs" on March 26 in Lugano and on May 27 in Florence as part of the "Maggio Elettrico". The composer was a guest and answered a number of questions about this work, written in 1985, and contemporary electronic music (in English).
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 Songsand 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 all got choreographed!
