Simon Bahr

Mixtape was composed around various snippets of existing music, trying to rethink and combine them in a fluid musical continuum. They were selected by the members of the ensemble and myself and found their way into the score – in the form of very radically transformed rhythmic and melodic fragments – as well as into the electronic beats played on the keyboard – in the form of very short and unidentifiable sonic particles. Central to the composition are notated loops: They usually include an approximate instruction for each player, e.g. “increase density”, “single notes only” or “pick 1 each cycle”. Events in those loops are chosen to be played or not played by each musician in each respective cycle according to those instructions, culminating in a semi-improvised section at the end of the piece.

The piece Well-Planned Theft for stolen and synthesised sounds deals with productive piracy and looks for aesthetic potentials in the notation – in this case in itself not necessary – of electronic music. It is a stereo composition consisting mainly of sounds taken from various pop songs. These more or less short sound particles are all chosen in such a way that they do not allow any conclusion to be drawn about a specific song in terms of sound. Instead, they stand for certain sound topoi. The theft is artificial in that it is only revealed in the score – as an assertion, so to speak – but cannot be heard from the sound itself.

The initial sounds were initially described relatively precisely in a production score in the style of a bibliography. Reproducing the piece with some interpretive fuzziness would thus be possible. The temporal organisation of the sounds is then established by means of a traditional rhythm notation. The stolen sounds are augmented by some synthesis sounds.

Well-planned Theft proposes a way of notating complex electronic sounds very accurately and yet very easily by considering the entire corpus of published music as a repository of musical material that can be referenced by means of citation. Here, notation is understood less as a medium of communication and more as a compositional tool.

Well-Planned Theft was premiered at KONTAKTE Festival, Akademy of Arts Berlin, 24.09.2022.

Mixtape

ensemble

composer

Well-Planned Theft

fixed sound

Remote Control

solo