“Behind Me - dips Eternity was created at the suggestion of the director of the Kunstakademie Bad Reichenhall, Stefan Wimmer, and the legendary British conductor Paul Hillier, who has lived and worked in Copenhagen for many years. I have had a wonderful artistic collaboration with Paul Hillier for a long time. He has performed some of my choral works in Copenhagen, Berlin and Dublin and invited me to Copenhagen in 2008 as Composer in Residence.
I've had my eye on the texts I set to music by the great American poet Emily Dickinson for a long time, and a few years ago I came across the wonderful short poems by the Japanese poet Saigyo on the recommendation of a colleague. Both cultures have inspired and influenced me for many years, since the early 90s the avant-garde of the USA such as the New York School with Cage, Feldman, Brown and Wolff, but also Ives, Ruggles, Reich, Partch and others.
In 1998 I began to concern myself with Asia and Southeast Asia, with music, nature, culture and architecture and above all with philosophy, spending several weeks there every year.
The focus has been Japan since 2010, and some compositions for Japanese musicians and singers were created. (e.g. for Shō and also for the Noh singer Ryoko Aoki)
The poetic monk Saigyō lived in the 12th century and his book Poems from the Mountain Hermitage is very famous in Japan. I coupled poems by Dickinson and Saigyo in pairs, intertwined with small interludes of the Japanese shō, a mouth organ also found in China.
11 short songs for four solo voices (soprano, alto, tenor and bass) are mirrored by “Mirrors” of the Shō, as if framed by the voice of eternity.
Eternity is an important motif and symbol in the worlds of Dickinson, but also in the short poems of Saigyo, which are often characterized by black humor, irony and sometimes bitterness against the great and probably eternal weaknesses of human existence.
All texts are timeless and therefore always frighteningly topical.”
TRADITIONAL
Oshikicho no choshi
JOHN CAGE
Ryoanji
BERND FRANKE
Behind me dips Eternity
Naomi Sato, shō
Theatre of Voices
-Else Torp
-Laura Lamph
-Jakob Skjoldborg
-Jakob Bloch Jespersen
Paul Hillier, conductor
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