Wortaufschüttung: exploring expression through performances and analyses of contemporary settings of twentieth-century poetry

This practice-based research project explores the concept of expression in Post-war compositions based on 20th Century poems. As the expressive means of lyricism in poetry were renewed in the Post-war period, composers have had to develop new compositional strategies to approach the particularities of this poetry. This evolution necessitates a re-evaluation and a more precise delimitation of the notion of expressivity. The preparation of the performances of the works interpreted in this project involved observing how the poetic qualities of the texts may be reflected by musical interpretations, and how this expressive articulation may be understood analytically and methodologically. A further step consisted of an enquiry into the appropriate applications of the notion of expressivity in relation to the whole formed by text and music. The documentation of the performances includes my rehearsals both as an accompanist and a conductor, such that the working process and its collective interpretative decision-making can be observed. After the documented rehearsals had taken place, I then reconsidered the analytical basis for interpretive decisions in light of them and evaluated the success of the strategies they engendered. Ideas that had emerged during the preparation process were not only proven right or wrong in the rehearsal process, they were also modified, expanded and altered by it. In my observations following the rehearsal process, I view the compositional reactions to the renewed language of the post-war poetry in question through the lens of the doctrine of affects and its theorization in the early seventeenth century: i.e., the compositional and analytical schema used in late Renaissance and early Baroque music. I view this application of the doctrine of affects as transformed by the context of a paradigm of musical expressivity that it was not originally intended to serve. It revealed itself as transfigured by the nature of the poetry the compositions are based upon, thus leading to a modernized understanding of the notion of musical expression. The methodology developed and pursued throughout this practice-based research has thereby proven capable of not only instigating an initial interpretive approach to the pieces in question, but also of providing a basis for a reconsideration of the notion of expressivity in retrospect, after the rehearsal process.