Visite Critique Donaueschingen: Hanna Eimermacher
The following text was written in the context of the visite critique during the Next Generation workshop at the Donaueschinger Musiktage 2025.
Aura by Hanna Eimermacher for 22 Performers
A text by Ivana Petrač
“Time is an illusion – There is always everything there all at once”
Audience expectations are inevitably heightened when the program note for a piece begins with a paraphrased quote from Einstein’s theory of relativity. We expect to be enveloped in sound, to be placed in a state that will alter our perception and somehow transcend our everyday experience. Sadly, however, mixing science with artistic metaphor all too often leads to familiar results.
Klangforum Wien’s performance proved that the involvement of highly skilled musicians is crucial in bringing a complex piece like Eimermacher’s Aura to life. The large setting included an oval distribution of instrumentalists around three diagonally spaced percussion sets, two conductors in the middle of the room, as well as live spatialisation, electronics and light setting. The majority of the audience were placed in the middle of the concert hall, though they were permitted to move freely through the space. The piece features multiple layers of performative and structural elements, and, in addition to the written and composed material, invites the audience to participate with humming at specific moments. Through the combination of these elements, Aura aims to transmit a specific idea and an experience that is not to be expected from just any “conventional” concert setting.
The static texture of the beginning, a sustained, frozen soundscape, slowly fills the registral space. The omnipresence of this sound seems to set a certain mood or perhaps confirm the expectations of the program note. This initial setting is soon met with a more pitch-based material – iridescent clusters, reminiscent of Ligeti’s Lontano. Their development is met with microtonal beatings, encompassed by a natural fifth. Other instances of formal separation stand out to the ear – in contrast to previously presented sound material, this material is rhythmically clear. The prominent, repetitive rhythmic pattern discredits the previously presented soundscape. Several types of gestural motives recur throughout, performed by soloists, which somehow embellish the static textures, but seem equally disruptive in other instances. In this piece, thin and brittle textures are met with a whimsical display of tonal reference, in an otherwise serious atmosphere. A clearly composed cadenza brings closure, yet its timing is misplaced. A new section, dominated by the voice and its electronic twin, takes over the concert hall with circular spatialization and a trivial half-tone pendulum motive. This circular sound motion is visually represented by the two conductors, turning around on their axes towards each musician. With each soloist’s concluding sound impulse, the piece expels its final breath.
The sound spatialization of this hour of music stayed faithful to everyday reality and stood opposed to the ethereal concept of Aura. The space-time metaphor of the piece was well met by its hour-long duration, a length that was properly felt. To allude once more to the initial quote, it was not “everything there all at once”, but rather instances of memories, expectations, flashes of understanding and pervious experience, clearly composed in a chronological order. The fact that a clear, predetermined form could be discerned (intensified by corresponding changes in lightning), contradicted the written intentions of the program note. Although I believe that each piece should be primarily heard rather than read about beforehand, this monumental setting came with many disappointments caused by different factors. Most were brought about by the incoherence of various types of materials, which suggested a simplistic approach to parametric composition, without a system being involved.
By the forty-fifth minute of Aura the audience was laying down, looking either immersed or weary. Unfortunately, I tended to find myself in the latter camp, unable to ignore the feeling that I had heard all those individual sounds in similar constellations with same background ideas before.
As part of the audience I was met with a guided experience, something fixed in time, something predictable in which I was not able to abandon or lose myself, rather in a space I visited times before.
