Lecture LAURE M. HIENDL (DE)

Score Sampling: Intertextuality, Anti-Gravity and the Infinite Wrappings of Musical Pasts

This lecture focuses on my own practice as a composer and how the concept and structure of sampling, coming from electronic music, translates back into the process of writing instrumental scores. In my recent works I have sampled other, pre-existing music and created purely acoustic textures which embody highly digital processes in the analog practice of instrumental music playing. I will first give a very technical breakdown, a detailed step by step description of the entire compositional process of my recent ensemble piece called “Seht meine Wunden und an meinen Beinen, die Narben meiner Wunden” (denn wir sind lange gewandert), as well as reflections and speculations on some of the critical technologies I created for this purpose: a digital floating-point numerical sequencer, and which is the basis of most of the sampling and permutation algorithms in the entire software architecture; as well as a more simple random structure generator working with weighted probabilities. In the second section I will contextualize these technologies in a wider cultural framework and reflect on these processes under certain terminologies key to postmodernism, like depthlessness and intertextuality, the weakening of historicity, repetition, new syntax and syntagmatic relations, new technology, and finally the political implications thereof.

The lecture will be in English.