Page 151 - Composing Processes and Artistic Agency

140 Musicological perspectives on composing
“Das Leben” “Life”
Das Leben ist schön Life is beautiful
schon so schön als das Leben. quite as beautiful as life.
Das Leben ist sehr schön Life is very beautiful
das lernen wir; das Leben; we learn it; life;
Das Leben ist sehr schön. Life is very beautiful.
Wie schön ist das Leben. How beautiful life is.
Es fängt schön an das Leben. Life starts out beautiful.
So (schön) schwer ist das es auch. So (beautifully) hard it is too.

Essl began his composing process (13 December 2013) by experimenting
with the spoken material. The experiments with granular-synthesis soft-
ware – of which Essl already had some experience – were “encouraging”
(basically, filter processes based on spectral analysis). At the same time, Essl
was tackling the issue of the title, which is always central for him and which
he likes to settle at the beginning of a piece if at all possible. Since the
author’s name only contains one vowel, the “e”, Essl wanted the title to
echo this phenomenon. He finally decided on “Herbecks Versprechen”, not
least because of its ambiguity. (The title means “Herbeck’s slip of the
tongue” or “Herbeck’s promise”.) This method suggests that in this case
Essl’s compositional thinking was to some degree programmatic, even if
the programme had no clear shape at this juncture. A further clue is his
intention to structure the piece into three movements whose titles he also
wanted to contain “e” as the only vowel: “ernst – bewegt – schwebend”
(serious – agitated – floating).
Essl conducted further experiments with the spoken material as of 9 January
2014, among other things with the Ircam software TRAX, a software called
Spear, and audio plug-ins developed by his friend, the New Zealand composer
Michael Norris, which are easy to integrate into the programming language
MaxMSP. He created types of sonic texture which convinced him that the
“instrument” was now completed (24 January 2014). Their nature also
suggested to him that his original idea for the form of the piece needed to be
changed:

During further trying-out of my instruments it becomes clear to me that
I’ll have to drop my original plan of composing three separate move-
ments. It seems much more interesting to me to create a larger and more
extensive sound process, in which the different compositional aspects
are put in relation to each other in all sorts of ways rather than to create
separate small pieces.

Eventually, Essl had a processual idea for the form, which can be seen both as
a permanent process of transitions between the sound textures and also pro-
grammatically, since Herbeck’s voice is supposed to be gradually “distilled
out of” rather abstract sounds. He described the formal sections with their fluid