Vermalung I - Westernmusik

Programme Note

VERMALUNG I - WESTERNMUSIK
for four channel tape
2005

- Did you bring a horse for me?
...
- ...Well... looks like we've... ...looks like we've shoot one horse... ahh, aahhhh
...
- ... you brought two too many

Sergio Leone, "Once upon a time in the west"

Vermalung I is the first piece of cycle where I work on already existing music or sound objects (Vermalung in English would be overpainting). Vermalung II - Donny G. for 8-channel-tape was written on Mozart's Don Giovanni. Vermalung III - Batman was written for percussion ensemble and electronics.
The general idea of the cycle Vermalung is to use one aspect of an already composed sonorous object to create a new composition. The sound object is firstly analysed with help of computer processes and then extracted the rhythmic information. At the end of this procedure there is a rhythmic structure that will be interpreted to create a new composition.
The main objective of this procedure is to stimulate a reaction to an already existing sonorous object; a concrete and non-metaphorical reaction based on the analysis of the inner of the sound. The micro existence of the sound object is projected into the perceptible domain and transformed into musical information. There is in Vermalung no attempt to adapt the rhythm to a certain compositional concept, rather to accept it "so as it is" and work on the concretness of the original material.
Vermalung I - Westernmusik for tape was composed on the first minutes of the soundtrack from the film Once upon a time in the west from Sergio Leone.

Luis Antunes Pena