Met onbewerkt geluid: youtu.be (On Death and Time) 1980 An Homage to Franz Schubert On Death and Time was commissioned by the NOS broadcasting organization. It is based on Schubert’s song Der Tod und das Mädchen, an extremely short song, which deals with the age-old theme of Death seducing a young girl. A number of contrasts is immediately apparent in Schubert’s song: the chorale-like serenity of the beginning and end as against the operatic middle section, the girl is young and pretty while Death is repulsively ugly, also the transition from Life to Death is represented by a ‘pseudomodulation’ from D minor to D major. Is this the fashionable romantic death-wish of the period, or did Schubert really see Death as a release from the troubles of Life? Or is it merely a technical device, a deliberate modernism, as contemporaries supposed? – Speculations. In On Death and Time these contrasts are enlarged by using the tool Time (chronological time) in order to transform Historical Time. Thus in the first movement (Life) use is made only of electronic (ie synthetic, therefore dead) sounds grouped according to the laws of tonality, although historically electronic music was the product of atonality. All sounds are electronically edited: here human action (Life) is electronic action (Death). The second movement (the seduction scene, the transition from Life to Death) uses musique concrète techniques: the transition from electronic music to live music. The sounds are isolated from …
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