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Blau (Blue)

The color blue is often associated with vastness, openness and coolness.
The word time, which appears at the end of the choreographic, comes from the title of the original underlying music – Time by Pink Floyd –, but time is also one of the dimensions we can see looking at the sky (actually, it is only, and not even always, blue during the day).

Thomas Zehnter's abstract color-form composition has inspired me to a largely structured musical interpretation – in other words, to compose „calculatingly into the blue”.
The temporality inherent in the emerging picture offers a guideline, along which the music develops – both doubling (movement in the picture corresponds to movement in the in the music) and contrapuntally (movement in the music, while the picture stands still, and vice versa).

At two points this counterpoint is particularly striking:
at the beginning, the choreography displays a white surface (the blank canvas, so to speak) for 20 seconds, during which the music of the entire piece runs in composed time-lapse, exemplary passages are positioned in exact proportion.
With the appearance of the word time the image stands still for 30 seconds at about minute 3 – time for a small fugato, the time organization of which is based on the proportionally compressed retrograde of the 3 form parts presented up to that point.

The treatment of pitches, dynamics and panorama distribution also has something to do with „time” – namely through the metaphor of the clock face (for musicians a vivid mnemonic bridge to the circle of fifths). By motivic reflections of the 3 tones that represent the range from green-blue to violet in Newton's color circle (a, b, and c) a 12−tone series (and another one for the fugato) was developed and converted into volume values (dB or MIDI velocity) and panorama positions.

This type of „strict”, for some perhaps (too?) „constructed” composition creates, interestingly enough, a lot of open space for tonal and rhythmic associations – such as chords and rhythms that seem to be borrowed from cool jazz, a music, which I also find very „blue”.


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