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Reflektionen II
remix of Hugo Ernst Käufer's recitation of his text Augapfeltiefe

In his text-cycle Augapfeltiefe Hugo Ernst Käufer looks at seeing itself. In many facets he draws a bead on the aspects of visual sensation – with the tools of language, which in turn are primarily acoustic.
Writers write, in this case shortly after an eye-operation – with huge letters, nose on paper; and Hugo Ernst Käufer's own recitation of his text makes special sense on this background.

Even before the recording the idea came up to mirror the visual processes and parameters spoken of in a musical, compositional way and thus go beyond the mere recital. This musicalization happens on several different levels:

Physically and physiologically sound waves can be imagined as light waves transposed down by several octaves, which means that phenomena as blurring, mirroring, luminosity and darkness can be directly translated into the acoustic domain. Just as well terms like „moments”, „viewed through a looking glass” or „seen in a different light” may be expressed audibly. Musical composition all along uses methaphors that work exactly on this basis.

On a psychological, mental and emotional level the meaning of these metaphors becomes important to us. Some moments stay with and impress us for a lifetime, others are forgotten immediately – some are believed forgotten and might re-emerge after decades.
I had to set priorities here. There is one chain of thoughts, for instance, that has moved me deeply: it leads from the little boy playing with his wooden toy train to the young anti-aircraft auxiliary, who had to die during an air attack against the train in the station of Lünen. The ophthalmology surgeon in the Heinrich-Heine-University at Düsseldorf, on the other hand, doesn't play any part in my treatment.

This composition is no setting of poetry or text in a conventional musical sense, rather it is a musicalization by means of electronic lingual composition and in this sense a remix.

Its material is all derived from Hugo Ernst Käufer's voice, with the exception of Friedrich Silcher's melody to Heinrich Heine's poem Lorelei („Ich weiß nicht, was soll es bedeuten”), which is used to tune filter frequencies.

The literal template can be understood as projected through my compositional lens on a „musical retina”, where it is transformed to audio images reflecting Hugo Ernst Käufer's text with my own means.


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