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Bernd Trautvetter's poem with its allusions to Ernst Jandl's Ottos Mops or also the children's song Drei Chinesen mit dem Kontrabass (have a look at the Wikipedia article) is not so much interpreted with regards to content in these 12 paraphrases. Rather I kept an eye on starting points to „begin something” musically with the given text material.

A – as first letter of the alphabet, as vowel, as musical tone – plays an important part, of course. Letters are the symbols we use to capture our transient language; the close relation of language and music is also pointed out by the fact that we name tones by letters.
Typically for our cultural area so inclined to ordering, we begin the alphabet with A – maybe, because it denotes the phoneme we scream out into this new world after our first deep breath.

Musically A is a tone like any other, yet as standard pitch (a¹) it is reference. For the audience of orchestral concerts the ritual of tuning started by the oboe is a signal that the music will soon begin.
And the first bars of Beethoven's 9^th Symphony are a fine example for the tone A as a musical symbol for 'beginning' (cf. my remarks on the 5^th paraphrase: Start Nr. 9).

So it does make sense to read the poem in compositional ways and thus generate language-music. Motives, melodies, series, sounds as well as organization of time are literally and verbally taken from the text.


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