Summen(Teilen) (Sum(Divide)) (and also: Hum(Share))

While reading through Yoko Ogawa's wonderful book Das Geheimnis der Eulerschen Formel (Original title: Hakase no aishita sûshiki, english: The Housekeeper and the Professor), I had the vague idea to use the phenomenon of Amicable numbers in some way to compose music.

The Wikipedia article on Amicable numbers (see above) mentions Pythagoras' answer to the question of what a friend is: „One that is another self, like 220 and 284.”
In her book, Ogawa uses this smallest pair of Amicable numbers as a metaphor for the friendship between an old math professor with his housekeeper and her ten-year-old son.
The old man's short−term memory only goes back 80 minutes, and so the timeless world of numbers is the place where this friendship can be renewed again and again.

Music is sometimes referred to as sounding mathematics – the abstraction described by this term goes along with the emotional movement that music can and wants to trigger.

And so, during my work on the piece, which soon got the title Summen(Teilen), plowing through tables of number families to determine pitches, durations, volumes and timbres, the idea of a five movement cycle emerged that was to focus on the conditions of human coexistence.

The narrative character of this thoroughly serial movement is not so much the result of my compositional intention, but rather in that the set elements relate and „have something to say” to each other.

Some compositional details (read on . . . ):


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