Banale Madrigale - Contemporary music for choir and soloists

The composition was written between 2008 and 2014 and is constantly being developed further. The free madrigal form, whose secular texts almost always contained themes of love, nature and death, is expanded to include a number of new points of reference. The idea behind my composition is to combine the seemingly banal aspects of everyday human life with the stylistic devices of artistic modern choral singing.

The texts are both her own poems and everyday texts from subway and pub conversations, classified ads and excerpts from television and the Internet. Just a few words are enough to ironically question the meaning of the rituals of our daily existence. In some pieces I like to draw on some of the stylistic devices of the old madrigal composers, especially those of Monteverdi (from whose first madrigal book I also quote), such as the onomatopoeic paraphrasing of sounds, the imitation of animal voices and an almost instrumental treatment of singing voices. Techniques from more recent pop music such as the use of beatbox and cell phone ringtones are also used, coughing, screaming, gurgling and moaning.

While in the first part the singing voices are clearly oriented towards the semantics of the text, in the second part the phonemes and sounds play an increasingly important role in the interpretation of the text. The various aspects of language in everyday communication are treated critically and humorously.

The first part of the composition was premiered at the Konzerthaus sans titre in Potsdam on June 3, 2018 by the legendary Berliner Maulwerker.

The world premiere of the fugue "Sprachlos" took place on 14.06.2016 by the Auditiv Vocal choir (conducted by Olaf Katzer) at the Palais am großen Garten Dresden.