Panel Statement
Panel: Chasing Ghosts: Reactive Notation and Extreme Sight Reading
Schwer…unheimlich schwer (difficult…incredible difficult) is a piece for bass clarinet, viola, piano and percussion about German Red Army Faction member Ulrike Meinhof. It zooms into the moment when she, in a TV interview, talks publicly about the fate of politically active women and expresses the possibility of leaving her children in order to pursue her interests. In this piece, based on the transcription of Meinhof’s speech and composed in real time by a computer (sending parts onto computer screens), the difficulty of extreme sight-reading, including microtones and large leaps for viola and clarinet as well as complex harmonies for marimba and piano, conveys a sense of the dilemma that Meinhof is clearly experiencing. The real-time composition was done with MaxScore, a composition and notation environment developed by Nick Didkovsky and the author.
- Georg Hajdu was born in Göttingen, Germany in 1960. He is among the first composers of his generation dedicated to the combination of music, science and computer technology. After studies in Cologne and at the Center for New Music and Audio Technologies (CNMAT), he received his PhD from UC Berkeley. In 1996, following residencies at IRCAM and the ZKM, Karlsruhe, he co-founded the ensemble WireWorks with his wife Jennifer Hymer, a group specializing in the performance of electro-acoustic music. Georg Hajdu has published articles on several topics on the borderline of music and science. His areas of interest include multimedia, microtonality, algorithmic, interactive and networked composition. Currently, Georg Hajdu is professor of multimedia composition at the Hamburg School of Music and Theater.