Nikolaus Brass: heliotrop

The composition »heliotrop–Sequences for Bass Clarinet and Vocal Sextet« was created between January and March 2022. Heliotropism is one of the fundamental movement principles of nature, the turning towards light. Like everything natural, it is subject to disturbances and obstructions. Like all living things, it is vulnerable to destruction. But as a natural principle of growth and formation, it prevails as long as the sun of our galaxy shines. Thus, it is reliable, if not as a law, then at least as an analogy.

 

The reference to the sequence in the title—here in its liturgical sense—points to the aspect of praise, perhaps a fundamental principle of art, just as heliotropism is a fundamental principle of nature. A sequence is a richly designed, wordless melody following the Hallelujah as a jubilus, a lyrical, hymnic song. This frame of reference is no longer »naturally« available to us in the 21st century without interruption, but in my understanding, it can certainly serve as the foundation for an artistic statement. The text entered this frame of reference only during the composition; initially, I understood its semantic level as a reflection on February 24, 2022. I could also say that the text infiltrated the initially textless music as an additional voice with its own rights. Sometimes it acts like a sung linguistic image, but often it is used merely as a means of »orchestration,« understood more as an emphasis or colour addition rather than an independent layer; sometimes it hides unheard, serving as a hint to the performers of an inner image.

 

The spectrally coloured harmony plays a role for me in the aesthetic context of nature and artefact—in the truest sense of the word. This means I present »natural tuning« in an ambivalent way, as the »distorted« intervals formed from the higher odd harmonics (seventh, eleventh, or thirteenth harmonics) are more familiar to us as artefacts than as images of nature.