Marianthi Papalexandri-Alexandri: Untitled VI

The voice was not at all an artistic focus for her. For many years, Marianthi Papalexandri-Alexandri has occupied herself with the production and behaviour of sound. She manipulates musical instruments with the most varied preparations, thus making them into sound objects, as well as inventing–usually motorized–sound objects that in turn act as musical instruments. In this way she explores new forms of musical interpretation, and her intervention in standard playing practice also influences the behaviour and reaction of the performers themselves. The properties of the sound produced by the resonant bodies also interest her; invisible, incorporeal, mobile and unpredictable, it is charged with individual imagined meaning and gives her sound objects the character of a living organism.
And now the voice. The »instrument« which, on sounding, not only directly places the vitality of its carrier at the centre, but also triggers individual associations, emotionality, theatricality–simply a »human« quality that renders impossible any tentative exploration of the interstices of living object character described earlier.
In this sense, being invited to participate in Mediterranean Voices was very much a challenge for Marianthi Papalexandri-Alexandri. Both technically–a singer, after all, does not use an instrument but is themselves the »device«, as it were–and emotionally, for occupying herself with singing sent her back to the past, and she first of all had to find her own voice. An archaic, Greek-flavoured melody was the »relic« of the past that now became her starting point for the new piece.
Marianthi Papalexandri-Alexandri places the work in the context of her series Untitled, in which she prepares musical instruments (recorders, grand pianos) and sound objects, often adding a membrane which, caused to vibrate through various manipulations, makes the resonant body sound.
»In Untitled VI the vocalists sing, with modified resonant tubes and motors, the Greek word akousate, meaning «listen carefully”. What happens when the voice and singing are controlled and mediated by motorized resonant bodies? How does the this act of singing alter the physical and imagined presence of the voice? How does this influence the process of intense listening to one’s own voice, to that of another, and to external sounds? By exploring these question, I encourage listening to the resonances between different voices and bodies.”
Three elements are at the centre of Untitled VI: a strong, loud sound (»here we are!«), a »beautiful« melody (»it’s the beauty«) and a sound in the space produced by three motors, which are prepared with a modified cogwheel to produce different rhythms, placed on sound boxes, combined or augmented by sound objects on stage that are controlled and also imitated by the singers.
Although the composer and the singers developed a choreography of individual actions together, every rehearsal and every future performance produces a unique sound sculpture whose individual elements have a perceptible narrative quality, giving Untitled VI a certain installation character.