PDF: Info flyer for the concert on 10 November 2024
Video Visiography
Sound and image composition (2024) – 15:61 min
Lyrical texts and background image for Aajad
Play the complete composition “aajad” (electronic version).
With headphones the breadth of the sound space unfolds more fully.
Monologue scene
The composition is conceived as a monologue scene for lyric soprano and electronic sounds, as a reflection on such an existential upheaval, out of which new strength grows toward the leadership that is needed in the inevitably impending processes of transformation.
Formally, “aajad” uses the stylistic devices of the aria to reflect world events around 2021/22 from a higher-level perspective – a situation that in 2024 appears even more acute due to the ongoing wars in Ukraine and Israel.
The title “aajad” stands for creation. “aajad” is the Persian word for “origin”, an important aspect of my underlying poems: it is about hope for creation, for a new beginning after the collapse. This takes place against the background of the archetypal knowledge of passing away and new beginning.
Essence in metaphors of the Tarot
These aspects are found metaphorically condensed in the cards “XVI The Tower” and “XVIII The Moon” of the Thoth Tarot by Aleister Crowley.
I chose both cards because of their energy of transformation, in which upheavals have their origin in past situations and ways of thinking, which force the destruction of situations and habits and finally lead to new structures.
I have lyrically translated such dimensions of these two Tarot cards, in my own view, into my poems “Der Turm” and “Der Mond”. They form the basis of my composition “aajad”.
On the realization in the composition
The starting point of the composition is dark, sketching an image of collapse: Crowley’s “XVI The Tower” as a metaphor for the accumulated upheavals in the world situation with climate, pandemic, war and economic crisis. Part 1 nevertheless leads into the situation of a transformed new beginning, so that the crisis finally leads to purification.
Part 2, “und in der Spirale weiter zurück” (“and further back in the spiral”) (based on Crowley’s “XVIII The Moon”), opens up a magical aspect: the spiral means a going back into a nonlinear time, which in this way leads to archetypal aspects of humanity that belong to every human being.
This makes clear that the current crisis, however bad it may be, stands within the recurring form of collapses such as have occurred again and again in world history for thousands of years. Becoming aware of such knowledge enables a new kind of freedom in the mind, makes it possible to find one’s bearings in the apocalyptic situation (“Zeit meines Ursprungs in Erde löst jetzt” – “time of my origin in earth now dissolves”): the emotional basis for the ecstatic unison melody shortly before the end of the piece.
On the video concept
Formally, the composition of the image material is a metaphor for different views of an infinite wholeness, which the time spiral holds.
The slowness of the processes of development also points to this wholeness, sounding out within it archetypal dimensions of being and worlds of experience – partly synchronous, partly in counterpoint to the sound processes.
Stills from the Video Visiography “aajad”
English translation of the German original. Deutsche Fassung
