Das Phonem zwischen zwei Wörtern (a)
duo for Bb cornet and trombones (2022)
commissioned by the ELISION Ensemble
premiered by the ELISION Ensemble at the Melbourne Recital Hall, August 25, 2022
Tristram Williams, Bb cornet
Benjamin Marks, alto and tenor trombones
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Discussing Derrida, Judith Butler argues that no phoneme corresponds to the spacing between words. Yet, without spacing, she argues, there would be no articulation, and thus no way of accounting for interlinearity as a signifying feature of text. Addressing the concept of articulation along Butler’s lines, Das Phonem zwischen zwei Wörtern (a) aims to trace this non-existing phoneme, as a virtual sound, by activating its relationship to spac-ing, not as an interval or void between sounds, but as an action yielding movement.
Reflecting on Butler’s approach to articulation in relation to Bénigne de Bacilly’s treatise, “Traité de la Methode ou Art de Bien Chanter” (1668), in which he discusses ornamentation in the French baroque not as a means of mere decoration, but as a temporal scalar of distance that saturates rhetorical expression and articulation, Das Phonem zwischen zwei Wörtern (a) addresses the notion of virtual sound also by bringing these discourses and their imbricated pasts in relation with sound, instrument design, and body — not for reconstruction or history-making, but in an effort to trace the ways in which this notion of virtuality could enable a mode of resistance, through which space reaches beyond political enclosures and conditioned temporalities.
Bringing phonetic and physical spaces in relation to each other, this work thus activates brass instrument performance to unpack interactions between corporeality and space, and to address how physical space brings an inherent corporeal event to the exterior through means of articulation and the virtual in engaging with perceived spaces, i.e., the embodied spatial portrayals drawn from the way sound sources interact with listeners.
©Turgut Erçetin 2010-2025 (All rights reserved).
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Audio (coming soon)
Video (YouTube)
Also to be featured on an upcoming portrait CD (Wergo, 2025), with a performance given by the ELISION Ensemble.
