rite de passage

The chamber music ensemble work "rite de passage" was composed around the turn of the year 2014/15 and specifically conceived for a concert with the ensemble "die reihe".

The title of the composition refers to a book published in 1909

by the French ethnologist Arnold van Gennep, in which he develops and presents

a theory that is essential for me: According to his view, there are numerous

transitions in the social and cultural life of a human being between two stages

of life por social states. He calls these phenomena rites of passage (French:

"rites de passage") and divides these ritual performances into three

phases: a phase of detachment, which is connected with rites of separation, an

intermediate phase, in which mainly threshold or transformation rites take

place, and an integration phase, in which rites of affiliation are

initiated. 

Van Gennep's central concern has thus been to make the

intellectual world of his time aware that rituals cannot be studied in

isolation, from a fragmentary perspective or detached from their social

context. More than a hundred years later, but nevertheless with the perspective

of a "turn of the century mood", these thoughts inspired me to my

work, which formally and structurally definitely refers to van Gennep's theory

and especially to the three-phase model explained earlier.

Central compositional, theoretical foundations of my personal

style, which of course also appears in this piece, are to treat tonality and

atonality equally, to use rhythm and meter as a formal principle, and to

synchronize conventional notation with aleatoric elements in a world that is

constantly characterized by omnipotent communication, globalization, and the

demand for multi-tasking.

In my opinion, it is only through all those musical methods just

described that such rites of passage as van Genneps describes constantly arise;

they are the ones by which my compositional work, generally speaking, obtains

orientation in a stylistically pluralistic time.