Of Moods and Beings

Update:

Permiere on Saturday, March 11, 2023 at 21:00 UTC+1 on YouTube:

Eszter Ivanova: Cover art for *Of Moods and Beings* (2023)

What is a crocheted bedspread? An object of daily use? A finger exercise? A recycling of wool residues? A meditation exercise? Applied arts? Art? For Eszter Ivanova, crocheting her bedspread was initially not an artistic practice, but rather an occupation, motor activity. The choice of the color of the wool often depended on the current mood, size and shape of a section in a particular color, were often the result of the available length of the thread. But the finished bedspread reflects many things in a complex way: the moods of the producer, her personality, current events of everyday life and coincidences, sedimented life story. Last but not least, craftsmanship and handwriting. Thus, the bedspread can be regarded as a commodity, applied art and also as a work of art.

This complexity of the object ultimately also makes it possible to read it as a graphic score. Like most graphic scores, this one is not overdetermined, but rather raises questions, creates open spaces instead of giving instructions. From which end do you read it and in which direction? Or do you read it as a whole from a bird’s eye view? What do you do with the colors, the color changes, the irregularities of the texture? What determines the sounds and musical progressions? The moods? The texture? The imagined process of production, the craftsmanship?

Eszter Ivanova: Untiteled, 2022, details

I opted for a non-linear reading, i.e. not to follow the sections with my music from one end of the bedspread to the other or to let the change of colors determine the course of the music. Instead, I tried to read the crochet blanket as a whole as an abstract portrait of Eszter Ivanova. This is how my thoughts on sound material began with the creation process of the crochet blanket, with the craftsmanship and motor activity involved. Translating crocheting into my own motor processes meant operating the keys of my flute and stroking small stones over the eardrum of a hand drum. Furthermore, it was clear from the beginning that the course of the piece of music had to be fragmentary, just as the crochet blanket with its irregular sections of different colored wool is characterized by the fragmentary. This gave a structure and atonal texture that should run through the whole piece. Everything else in terms of sounds and musical characters is the attempt to translate into music what I feel is sedimented in the crochet blanket, i.e. life history, everyday life, moods.

Thus, the piece of music is ultimately the result of two translation processes, whereby translation is not to be understood in the linguistic sense, but as experiential-multimodal translation. Eszter Ivanova translated her experiences and moods into a crochet blanket, I tried to read these experiences and moods from the crochet blanket and translate them again ̶ into sounds and music.

Artistic creativity is a complex process that usually cannot be pinned down to one person. In this case, too, it is a complex process that has taken place between two people and their complex relationships: a multimodal collaboration in experiential translation.

Ausgesuchtestenohren X Eszter Ivanova