Intoxication / Mushrooms

What do insect molting and large-scale tree fungi have in common? They follow a clear process, both intoxicating and fragile. Take Stefan Wirth's "Eleusis," for example: Like tree mycelia, which can form a vast fungal network, the orchestra spreads throughout the entire space. The Swiss composer, who teaches in Lucerne, speaks of a "ritual act." A trance-like state is expressly desired.

The aim is to achieve the same feeling of bliss as in the Eleusinian Mysteries for the ancient Greeks through the "ingestion of highly dosed musical events"—entirely without drugs. In "Moult," it is the molting of spiders that inspired Clara Iannotta. The old exoskeleton is shed, and the new, molted body emerges, as it were, from the "spirit or shadow of its own form." The Italian artist speaks of a "double temporality," in which yesterday leaves almost physical traces in today.

In Iannotta's work, the orchestra becomes an animal shedding its old skin, along with the past. Yet the past remains ever-present. This sonic shedding process unfolds with the same rapturous intensity as the luminous shifts in timbre in Beat Furrer's "Phaos" from 2006 or the spectral, spherical music of Gérard Grisey. The work's title, "Phaos," means brightness or light.

Furrer creates this impression with high, ethereal sounds and overtone-rich spectra. They emerge from multidimensional sound events that unfold almost in slow motion. Grisey employs a similar approach in "Le Temps et l'Écume" from 1989. In this "time foam," the temporal "planes of deceleration and acceleration" increasingly overlap. Time and space expand and compress.