Music

Everywhere in the world, people play with sound: on musical instruments, with their voice, with their bodies, and in their minds. They enchant and surprise us with their play, they let us move, halt, remember and forget. How does this work? This question is my personal drive.

Making and hearing music is an intimate and sometimes invasive mode of human social interaction. This insight is important for my musicological research practice but also for my own play with noises, sounds, with my body and with my voice. The recorder and later the oboe were extensions of my own body. Yet they also confronted me with the limitations of my body. What you hear is not always what you want to hear, and what you think you hear is not always what those around you hear. Singing provides me with the best opportunities to deal with these discrepancies, possibly because I regard singing as a collective enterprise. For playing the oboe I needed to emphatically assert my presence in order to articulate and shape my tone. In a choir, by contrast, I need to adapt, colour in with the other voices, bend along or offer subtle resistance. This convinces me that music requires social skills that reach beyond musicality proper.

Some of the music I made