I feel your silence. [Konzert/Artist Talk]

Hans Thomalla in conversation with Camilla Bork
Sarah Saviet (Violin)

Hans Thomalla’s music has undergone significant change in the last decade: his early pieces such as Momentsmusicaux (2004), or Fremd (2011), are characterized by a materially-oriented exploration of sound, in which the elements of music, as language, appear, but almost always as a means to quote music history. However, in his works composed in the last ten years, especially in his operas Dark Spring (2020) and Dark Fall (2024), there is instead an apparent development of a music that understands itself as a medium of expression, and as a result explores the models of tonality in new ways. In particular, there is a focus on an attempt to musically articulate the affects of the present day—whether those be individual “affects” such as irritation or forlornness, or collective feelings such as stagnation or self-alienation.

In conversation with Camilla Bork, Professor of Musicology at the Freie Universität Berlin, and an expert on musical theater, the composer will speak about this development and the tension between sound, affect, and narrative in his music. The violinist Sarah Saviet will also play Thomalla’s Air (2018) for solo violin, which itself marks a transition between these diverging compositional tendencies. The melody of the piece can be defined directly through its relation to the musical language of the opera Dark Spring (2020). Yet, aurally, the music always moves at the boundaries of the instrument, with a tendency to disappear into quiet murmurs or silence.