Ardor

Ardor is a poem by writer Frederika Amalia Finkelstein.
The score is written for 12 mixed voices, each enhanced by a single percussion instrument.
Skin, wood, metal: sound bodies brought into contact with the manual gesture, then resonating in the natural acoustic space. In this way, the sound body responds to the vocal body. The sensation of resonant percussive breath illuminates and spatializes that of vocal breath.
The rhythm, the scansion, the punctuation of timbres and sound colors radiating out into space opens up to the magnificence, to the nature of the extreme beauty of this poem which, like Shakespeare’s Sonnets, speaks of the ways of love, its addresses, its enigmas, its territories of fire.
This musical and vocal text, its mystery as well as its obviousness, was constructed along two axes:
harmonic energy as the momentum of resonance, and the looseness of the phrase when, at its limit, it is reduced to a simple breath.

Philippe Schoeller, January 2015