Körperstudie
for prepared viola and electronics
2025/26
6 min
This piece was inspired by the video work I’m Too Sad to Tell You by the artist Bas Jan Ader, in which he simply cries in front of a camera. It’s a short black-and-white video without any sound, that has intrigued and spoken to me ever since I first saw it. I knew I wanted to do something related to it someday.
In 2025, my friend Anna Jurriaanse asked me to write a solo viola piece for her final recital at UDK Berlin, in which she wanted to perform a series of viola miniatures, a project she called “The Composers in My Life”. Since Anna and I often talked about (our) crying (and maybe because she and Bas Jan Ader are both Dutch), I thought this would be the ideal opportunity to revisit my idea of composing something related to Ader’s work.
My first impulse was to turn the concept around and use the sound of crying without any visuals. I wanted to explore the pure sonic qualities of human crying. At the same time, I was interested in the expressive qualities it naturally has.
I began by working on the electronic part and tried to transform the sound so that it wasn’t immediately recognizable as crying, while simultaneously suggesting it or something related to it.
My aim was to blur the distinction between the viola and the electronics, merging them into a single sound body. Once the electronic part was roughly complete, Anna and I searched for sounds on the viola that could imitate its timbral, gestural, and expressive qualities, blending with it as seamlessly as possible. We found preparations, techniques, and gestures that brought the viola quite close to the electronic material.
The piece first unfolds an organic sound world formed from the interplay of viola and electronics, then arrives at a moment of suspension, before evolving into something new, opening up a different sonic space.
Anna Jurriaanse’s Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/annajurriaanse/
Premiered by Anna Jurriaanse at a house concert in Berlin Neukölln, 09.02.26
Later performed at her final recital at UDK Berlin, 13.02.26
And at Luana Cloșcă’s exhibition in at the Dorothea Konwiarz Stiftung, 04.03.26
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