EXAUDI / PHACE

The title of Isabel Mundry’s trio “Sounds, Archeologies”, in which individual voices repeatedly flow towards or away from each other in ways that make listeners gasp, already hints at unearthing unconventional sounds. This piece for the unusual combination of basset horn, cello and piano, was inspired by an ancient Egyptian sculpture – or to be more precise: by a picture of this sculpture sitting on a desk in an Egyptology Institute “amongst papers and paperweights.” During the composing process, Mundry worked through “sediments of musical history“ as she puts it, “down to the archetypes, the nature of the instruments themselves and how they are played: polyphonies, melodies, responsories, triads, open strings, the proper time of playing actions, finales” – archetypes that she spreads out across her desk “like Egyptian sculptures to explore the question of whether and how they still speak to me, so that I can speak to them too.” In her spatial composition “Invisible”, the composer then examines the “question of attachment and detachment”: with an inner circle of seven vocalists around whom the audience is seated, that is then in turn surrounded by the instrumental ensemble. In that inner circle, “individuals repeatedly turn around to face outwards” – at one point, all of them except one. “This means that the singers in the middle are constantly oscillating between two allegiances,” says Mundry, with a continuously changing perspective between inclusion and exclusion.