Salut für Caudwell (2005)

This extract from the project Mouvements für Lachenmann, Staging of an Evening Concert (2005), conceived in honour of the seventieth birthday of the German composer, Salut für Caudwell  is the first piece in a series of shows, written through a musical  interpretation of pre-existing works. In this case, it is a 1977  composition, dedicated to the British poet Christopher Caudwell, who  fell in combat during the Spanish Civil War, which sets to music a  Marxist-inspired pamphlet against bourgeois thought. The schema  conceived for four performers, instead of the two guitarists as  initially planned, dissociates the music played in the wings from the  interpretation being mimed on the stage. The detachment produced between  the two guitarists, who are out of sight, and two other musicians, who  execute the original score without instruments, deconstructs the usual  identification between the visible and the audible. Xavier Le Roy also  adopts Lachenmann’s indications (“muffled” sounds, “the most neutral  possible diction, almost as though read out aloud”…) so as to translate  them into gestures, going so far as to transform the sonic event and the  musical playing into purely plastic objects.

Source: program of the CND