The four roomspaces – the ice tunnel through the Rhône glacier, the petrified basement under the former Steinfels Soap Factory in Zurich, the viaduct on the railway route up to the Gotthard and the soundproof torture chamber of the Sado-Maso brothel in the 5th District of Zurich – have their own unique visual, special mood, their own temperature, and their own acoustics. Charlotte Hug sets out to investigate the roomspace, reacts in the form of musical notes and researches them both. She senses the sound within the soundbox; the musical pitch of the room. The selected locations inspire the notes; a multi-layered musical sound experience is created.

The music is dispersed over sound waves and reaches the ear through the airspace; the notes change with the position and the body posture of the musician, depending on the movement in the room.

The movements in the roomspace dictate the directional movement of sound – new constellations. Originating in the room, the musical notes that are striving to sound become self-revealing. The sound was born in three dimensions. Dialogue with the room: the room gives the playing impulse for the notes.  Musical parallel works on surfaces and colours and on temperatures, odours, and architecture. The notes unite the seen and the unseen. They evoke the latent sound to be heard out of the silence, from the stone, the ice and the dumb object. They are telling us , that the three-dimensional space is striving to become sound.

- they are saying it. Reply, respond, speak – dialogue with the music: what do the notes desire, where would they be played, and in which direction?

The sound scans along the surfaces of the roomspace, The notes spread out, return and report back. They touch the walls, the border, the epiderm of the room. And then, they tell us what they have been experiencing. The music is absorbed or amplified, depending on the consistency of the roomspace and varies according to the pitch of the instrument. The viola – also a three-dimensional body – is tuned to a variety of pitches; the bow is drawn at different tensions, from tight to a slack “soft bow” and is the agent for the expression of the resonant spaces, conveying the notion of the physicality of the body of the instrument. The viola creates bodies of sound, images of sound. These, in their turn create new roomspaces and from these, new clang effects and again, other roomspaces and onwards, new resonances once more – provoking images, memories, evoking associations of ideas – all at once changing the roomspace.

The room, the colours, the shapes, the scents, temperatures, and the music penetrate Charlotte Hug through and through. The notes are compounded within her, converted, combined and find their exit through the instrument, enriched, intensified. Charlotte Hug enables them to form sound and speech. She responds with composition of the roomspace body thoughts and feelings.

In her fifth composition – Aggregate – she compresses the roomspace memories of the four previous locations and the recorded clang-sound material to a new, emotional roomspace of sound – and there creates an imaginary room.

CD-text Nadine Olonetzky, translation Susanne Aeschliman Transcor

VIDEO STEINFELS     VIDEO INTSCHI     VIDEO SADO      VIDEO RHÔNE

HÖREN Steinfels        HÖREN Intschi     HÖREN Sado      HÖREN Rhône