Bouque, SWR Experimentalstudio, GrauSchumacher, Saviet: Manoury, Sheehan

Program Notes

Kelley Sheehan
O Maria (2026)

Always present is the voice; not as an ideal of expression, but as something porous. A single throat, a single string, becomes the site where one is possessed, contorted, and muddied from within. Through amplification and physical mediation, the work exposes how the manifested voice can exceed or resist the body that produces it. At the center of the piece, however, is an intrusion.

O Maria emerged through ongoing conversations between Ty and me, shaped in close collaboration during workshops at SWR Freiburg. Fragments of those sessions remain embedded in the performance setup itself: the violin, the score, the physical traces of experimentation.

Philippe Manoury
Le temps, mode d’emploi (2014)

Le temps, mode d’emploi is a large musical fresco on various ways to express time. Contemplative or active time, delayed or real time, continuous or discontinuous, smooth or pulsed, suspended, revisited, circular, diffracted . . . physical or musical time but also psychic time. Time is not just a repository containing our lives, actions, and perceptions; it can have its own structure, a sort of envelope which puts a mark on us. Music was always the best way to express that, much better than any other medium. Before having written a single note, I decided to work based on these modes of temporal organization. The two pianos are surrounded by four virtual pianos and a very complex system of sound synthesis, signal processing, and spatialization. Composed in eight sections, which are linked and responding to each other, the work covers fifty-eight minutes.