Creation: 23 october 1994 at the Autumn festival, Bonn, DE
Musicians: 6 percussionnists
Duration: 11′
Publishing: Bote Bock
” Water in itself does not exist. One conception of water is a river, another is a puddle, a third is rain. The four natural elements: earth, water, fire and air take on their full meaning with the fifth element: the spirit “Wolf Kahlen. Rain takes on very different forms and is, like all other natural elements, an “innocent dependency”, just as it is dependent on non-materialised noise. Rain creates sound, only the mind can record it through acoustic perception. The mind can imagine sounds without hearing them… What a marvellous suspended moment, like a foreboding rain. How close is the sound, produced by the rhythms of percussion instruments. Both (sound and rhythms) inspired by the imagination of the mind. Different elements blend inseparably together down to the smallest detail, to become one sound, in its own right. Listening to music or rain, a process in time, time inhabited by numbers, like music.
A piece for 6 musicians – 6, the absolute number, because it is the sum as much as the product : 1+2+3 and 1x2x3. It is also the product of the first male (3) and the first female (2) digits, whose sum is the indivisible 5. This play with numbers in the mathematical and poetic sense (e.g. interpretation of their polarities) becomes audible time in the most varied relations between sounds, dense or almost naked, strong, soft, interrupted by silence, calm… like the imperceptible beginning of a rain”.
Annette Schlünz