Made in close collaboration with Anna Jalving

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Credits:

Anna Jalving, Violin

Anna Sofie Keller, Consultant in dramaturgy

Benedikte Borum Engell, Costume

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About:

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As a recurring theme in Matthew's work, he follows the performers he works with as a documentary subject. Their lives inside and outside the music therefore become the material that he composes with. A playful blurring between reality and fiction is often the result but at the core of these works sits a framing of seemingly ignorable, everyday realities as artistic material with a rich and fragile inner life. The collaboration between Matthew and Anna has spanned the birth of Anna's second child.

 

Through intricate musical transcriptions of speech from home movies and conversations that reveal the process of making the work together, the pair investigate what it means for Anna to balance a life as a freelance artist whilst being a mother of two small kids. How can one get lost in music as they used to while there's always the sound of screaming or laughing children only metres away? Is this something to block out or embrace in one's sonic environment?

 

A large part of the musical material in the work takes its starting point in the prologue to Ordo Virtutum, the first ever music dramatic work, written by 12th century composer, mystic and abbess Hildegard of Bingen. We hear the music disfigured through preparations to the violin with multiple layers of different fabrics wrapping the strings. The musical material is gradually revealed in a process that resembles 'finding one's self again' through repetition, the passage of time and an adjustment period. Ordo Virtutum is music that Anna has a special connection to, and during the process of working with Matthew, Anna revealed that, for her, Hildegard simultaneously represents an iconic feminine strength and power whilst also being an intimidating polymath figure that feels impossible to measure up to.

 

Throughout the piece, in a series of absurd reenactments, Matthew grapples with the question "how can I make a piece about motherhood as a man without children and what on Earth have I got myself into by trying to answer this question?". We see Matthew cosplaying as Anna, lipsyncing to her home movies and attempting mothering rituals like diaper changing and breastfeeding but with a violin as a replacement for a nursing infant. Matthew's absurd and futile attempts to fully understand Anna ultimately point towards the impossibility of ever fully capturing a documentary subject. What is left is a blurry amalgam of two individuals (the documentarian, or in this case composer, and the subject, or in this case, the performer).

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The piece was realised with support from Aabne Scene's Residency programme. 

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