CRUELLY COY
S A B I N A M E Y E R - SOPRANO
Live Performance for voice&video
Music by B E R I O, S C E L S I, C A G E, E I S L E R
Single screen video projection by T H E O E S H E T U
I came in contact with Scelsi’s music in 2003 when I started to study with Michiko Hirayama: 
to sculpture, to chisel, to explore in and around the musical material of the score. The naked voice comes to expression through minimal shifting of quarter tones alternating with very large intervals which conducts the sound in different areas of resonance. This provokes a high richness in timbre and colour, as if the score would be a kind of indication of movement through space and inside of the singer’s body.
There are no significant words, there is no story to tell through verbal comunication. The syllables are like invocations . . . magic formulas, so the singer is pushed to invent a subterranean tale which can be deducted through the alternation of density and rarefaction, vehemence and abandonment of the timbre. This behaviour has strictly to do with improvisation, improvisation which originated in fact this music.
Sequenza III spurs me to explore the combination of my emotional colours in relationship to the different contemporary grammars: all the resources around the timbre systemized in a gesture of continous transformation up to a very strict organization of time and space.
John Cage's visual score traces signs and colours whose rigorous organization was the first to be discovered. The interpreters body is going to be transformed in a soundbox which evokes ten different personalities. The black squares between the coloured lines indicate not to sing but to make noise. Rather than the human noise, I’ve been attracted by the mechanical sound of everyday life objects which interact with the vocal parts.
Finally two “songs” treated in an unconventional way: Trois poèmes d’amour by Erik Satie, proposed for voice and toy piano; the voice has been recorded after the instrumental part, and Hanns Eislers Ueber den Selbstmord arranged for voice and electronics. The noise parts have been added independently from the vocal recordings.