Whispers (for ensemble)

Composed by Maya Verlaak, mayaverlaak.com/
Whispers (for solo piano) rewritten for the Belgian HERMES ensemble, performed 6 February 2025 at De Singel, Antwerp, Belgium
More information:
In 2022, York-based pianist Kate Ledger contacted me with the idea of ​​working together on a new project. At the very beginning of this collaboration, she inspired me to think about the physical awareness of a musician during a performance. I therefore set myself the task of thinking about how she can physically feel the compositional process so that it requires her full embodiment to shape the sound.
Kate begins the performance by pressing a foot pedal to activate a pitch. She hears this pitch through headphones and also feels it as an extremely low pitch via a bass shaker attached to her left leg. She then sings this pitch and immediately after singing, she sees the pitch appear as a white dot on a black computer screen. She then continues to inhale to cause a second white dot to appear, emerging from the first dot. The second dot moves upwards with her inhalation, and this moving dot is also simultaneously felt as a low vibration via a second bass shaker attached to her right leg. After inhaling and raising the second pitch/dot to its maximum position, Kate exhales to bring the pitch back down. She can then choose a position for the pitch/dot on the screen by stopping her breath at any time. When she positions the second dot, she feels the interval between the two pitches/dots as low vibrations in her left and right legs. Her next task is to guess the pitch of the second white dot (which she positioned with her breath) and her only reference point is the sung note (the first dot). She plays her chosen pitch on the piano and the self build interactive computer application compares the played pitch to the pitch of the second dot. It then calculates an incorrect harmonic series in exact proportion to how far she was from the actual pitch. In response to this sound, Kate then plays a chord that leads either toward or away from the sound. Each time she repeats this process, she builds up more (incorrect) harmonic series for the specific notes she plays. The goal of the performance is not to guess the notes correctly, but to create a sound world of her own, to shape the sound of the piano and at the same time to have full insight into the construction of the composition. As Kate carefully shapes her sound world, the black computer screen slowly turns white, making the white dots less clear and until they disappear and Kate can only rely on feeling the notes in her legs. At that final stage of the performance, the full embodiment is complete and Kate can choose to stop the performance. The performance can be listened to here: mayaverlaak.ba...
In 2024, I was asked to rewrite Whispers for the HERMESensemble in Antwerp. I reflected on Kate's various solo performances and decided to reconsider two important parameters: the tempo of the performance and the ultimate goal of the performance. The tempo of Kate's performance is very slow because she needs time to sing, breathe in and out to position a note, play a note, listen attentively and play a response to the harmonics. In the rewritten version of Whispers for the HERMESensemble, not one, but two musicians take on the inhale and exhale roles. This not only doubles the tempo of the process, but also creates two different sound worlds. The ensemble is divided into two groups, one group supported and led by the clarinetist and a second group supported and led by the flautist. The groups respond to the sound worlds created by the wind players; in a similar but more complex way as in the solo piano version. The false harmonics are now not only built up from the sound of one instrument, but are triggered by the sound of one instrument (the winds) and processed/developed/shifted to be harmonics of the supporting group. The supporting group will carefully listen to the harmonics and respond to them. The goal for the musicians is to bring together the two sound worlds that emerge from the two groups in the ensemble. The bass shakers that Kate had to tie to her legs, are in the ensemble version a score for the percussionist, the pitch intervals between both shakers are translated by the percussionist into rhythmic intervals.
This performance has no conventional score, the score consists of clear rules in text form, a self-build live interactive computer application and listening instructions. This way the musicians are more aware of the structure, have full insight into the compositional process, the musical relationships, what their individual roles are and how they should interact with each other to create the desired outcome.

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