It's easy enough to imagine how a composer might aim for the sublime within a cultural and music framework that allows for a full, lush exploitation of familiar melodic devices. But what do you do when you're a composer writing in the latter half of the twentieth century and those same devices--indeed, familiar notions of tonality--have become problematized (to use an ungainly word from literary theory)? How does one evoke from the human voice something approximating a (postmodern) sublime?
Heaven knows I'm no connoisseur of contemporary works for vocal ensembles. But a couple of tracks have been figuring prominently in my music rotation these last few days and they certainly seem germane to such questions. Oddly enough, they are both from movie soundtracks. The first is from Jürgen Kneiper's soundtrack to Der Himmel über Berlin [Wings of Desire, directed by Wim Wenders in 1989] and the second is a piece by György Ligeti's featured in 2001: A Space Odyssey [Stanley Kubrick, 1968].
Here's a 30-second clip from the piece by Knieper:
Heaven knows I'm no connoisseur of contemporary works for vocal ensembles. But a couple of tracks have been figuring prominently in my music rotation these last few days and they certainly seem germane to such questions. Oddly enough, they
are both from movie soundtracks. The first is from Jürgen Kneiper's soundtrack to Der Himmel über Berlin [Wings of Desire, directed by Wim Wenders in 1989] and the second is a piece by György Ligeti's featured in 2001: A Space Odyssey [Stanley Kubrick, 1968].
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