PROGRAM NOTE & PREMIERE HISTORY

“Architecture transformed into a meditative choral work”

The “image of the goddess” (Imago Deae) floats like a canopy over Tamara Friebel’s Illuminations. Illuminated sounds, substantiated, above all, in the voices of the choir and carried further by mantras and invocations of goddesses’ names, draw contemplations by mystics such as Hildegard von Bingen or Rabi'a al-Adawiya into the Klangraum Krems in the Minorite Church. This space, indeed, is central to the work by Tamara Friebel, who, after studies in composition with Chaya Czernowin and architecture with Zaha Hadid, is currently pursuing her postdoctoral research at the Institute of Mathematics at the University of Graz.

The guideline of the Imago Dei Festival’s commission for the composer was to develop a score based on the architecture of the Minorite Church in Krems, whose musical structures are derived from the specific proportions of the space and translated into a twelve-part choir piece. Latent structures are distilled from the manifest, in the form of the centuries-old church walls, and then transformed into concrete musical material. In this way, the Klangraum Krems in the Minorite Church is cast into a resounding monument.