Tenerenmente – World Premiere

Posted on

On Monday, September 8, at 20h, the pianist Moritz Ernst will play the world premiere of Sandeep Bhagwati’s three movement work “Tenerenmente” for prepared piano [ca.21 min].

This will be part of Concert&Discussion in the off-Beethovenfest Bonn, in the PostTower Lounge. Platz der Deutschen Post 1, 53113 Bonn. Free Entry.

Tenerenmente
Three memorials for prepared piano
1.) Stele
2.) Mneme
3.) Nerve

“tener en mente” in Spanish means “to keep in mind” – and the three movements of this work all, in different ways, engage with memory: in “Stele”, the memorial stone, music and life inscribe themselves deeper and deeper by each moment into a hard, inflexible pulse – and thereby transforms it. In “Mneme” (also the name of the antique Greek muse of memory), we encounter a melos and the impossibility of re-living it unchanged – it eludes us and thereby gives rise to new sensations. In “Nerve”, finally, memory is like a raw nerve: Even the most desperate attempts to cover it up with activism, inventiveness and new perspectives – fail. The thing that bothers us will simply not go away into oblivion.

The prepared piano embodies the ambivalence between memory and forgetting: half of its strings are prepared, making them sound different, alien, elusive, dry. They create, around the familiar and present piano sounds, a realm of shadows and potentialities – the forgotten, the remembered, the never realized.

Each of these three movements also is dedicated to some of my private artistic “heroes”, by creating a blurry memory of their musical language. “Stele” is for John Cage and Merce Cunningham, “Mneme” for my teacher Wilhelm Killmayer, and “Nerve” for Zakir Hussain and Shivkumar Sharma