Description
Raven Mantra was composed in Berlin between 9th September and 30th October 2012. The score neither sets nor expresses anything of Poe’s most famous poem, but represents the poetic text itself: a ‘meditation’ (as the sutitle calls it) in the Hindu-Buddhist manner on the mystical qualities of its atomized consonants, vowels, and diphthongs, entirely divorced from semantic context. In The Raven, the atavistic fascination with the purely phonetic elements of human utterance, often bordering on tautology or nonsense, lacks only the crowning reductio ad absurdum – a final liberation of Poe’s word-music into the realm of sheer sound, sheer noise. this, Raven Mantra attempts to bring about, in strict adherence to a meticulously devised system of correspondences or ‘method of projection’, explained in detail below.
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