Dorothee Schabert’s compositional perspective was one I took a lot of inspiration from. While the palette was seemingly austere, but the longer you listened, it resembled the act of walking, to me. Contemplative, existing on the boundary between neutral and emotive. ‘Nachklang I Padjelanta’, a 2023 piece named for a hiking trail in Sweden and performed by Ensemble Resonanz, was particularly striking.
Schabert stated that “Hiking through Lapland sets many inner processes going”, enabling you to “recover the distance gained between body and mind.” In relation to my initial conceptual explorations of walking practices, and the extensive computer-brain time required on this course, I felt this keenly. She encouraged listening to the tone and structure of the landscape, walking step by step. The sound of memory in landscape and being therein.
Quite simply, Schabert summarised “we create our landscape out of what we perceive.” Naturally, we often block out what doesn’t fit into the picture, coloured and modified by our mood and culminating in artworks. I thought it interesting that my essay examines this same tension, a creation of landscape versus the curiously sound studies-specific ethical concerns about representing the environment in an untouched way. In Schabert’s view, perhaps ‘landscape’ can be a construct that we arrange and organise in the artmaking process. That a sonic landscape can be interpreted musically by the artist.
I think in many ways, her thinking aligns with mine. As I have discovered in researching and writing my essay about soundwalking, which has many overlapping concerns surrounding humanity’s place in the landscape, this debate can be bottomless. Schabert’s clarity and simplicity in detailing her position was immensely refreshing, I felt a dawning recognition as her talk progressed. Perhaps, if there is space or time to include it, I could refer to this lecture in the essay. Compositionally, I think her lecture has helped assuage a great deal my own concerns surrounding music in the sound art sphere.
Her unfinished or unreleased piece, The Dying Apple Tree, was very intriguing. While the processing, simple time-stretching, was a little transparent, the way she used field recordings to form a narrative is something I wish to explore in greater detail moving forward.