Exploring the Sonic Landscape of Elisabeth Schimana's „Virus"

Insights of a musician’s perspective

Background on “Virus”: Short explanation of the piece. Personal Experience: I’ve had the privilege of engaging with “Virus” for over a decade, performing it in various configurations, from solo to large ensembles. This experience has offered me a unique perspective on performing music without a traditional score, relying instead on auditory cues. Preparation and Performance: I’d like to provide a brief overview of how “Virus” is prepared and performed:

• Instrument Selection: The process begins with selecting in my case: percussion instruments that complement the preselected electronic sounds. • Improvisation and Exploration: experimentation process with these sounds together with Elisabeth, exploring their possibilities and limitations to find a suitable musical structure.

• Rehearsal: This stage involves honing the technical and interpretative aspects of the performance and getting used to the concert venue and the usually new sound of the new speakers • Performance: The concert itself is a culmination of this preparation, characterized by the flexibility and excitement of live interaction with Elisabeth through the audioscore.

Discussion on Audioscore: 1. Comparison with Visual Scores 2. Comparison with improvising 3. Challenges and Opportunities 4. Perfection and Tension in Performance Experiment: To give you a taste of this experience, I propose a short experiment with all participants of the workshop 3 groups with at least 2 persons 3 different sounds (beep, summ, sssss) Person 1 is giving the audio cue to person 2! Person 2 tries to anticipate when the sound will come and tries to imitate the sound as good as possible. All 3 groups perform together.