• Work category: Voice and other instruments
• First performed: 2008, Gamla kyrkogården, Uppsala
• Duration: Approx. 40-50 min

Instrumentation

Voice, theremin and live electronics

Description of work

Litanies in Zero Kelvin is an improvised piece and no pre-recorded music is allowed. So says my muse and she scares me just enough to have me obey.
The central theme is death, the final state of … Read moreentropy. Death has never held any intrinsic meaning to me, but there are bound to be at least a few spiritual mysteries involved in any attempted rapprochement with old man le Mort. The songs I use in Litanies are not strictly speaking sacred, though their intentions are often just that – old Russian folk songs and old English ballads. The imageries of the words, but also the cosmologies which inspired these songs, have moved and terrified me since the day I learned to sing them.
James Joyce’s one hundred letters of The Fall are a natural choice as facilitators of the transition from the old and familiar to the new and incomprehensible. Collapse

Links

http://girilal.org/litanies.html
https://clinicalarchives.blogspot.com/2010/04/ca370-girilal-baars-litanies-in-zero.html

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