Seiltanz - Karin Wetzel

In Seiltanz (“tightrope-dance”), Wetzel explores tension, balance and precariousness - not in a literal narrative sense, but through musical parameters of tempo, meter and ensemble interplay. The work is linked to the research project Polytempo at the Zürcher Hochschule der Künste, which investigates technologies and strategies for synchronising performers and enabling independent but interrelated tempi.

From the opening bars we confront a horizontal network of overlapping lines: each saxophone part moves at its own pace, suggesting a walking gesture on a thin rope, always alert to imbalance, always leaning into the next step. Against this surface, small bursts of rhythmic acceleration and deceleration occur, evoking the micro-adjustments of a walker shifting weight, breathing, regaining stability.

Instrumental colour plays a telling role. The quartet’s voices are used not only for range but for contrast of register and timbral weight. Wetzel utilises multiphonics, key-clicks, altissimo sweeps and subtle dynamic fluctuations so as to widen the field of the saxophone beyond “just notes”. In doing so she invites the listener to inhabit the space of the performer, where sound is as much physical presence and effort as it is pitch and rhythm.

The work unfolds in roughly seven minutes of continuous motion. The temporal structure is not overtly sectional; rather it steers through phases of increasing instability and resolution: steady walking gives way to shimmering micro-tempo divergences, culminating in a vertiginous moment where the four parts oscillate between distinct pulse groups before coalescing into a more unified - but still delicate - alignment. One might think of the final moment as the quartet having reached the other side of the rope, and pausing in silence or near-silence, restored yet changed.

For performers the piece demands both precision and freedom: each part must track its own curve of tempo while remaining aware of the collective horizontal plane. The listener’s focus is pulled between the individual threads and the aggregate pattern: at times we focus on a single saxophone, at others on the shimmering cluster. In that sense the piece invites active listening and physical awareness, as though one were walking the rope oneself.

In short, Seiltanz offers an aural metaphor of risk and equilibrium, of individual striving and communal co-dependence.

(Program note by Don-Paul Kahl)

EBM Performance Record:

2023:
19 October 2023 - Berlin, Germany - SoundPlasma Festival