"As musicians with a classical background, we have dealt with Erik Satie’s music numerous times over the past years. Satie as an artist is iconic for many musicians today and is considered as one of the pioneers of minimalism, many see an ancestor of ambient music in his music. But this is just one side of Satie and as we started to think about our contribution to this project, we agreed that we would like to dedicate ourselves to other sides of Satie’s highly versatile personality. Satie is not only to be associated with minimalism, Satie is also to be associated with nightlife entertainment, absurdism, dadaism and satire. According to certain sources, Satie could have meant Vexations as an ironic comment to Richard Wagner’s music, or even as a parody of the meaningless virtuosity of the perpetuum mobile genre.
In our version of 40 vexations, we chose to condense contradictory musical elements and styles and layer them into a dense musical collage held together by Satie’s repetitive musical phrases. We used elements of avant-garde, jazz, techno and electroacoustic music, sometime disassembling Satie’s original chords or re contextualising them into new harmonies. This resulted in a piece of extreme contrasts between extremely fragile lines - especially in the voice - and jarring accumulations of sound. To create a special atmosphere, the voice makes uses of breath as an important element of expression beneath digital sound processing. The violin sound runs through several analog and digital effect chains at the same time, which process the sound simultaneously in different ways and at the same time interact with each other. We also had the idea to integrate the bombastic language of Satie’s publications for the “Metropolitan Church of Art of Jesus the Conductor”, a one-man sect Satie had created, into the piece. Satie supposedly composed Vexations in the same period in which he created his one-man sect and we found quotes related to this one-man sect to be a necessary artistic paraphrase of Satie’s affinity for satire and absurdism."
Esther Kretzinger and Georges-E. Schneider, July 2021
Esther Kretzinger was born in the central European region of former Partium and grew up in
Germany. She studied vocal & opera at the Mozarteum University Salzburg (Austria) where she graduated with honors in 2008 and was awarded with the Lilli Lehman Medal by the
international Mozarteum foundation. Meanwhile she is working as an independent singer and
artist. Esther is not only active as a singer, she sees herself as an up-to-date artist who creatively works in different areas and who extensively follows an artistic approach in whatever she is doing. She sees her creative potential not only in her singing voice, she is also highly active as a producer. Since 2014 she has been carrying out various cultural projects as the Weissenhorn Klassik Festival, the Kulturhaltestelle Berlin, and since 2021 also the Giacinto Scelsi Festival Basel. Both as a singer and a producer she dedicates herself to specific topics and narratives and creatively works them up. Her records with Gramola Vienna “Lieder im Volkston” (2011, juxtaposition of german, bohemian and hungarian folk songs) and “Sound of a poem” (2017, jazz arrangements of late-romantic and impressionistic songs) are significant examples of this work. Her objective is to redefine today’s appearance of an artist with multilayered activities and make it fit for the 21st century. She lives and works as a singer and cultural entrepreneur in Berlin, Germany.
As a singer she has been distinguished with many significant awards, among them the first prize at the Bundeswettbewerb Gesang Berlin and other awards at international competitions in Vienna, Graz and Hamburg. These competition successes were followed by extensive
international concert touring and opera productions at the Salzburg State Theatre, Festspielhaus Salzburg, Mainfranken Theater Würzburg and the Norwegian National Opera,
collaborating with conductors as Ivor Bolton, Peter Gülke, Markus Poschner, Ola Rudner,
Sebastian Weigle among others. Throughout nearly 20 years of an intense and versatile career, she has gained a high level of experience, which she is happy to share with future singers and music students. She is subsequently active as a guest teacher in Europe and Asia (China Conservatory of Music in Beijing among others).
Esther’s early career had been shaped by classical repertoire mainly around Mozart and the First Viennese School. Quickly she also turned her attention to 20th and 21st century music that were offering artistic freedom through unusual casts, connection to other art forms and direct contact with present time. Her curiosity led her also to deal with Jazz and free improvising. Meanwhile, Esther’s repertoire choice is stylistically broad, but focuses mainly on pieces for small ensemble or solo pieces that make a special sense when matched together.
Esther - pic by Markus Sepperer
French-Swiss violinist Georges-E. Schneider studied for eight years with the esteemed
pedagogue Ruggiero Ricci at the Mozarteum University of Salzburg, which was followed by a
busy concert life as a soloist, chamber musician and ensemble player throughout Europe and
worldwide. Throughout all this time Georges had showed a strong interest for contemporary
and avant-garde music. Since years now as a sound artist he also deals with electronic music
and searches for new ways of expression with his instrument. In 2018 he completed his expertise in this field in achieving a Max/MSP certification at the IRCAM in Paris. Georges’s
violin playing is highly versatile and stands for avant-garde, jazz, free improvising,
electroacoustic music, ambient, electronic beats and above all for a unique fusion sound that
unites elements of all these music genres in order to create a new way of playing the violin.
The outcome of this work has been presented in several records that have been released
between 2017 and 2020: the ambient albums Assassinous Act (Time Released Sound, Oakland California 2017), Für Immer (Off Record, Brussels 2020) and Vermacht (Mixcult, St. Petersburg 2020) with German music producer Morgen Wurde, the free jazz albums Kontergesang and Rhizome with Udo Schindler/Gunter Pretzel (Creative Sources Recordings, Lisbon, 2019) and the jazz/ classical music fusion album Sound of a poem with vocalist Esther Kretzinger (Gramola, Vienna 2017, also available as a LP). The complete performance of Rajesh Mehta’s skycage at the Moers Festival 2020 was broadcasted live by tv channel ARTE TV, featuring Georges’s violin playing. Georges’s work focuses also on cooperating with visual artists as Marianne Hollenstein (Basel) and the fashion label Finch (Kiew), TOMAK (Vienna) or Albert Weis (Berlin).
Georges has performed in venues including the Tonhalle Zürich, Konzerthaus Berlin,
Konzerthaus Wien, Cadogan Hall London, LSO St. Luke’s, Brucknerhaus Linz, KHS Hall Taipeh, Bâtiment des Forces Motrices Genève, National Concert Hall Dublin, Rudolfinum Prague, New York Metropolitan Museum, Kulturcasino Bern, Kultur- und Kongresszentrum Luzern, amongst others. He has participated in festivals such as Salzburger Festspiele, Bregenzer Festspiele, Wien Modern, Ultraschall Festival Berlin, Salzburg Biennale, Shanghai New Music Week, Traiettorie Festival Parma, Festival Melos Ethos Bratislava, Biennale Koper, Unerhört! (Bayerischer Rundfunk), Festival Dialoge (International Mozarteum Foundation), Carinthischer Sommer, Sounds of Jazz Salzburg, Salzburger Jazzherbst and the Moers Festival.
Georges-Emmanuel - pic by Ruslan Synhaewsky
