Robert Schumann Hochschule Düsseldorf

Poem for 7 Arms

The composer Dieter Schnebel (1930–2018) wrote the cycle of character-based music between 1986–89. It consists of six so-called poems with the following intention:

“These are, so to speak, body poems in which individual and specific limbs carry out simple movements, in a strictly temporal structure. Thus, here gestures are simultaneously structured time, and the poems represent images of time. Generally more sporadic, the vocal actions accompany the gestures, run in parallel, comment on it, set countering accents to it and form counterpoints, but also materialize the meter and have a symbolic quality themselves. All in all a work consisting of musicalized signs with pictorial sounds. The six poems form a cycle.”

Visual production:
Based on its more modern musical form and notation, this piece attempts to keep the agogic shifting of the lighting and set design as minimalistic as possible in order to create a feeling of experimentation in a highly concentrated form in the post-production through the use of montage and visual effects. Yannick Benavides was responsible for implementation.

The Poem for 7 Arms project was created between June 2019 and February 2020 and supervised by Prof. Enrique Sánchez Lansch (Music and Audiovisual Media), Prof. Dagmar Birwe (Classical Music Recording) and Prof. Wolfgang Rüdiger (Music Education).