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General

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Aria and Fughetta after Bach

During the last days I made a three-part keyboard arrangement of the final aria Drum schließ ich mich in deine Hände from Johann Sebastian Bach’s motet Komm, Jesu, komm, BWV 229. This aria is one of my all-time favourite chorale settings: It features cadences in no less than five different scale degrees and culminates in a marvellously ornated concluding melisma. The Baroque lyrics by Paul Thymich figure as a deeply touching embodiment of poetic devotion to the creator in the face of death—and this is why I chose to perform the music at my grandmother’s funeral earlier this week. Subsequently, I replenished the composition with a brief fughetta on the subject of the aria’s first line. Hope you won’t mind the sad occasion of its genesis and enjoy the piece anyway.

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Panacademic Teaching

A challenging hybrid semester at Robert Schumann Hochschule Düsseldorf has begun. There is a sustainable hygiene concept which allows most of my classes in analysis, basic elements of composition, and aural skills to be held face-to-face. In addition, I offer an elementary music theory seminar which features a dual approach. Some 70 freshmen in the musicology minor at Heinrich Heine Universität Düsseldorf will either attend classroom teaching in three groups of 15, or take part in an asynchronous online lecturing programme with a choice of Teams and Moodle coursework and an additional OER tutorial. This construction will enable everyone to earn the desired credits during this term. However, should the governmental measures of infection prevention be extended to universities once again, we might be obliged to move all classes online—I am confident that there will be appropriate solutions for all courses and exams.

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Changing Chanting Chances

After one year of deprivation of active vocal practice, I have finally found a new choir. Vokalsystem Berlin, a youthful and ambitious ensemble led by my dear colleague Johannes David Wolff, accepted me as a new member. What a delightful perspective to perform music by Maurice Duruflé, Anders Edenroth, Eric Whitacre, Ola Gjeilo, and Yannick Wittmann soon! Hope it will turn out to happen as intended.

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GMTH Board Membership

Yesterday I was elected as a board member of Gesellschaft für Musiktheorie, the professional association of German-speaking music theory. My areas of responsibility are lobbying for the freelance academic teaching staff in music theory and ear training, as well as to support the international activities of the GMTH. If you want to address any of the aforementioned topics, please feel free to get in touch! I look forward to collaborating with my fellow board members, Florian Edler, Sigrun Heinzelmann, Thomas Wozonig, Julia Deppert-Lang, Hans Aerts, and Derek Remeš, during the next two years.

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Diversity of Voices

I have always found it fascinating that there is no direct correlation between a singer’s visual appearance, sexual identity, role identity on stage, voice type, and tessitura. Isn’t it wonderful that the shades of the human voice are just as diverse as the varieties of human gender, age, and ethnicity? Anything is possible in that transcendent continuum of phoniatric functionality. In my opinion, the utter beauty of a voice comes from the multitude of influences that it is affected by. The more the aesthetic and physical preconditions intermingle, the more captivating the result.