Samir Odeh-Tamimi / Wolfgang Rihm

Roaï comes from the Arabic word roaïa and means early morning dreams, which, in Arabic mythology, these are defined as divine messages about things that could happen. Kron is the abbreviation of the Greek word Krónos (Saturn). Roaïkron denotes a Saturnian message. Gigantic rings consisting of an enormous number of individual small chunks of material orbit the planet Saturn. The size of these particles ranges from dust particles to a diameter of several metres. The particles can be seen as musical elements, as an accumulation of recurring rhythmic formations and the different tone colours of the percussion instruments, produced by fur, iron, wood and so on. At a certain point in the work, the musicians leave their positions. With hand drums, they wander through the room and through the audience, taking their own rhythmic structures and fragments of speech with them, freely chosen aleatorically from the composed material.

Samir Odeh-Tamimi

Tutuguri. Le rite du soleil noir is a poem by Antonin Artaud written to be read on the radio, born of the experience of his journey to Mexico in 1936. This poem and Artaud’s psychedelic experience inspired Wolfgang Rihm to write Tutuguri. Poème dansé (1980-1982), a full-length ballet for orchestra, chorus, magnetic tape and narrator. This large-scale work consists of six independent parts, whose last section, Tutuguri VI (Kreuze), is solely for percussion instruments. The subtitle, Kreuze, is a reference to the final part of the poem, in which Artaud metaphorically cries out “L’ABOLITION DE LA CROIX” on paper. The six percussionists are arranged in the performance space in a semicircle. Rihm’s writing proceeds with massive sound blocks alternating with moments of sparse gestures and of repetitive rhythmic elements. The result is a hypnotic, primordial music that ruthlessly overrides all attempts at linguistic mediation and sound formalism in an urgence to communicate via the most atavistic experience of sound perception.