Gisela Horat - Erzählen (2023)

Telling a story, gripping the listener, stimulating their imagination is important to me. Seen in this way, the latest work by the Gisela Horat Trio is simply a further development and a step forward with what already exists.
My first idea was to set fairy tales to music. So I thought about which fairy tale appealed to me emotionally very directly and I decided on "Hänsel and Gretel" by the Brothers Grimm. I didn't just want to tell the story musically, I wanted to use the music to capture and express the feelings of the main characters, to give a voice to their despair, loneliness and traumas they had experienced. But even during this first phase, I noticed that that wasn't enough for me. Since improvisation primarily depicts the moment, the fairy tale has changed with every performance and developed a life of its own.
That brought me to the next step and further thoughts. What happens to a story when the individual building blocks or chapters, in this case compositional elements, are swapped and told and acted out in a new order? How does that affect the dynamics, since the compositional elements already contain a message? Our experience was that a common basic mood is maintained. But every time a new, different story emerges, which develops a different dynamic influenced by the moment with every performance.
Based on 9 compositional elements with their titles (on the road; simply sad; inner turmoil; contented, happy?; mother; loneliness; breathless; life; thoughts go round in circles), set in a new, different order, another, new history arise. Christine Stöckli was free to arrange these 9 elements in any order. The two stories “Waldgeist” and “Showing your teeth” can be found on our CD as examples.
«Waldgeist» (track 10) shows very nicely how these 9 elements fit together and how the music is influenced by the narration. In the joint improvisation with the author, Christine Stöckli, the changes and spontaneous dynamics, the mutual influence and reactions in the moment are shown. Interplay between word and sound with lots of fantasy, sensitivity and surprises.
In tracks 1 to 9, the trio plays the 9 compositional elements as individual isolated building blocks so that they can be heard in any order and the listeners can develop their own stories. For the sample story on the CD, the compositional elements are arranged in the same order as in the story “Showing your teeth” by Christine Stöckli. When recording, we had to design the individual elements in such a way that, despite the different meters, keys and time, they could be arranged as desired, fit together and, placed in different sequences, could result in exciting musical dynamics.
The work with compositional elements is just beginning and offers many possibilities for further development and redesign. We want to tell stories, always different and new. With further compositional elements that are inspired by life and thus constantly change our music and broaden its horizons.

Gisela Horat