Illuminations

Premiere: Saturday, 12. March, 18:00 2022, 60'
Minorite Church Krems, Austria, Imago Dei Festival

March 12 - April 13, 2022
Exhibition - 'Kapitelsaal'

12 voice choir of the Company of Music 
Johannes Hiemetsberger - Conductor,

Sylvie Lacroix - Flute, Michael Moser - Cello, Hannes Schöggl - Percussion

Architecture transformed 
into a meditative choral work

'Illuminations' is a choral work based on the architecture of the Minorite Church in Krems.

Nadja Kayali, the Festival Director of 'Imago Dei' in Austria, approached me with a commission to transform the architecture into sound. As I am trained both as an architect and composer, this was a very natural process for me and I was stimulated by the request. I have always had a symbiosis of these in my mind, as I have spent years studying both simultaneously.

The “image of the goddess” (Imago Deae) floats like a canopy over Tamara Friebel’s Illuminations. Illuminated sounds, substantiated, above all, in the voices of the choir and carried further by mantras and invocations of goddesses’ names, draw contemplations by mystics such as Hildegard von Bingen or Rabi'a al-Adawiya into the Klangraum Krems in the Minorite Church. This space, indeed, is central to the work.

The guideline of the Imago Dei Festival’s commission for the composer was to develop a score based on the architecture of the Minorite Church in Krems, whose musical structures are derived from the specific proportions of the space and translated into a twelve-part choir piece. Latent structures are distilled from the manifest, in the form of the centuries-old church walls, and then transformed into concrete musical material. In this way, the Klangraum Krems in the Minorite Church is cast into a resounding monument.   - Nadja Kayali, Festival Director, Imago Dei

“Take the internal proportions of the church,
Study the inherent structures which were derived centuries ago,
And these studies form a body of language, which can be translated into object formations,
Giving me a deeper understanding of the acoustics of the church, which one may perceive. This forms the compositional language which the sounds then become embodied in.”

Exhibition - 'Kapitelsaal' Krems March 12 - April 13, 2022