Sappho fragments

SAPPHO: DESIRE, LOVE UNSUNG

26 May 2023 19:00 Alte Schmiede, Vienna

28 May 2023 19:00 KULTUM [Im Cubus], Graz
, Austria

Sappho Fragments for violin & soprano with electronics

Kaoko Amano (soprano), 
Marianna Oczkowska (violin), 
Tamara Friebel (electronics)

Sponsor: SKE AUSTROMECHANA/Wien

Awakened Flutters” traces the exquisite poetic Ancient Greek fragments of Sappho for Violin & Soprano Duo with Kaoko Amano, (Soprano) & Marianna Oczkowska (Violin), composed by Tamara Friebel over the last few years.


As the British Museum in London describes, “Although little is known for certain about the Greek poet Sappho's life, her poems gave a voice to female desire that still resonates today.”  Her poetry is not just elusive in text, but she has become featured as engravings on ancient clay pots, and she has an enigmatic quality through her representation as an artist.

 Trace back to 600 BC. Sappho, was a poet, who performed, she was not just a singer/songwriter of the ancient world, but she was thought to have composed and performed these works for a group of women.  She is really the only great female poet of Greek antiquity. She was fondly called the 10th muse, the other 9 were simply goddesses. Sappho seemed to be a woman almost divine in her ability to entrance the audiences, so she was given the honorific title of the tenth muse.

 It is known that Sappho favoured the Mixolydian mode. 


 I began with the first fragment, Beauty of the sun, with a central focus around the resonance created by the violin open strings of A and D, which is aggravated by the 5th note of the Greek Mixolydian tonos(diatonic Genus) scale, the Bb, and the voice further sitting on the Ab, hovering around this central point.  This piece is like a fragment sitting on this Greek Mixolydian mode, hovering gently around its whereabouts. The further fragments follow this principle, and can be traced to different modes and various remnants of melodic counterpoint.

 The melodic material weaves between the violin and voice, they are sometimes complementary, other times they offer accompaniment to each other, and sometimes they lose each other, fragments lost in time and space, trying to be sung, here and now.