My interest in voice draws me into the area between music and language. An area which I see as the coast between words and music, where the grain of language and the fluidity of sound converge. I have wandered in this area since 1995 and my interest has been:

  • exploring the simultaneity of sound and meaning within the words in text only works like colline sur livre. Here sound and meaning are inextricable interwoven.

  • exploring the intersections of sound and meaning in the interplay with an instrument. Here the e-pont serves as a bridge between pure sound and voice, allowing shades of transparency and occlusion of one or the other.

  • exploring the relation between words and music through text-scores and oral transmission. Here words serve as a medium to convert ideas that can not be described otherwise.

 

colline sur livre (2023 - )

Colline sur livre is an ongoing work to observe and suss the intersections, overlays and dimensions between words and music on the basis of the growing text-corpus colline sur livre. This process is facilitated by a lute and cableless mini-set of electronics, a device that I call e-pont, because it serves as a bridge between words and music.

wippe (2025)

text-publication with Verlag Klingental, Basel, an editor, that features works in the intersection between words and music.

Aus dem Zeltbuch (2023)

was created in co-authorship with cellist Deborah Walker as a related counterpart and to be played in a programme with Eliane Radigue‘s OCCAM RIVER XXIV.
In the area between music and langage Aus dem Zeltbuch is the incarnation of langage in speaking voice.
The piece unfolds a surface of words-sounds textures in low dynamics on the edge of acoustic intelligibility. This work is questioning the perception of language in a musical context by creating bilingual areas of sound. As words and sounds are superimposed they may unclose a sounding path through narration, meaning and understandibility. extract

a day in july (2023)

co-composition with Stefan Thut
Marianne Schuppe, voice & text
Stefan Thut, cello, pipe, pencil and paper

entrevoix I (2024)

was developed for the duo with singer Stefanie Erni. A list of words in german, english and french serves as a subterrainian element shaping the sounds of the singers without becoming intelligible.

Salz, Lücke, Zelt (2019)

for 8 mixed voices
commissioned by Ensemble Voce, Basel,

slow songs - nosongs (2015 / 2018)

solo voice with lute and e-ponts

der blumen ( 2017)

for any number of voices

notes from the hill (2015/2019)

for voice and one instrument

temps ( 1998)

commissioned by Schweizer Tonkünsterverein

wandern (1995)

co- composition with Willy Daum