Silvia Formina

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Silvia Fómina (born October 31, 1962 in Buenos Aires ) is a contemporary Argentinian composer, director and author. She specializes in polyphonic music, microtonality and micro-rhythm. She has lived in Berlin since 1991.

life and work

Silvia Fómina was born in Buenos Aires in 1962 as the daughter of Russian emigrants. She “comes from a peasant family impoverished in the former Soviet Union who emigrated to Argentina at the beginning of this century, who - like so many others - had been able to build a makeshift roof over their heads, but were unable to see their many children themselves feed. ”Silvia was given up for adoption by the affluent bourgeoisie in Buenos Aires. “Although“ the people were very nice to me ”, Silvia Fómina found“ everything in the family too strange ”- and at the age of eleven she ran out of the house, worked in a factory as a child, earned a living: a room , a piano, lessons. ”Between 1978 and 1985 she fought for a musical education. Fortunately escaping arrest during the military dictatorship, Fómina goes into a remote Andean village, spends four years there and “composes for her life”. One day she risks calling her father. He got her a fake passport, which, according to the Argentine proverb - if you misbehave, we'll send you to Berlin. - just emigrated to Berlin. "At some point she somehow hears the name and music of György Ligeti , takes all the courage, packs her manuscripts and drives to Hamburg, shows what she has written so far - and finds an echo, enjoys recognition, wins a sponsor." Ligeti accepted her as a private student in composition in Hamburg and worked with him for well over ten years.

Fómina was among other things a prize winner of the Portuguese competition to promote cultural exchange, winner of the first prize of the International Vienna Composition Competition under Claudio Abbado (1991) and a finalist of the International Gaudeamus Music Week in Amsterdam; In addition, she received scholarships from the Rotary Club and the DAAD. In 1993, Silvia Fómina won the Munich Academy of Arts Prize, which was awarded to her in 1993 by the Ernst-von-Siemens Foundation for her research in the field of instrumental microtonous composition.

In 1994 she worked as artist-in-residence, first in Woodside , then in Saratoga (California) , in 1997 first in Peterborough (New Hampshire), then again in Saratoga, 2017 in Winterthur ( Villa Sträuli ), and 2018 in Solothurn . In California she met Jonathan Treitel , a physicist, the son of Jewish emigrants; He is the main author of the opera Shah Mat , which was written over several years and into which her Seven Vespers (1990 ff.) flow.

The opera Sha Mat

Preliminary stages of this opera are chamber versions, so-called “miniatures”, as independent pieces (including the Overture and Endspiel in Witten 2000). Travels to Africa, to the pygmies of the Central African rainforest, and later to Thailand and Bali, formed the basis of fóminas previously obtained from music ethnological research in Paris. Far from “folkloric” imitations, rather to gain a “multidimensional continuity”, determined by the polyrhythmic superimposition of different patterns.

Three-dimensional music

“Fômina is no ordinary composer, as one might say of Mozart or Beethoven. Your compositions have or create a multidimensional form. "I spatialize the music, that means I have a three-dimensional idea of ​​sounds." When their compositions are performed, everyone has their own space, both musicians in the orchestra and the audience. "This explicit placement creates a multidimensional shape, sounds spread at different heights in a room and over different distances."

Solo cello

Fominas work solo cello provides a variety of ways for interference with speaker sounds. It slowly asserts itself against these. In the fourth movement (“ethereal”) it exposes the nerve strands of the original material, tiny, thin overtone threads that become even finer towards the end and lead to a “nothing” from the five-fold pianissimo, which is then followed by “Silenzio assoluto” for fifteen seconds . “This work is dedicated to the Absent Generation, the generation of young intellectuals (in the best creative sense) with whom I grew up in Argentina and who should have appeared and expressed themselves after the nightmare of terror and death under the military government from 1976 to 1983 . Persecuted, silenced, censored, tortured, shot and wiped out generation. I pay this homage to those who have disappeared and to the deep emptiness, the silence and the absence of their works, with clenched fists and clenched teeth. With closed eyes."

Works

  • Im Halbdunkel (1990) for 12 strings or quartet with tape.
  • Expulsion. Désagrégation. Dispersion (Berlin, 1992) for violoncello and tape.
  • Permanenza (1994) for micropolyphonic orchestra distributed in the room.
    • I - chronons
    • II - Unstable equilibria
    • III - Above water
  • Auguri Aquae , sound movement for voices and orchestra (Donaueschingen Festival, 1997)
  • Shah Mat , Opera (first performance in Stuttgart 1999, further performances: Witten, Madrid, commissioned by the Salzburg Festival)

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c The time.
  2. ^ Akademie Schloss Solitüde: Silvia Fómina. Retrieved October 3, 2018 .
  3. ^ A b Yvonne Aregger (Solothurner Zeitung): Argentinian guest artist in love with Solothurn. August 31, 2018, accessed October 3, 2018 .
  4. ↑ From the score of the work, quoted according to the time.
personal data
SURNAME Fómina, Silvia
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Fómina Cotignola, Silvia
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Argentine composer
DATE OF BIRTH October 31, 1962
PLACE OF BIRTH Buenos Aires