For fans of: Arvo Pärt, Hildur Guðnadóttir, Ryuichi Sakamoto, Olafur Arnalds, Jóhann Jóhannsson, Nils Frahm, Max Richter.
''Preludes'' is the first glimpse into Wolfgang Von Maia's fascinating approach to classical music. The 5 compositions reunited here - a preview of his upcoming album - show a composer doing what few, if any, classical composers have ever done: finding his voice through others' voices.
As he aptly describes it: ‘’(In my approach) the composer becomes an instrument that channels the sounds of the world into a composition. You let the sounds used speak for you instead of you speaking for them. The compositions become sonic manifestations of the universe. Composing becomes the art of conjuring miracles, sound miracles.''
''Preludes'' is out on Feburary 3
***
When we think of music composition, we often think of a laborious activity compromising precise specifications. Yet, there are rare cases -as rare as shooting starts - in which a composition can be meaningful without the need of such specifications. If a spontaneous and meaningful composition is a miracle, then Wolfgang von Maia is conjurer of miracles.
Wolfgang's journey began at age 4, when his beloved grandmother and sole carer 'Mimi' taught him how to play piano. For the next 10 years it seemed as if he would become a piano concertist, until one day his grandmother suddenly died in a traffic accident. Devastated, he stopped playing music altogether. ''Music became a source of pain'' he said of this period.
For the next 5 years he embarked on a self-destructive path that would lead to a near-death experience: after getting into a fight with a gang, he was left unconscious in the middle of nowhere. When he finally woke up, he realized that a nun was taking care of him. After 2 weeks at the nuns' commune, he began attending their singing sessions. It was here that Wolfgang encountered the healing power of music.
''I could stay until late at night or wake up very early in the morning just to listen to the nuns sing and pray. I would cry and cry while listening to them, sometimes all day and all night. I felt as if I was crying what I had not cry in so many years. I did not know it back then, but their voices healed me like nothing else could have''.
The key moment for Wolfgang’s return to music came when the nuns were asked by their superiors to record their songs and prayers in ''Machine prayers'', portable plastic boxes - similar to transistor radios - that play prayers and music loops for meditation. While toying with the recordings, Wolfgang noticed that, by playing many recordings at the same time, he could create an entirely new piece with a whole range of sonic possibilities unforeseeable at the initial moment of the recording. This became the spark that ignited Wolfgang's musical imagination. ''What if you could create classical compositions in the same way, not by writing notes on the music sheet, but simply by manipulating the audio of the recordings?''.
He spent the next years perfecting the art of what he dubbed ''sound manipulation'', a form of meta-composition whose raw materials were sounds from all sorts of sources, including other peoples’ compositions. ''Composing through audio manipulation became a transforming experience. It freed me from the rusted chains that my classical education had left. It gave me the opportunity to compose pieces that were not just unexpected and aesthetically exciting in their inception, but also emotionally powerful and existentially meaningful when engaging with them.''
''Preludes'' is the first glimpse into Wolfgang's fascinating approach to classical music. The 5 compositions reunited here - a preview of his upcoming album - show a composer doing what few, if any, classical composers have ever done: finding his voice through other peoples’ voices. As he aptly describes it: ‘’the composer becomes an instrument that channels the sounds of the world into a composition. You let the sounds used speak for you instead of you speaking for them. The compositions become sonic manifestations of the universe. Composing becomes the art of conjuring miracles, sound miracles.''
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