Music and Language
Cornelius Schwehr, Alistair Zaldua · Contemporary Music Review · 2020
My work (in all genres) is principally informed and guided by the question of what we can learn from our tradition and which elements from the tradition can still be identified and experienced as alive and relevant. These questions are not trivial: as I understand it, they address the crux of composition. Even though it is not important to seek conclusions, it is necessary to insist on posing these questions again and again. In addition, I have become increasingly aware of the relationship between music and language (both spoken and written) in my work and research. I have been preoccupied with this theme since I began to compose. More recently my principal concerns are to take a word—which is already a unit that comprises of sound and meaning—and combine it with its associated speech sound, and take an understanding of speech sound at its word, and finally, amidst this interplay, to expose the music and allow it to be set free.