“The beauty of writing music,” says Claudia Molitor, “is that your audience is made out of people with brains that can’t help but try to find connections. Because that’s what we do: we try to find patterns, we try to find connections. We are connection-making machines.”
Just getting a handle on who Molitor is as an artist is one such act of connection-making. Yes, certain qualities across all her work – a lightness of touch, an alchemy of humour and meticulous research, a devotion to handicraft – give it a consistent character. But equally, her methods and choices of media mean that she evades easy pigeonholing. She defines herself principally as a composer, but as well as the more familiar areas of installation, soundwalk and video, her work broadens that definition into henna tattoos, tactile scores woven from knotted string, embroidery and even eating (the remarkable 10 mouth installations is a set of instructions for ways to consume combinations of popping candy, pretzel sticks and pumpkin seeds).
In celebration of her fiftieth birthday this year, hcmf// will feature three pieces by the German-born British composer: a solo performance as part of hcmf// shorts; the thirty-minute In Den Träumen for piano and soundtrack, commissioned and performed by Zubin Kanga (in its first live performance); and Fever, a new work for the eight trumpets of Marco Blaauw’s Monochrome Project. In the context of Molitor’s output, all three are relatively straightforward concert pieces; the only senses they engage directly are hearing and, to a lesser extent, sight. Yet they nevertheless cover characteristically wide ground (and in any case, Molitor views sound as tactile medium). The available recording of In Den Träumen reveals a work that glides effortlessly from pianistic arpeggiation to field recordings to techno to unaccompanied pop song. And Fever employs the irresistible sound of eight trumpets to explore encounters of hope and despair that conjure both ancient rituals and contemporary challenges. Finally, the composer’s shorts performance will be a specially devised mash-up of work from the last five years, including songs from her Have You Ever CD, released on nonclassical in 2022, an extract from her installation Listen To My World (2021), and pieces of film from other projects.
The way in which pieces like these construct continuity and coherence from chains of difference and disparity is essential to Molitor’s conception of her work, and of its relationship to life. Sonorama (2014), an app designed to accompany the train ride from London to Margate, imagines the journey through the Kent countryside as a psychogeographic musical score that embraces Roman history, hop-picking, visual culture and the oil industry. Clearly, there are political dimensions to this plurality of vision as well as aesthetic ones. A piece like Listen To My World, for example – which exists as a website, audio-visual installation and book – not only seeks to tell peoples’ experiences of inclusion or exclusion but also to show how listening to others’ experiences of space can make us more empathetic towards one another. “That’s how being alive is,” the composer says. “In the UK you can go out of the house and it’s nice and warm, and two hours later you’re completely soaked! Life isn’t something that develops logically in the way that we’re taught to write music.” Even if the precise nature of those connections will differ for every listener, the aim is always to tell a story in which lots of things happen but that still makes sense from one emotional space to the next. To be is to connect.
Profile by Tim Rutherford-Johnson
The 47th edition of Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival, hcmf// 2024, takes place Friday 15 – Sunday 24 November 2024. Tickets for The Monochrome Project and Zubin Kanga, featuring music by Claudia Molitor, are on sale now.