Handbook Project “Neue Klangphänomene auf Streichinstrumenten und ihre Notation”

Barbara Maurer, Freiburg, Germany

Since 1960 fascinating compositions have arisen from composers’ new, searching and unbiased access to traditional instruments. Sounds and noises previously considered by-products of traditional sound production have now suddenly moved into the foreground as controlled and controllable sound phenomena. Entire worlds have opened up here. 
With the support of the Ernst von Siemens Music Foundation Barbara Maurer is creating a handbook providing a catalog of the new sounds and noises on stringed instruments. As the notation forms the key interface on the path from the idea to sound realization the customary or most efficient methods of notation for each of the playing techniques are to be discussed and illustrated here. This handbook is aimed at string players and composers, students and professional musicians as well as interested lay people.
As a violist the author Barbara Maurer has lived for 25 years from and with contemporary music – as a soloist, as a chamber musician in the ensemble recherche, as a viola teacher and jury member at the Darmstadt Summer Courses for New Music and as a lecturer for new chamber music at Cologne’s music academy Musikhochschule Köln.

2012