Bernhard Günter - Slow Gestures / Cérémonie Désir (1999)

"Anybody who has ever become really involved in listening to a piece of music, looking at a painting, or reading a book, will have noticed that our subjective time is not feeling the same as the chronometrical time our watch shows.

In my work as a composer I have often found that listeners believed a shorter piece to last longer than an actually longer one, and that their estimates of the duration of a work were often quite far from the actual chronometrical one.

These considerations together with the interest I have taken in neurological research into our perception of time have led me to devise a new time unit for measuring the duration of my musical works. Said research has found that our perception of "present", "now", "the present moment" is a time window of about three seconds, everything else is memory or anticipation.
So my new time unit is three seconds long, and I call it DIM, which stands for the french expression "durée; içi, maintenaint" (duration: here, now).

From now on, I will give the duration of my works expressed in numbers of this unit:
slow gestures / cérémonie désir (for heike) : 464.3 DIM
With this new time value, you will know how many "moments" of your attention/consciousness each of my works is asking for".
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Slow Gestures / Cérémonie Désir (for Heike) 464.3 DIM

"It is very difficult for me to speak of this work, since it is getting very close to my goal of creating a kind of language free space. I thus prefer to let it go without further comment other than that I dedicate it to my companion Heike - each gesture is both speaking of her, and speaking to her, without words".

Composed, recorded and mastered by Bernhard Günter at Trente Oiseaux, 1999.
Cover by Marc Behrens

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