"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".
__________________________________________________________
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
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".
__________________________________________________________
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
