One Voice

a sound piece for four voices in different language

Unisono is a musical term for music for various performers who all play or sing one single melody-line in parallel with each other.

This phenomenon often appears in music with a 'functional' existence, for instance Irish traditional dance music, Arab and Islamic spiritual music and the contemplative Gregorian Chant. 

There is no mood-rousing harmonic support, no hierarchy in performance and no ego-celebration.

There is also no question and response: 'Unisono needs no counterpart, there is consensus' (Hannes Böhringer in his lecture Unisono 2004)

For the reason that one can also say that unisono is a form of depersonalisation, the textual material for my performance One Voice for Echofluxx 2012 exists of the personal data of each of the four performers, vocalised in unisono in each of their languages.

The four performers are situated in the space around the audience in four directions.

Their personal details, as given in an interview, will be pronounced in parallel with each other. This means that when reciting the data of one performer in his mother tongue, three of them have to imitate his words and sentences in a - for them -foreign language. Still they try to sound as one voice.

After finishing the data of one performer, the four will change positions in the space, and start pronouncing the data of the next performer, yet in another language, until all data and four languages have been sounding in the space, and each voice has been heard from a different direction.

The voices will be the only sound sources in the acoustics of the space, there will be no amplification.

Depending on the texts the duration of the full performance will take 15 - 20 minutes.

work process:

each of the four performers orally answers the interview questions about personal data in his own language. 

The answers/data will be recorded and typed out as text. These data will be sent as mp3 and Word-document to Toine Horvers who will edit them - especially in time - and forward them to the other performers so that they all have a full data set of each, in sound as well as in printed text.

Each performer can make his phonetic version of the data for his own use.

From here each performer can start practicing the pronunciation of the data.

Each performer gets an mp3-player with a little earphone for one ear.

In the silences between the sentences one can hear the next one and at the same time see it in print,  in order to be able to reproduce the sentence in words and intonation.

With one earphone it must be possible to also hear each others voices in the space.