Dorothee Schabertaus modern

Dorothee Schabert (* 1952 in Bamberg) is a German composer, KlangWerkerin and author.

Life

Dorothee Schabert was born in Bamberg in 1952. She studied history and German language and literature at the University of Freiburg between 1971 and 1977 and took her state examination in 1976/77. She graduated as a sound engineer in 1985 and was sound engineer/musical recording director at SWF/SWR2Musik Baden-Baden from 1987 – 2017. She supervised productions for radio and CD; classical symphonic and contemporary compositions with SWR Symphony Orchestra, chamber musicians, as well as the renowned contemporary music ensembles, Donaueschinger Musiktage.

Her compositions are for instruments and voices, choir and ensemble in various settings. Dorothee Schabert has received commissions from Ensemble Aventure, Capella de la Torre, members of the SWR Symphony Orchestra, among others.
She makes sound installations and computer compositions – also in cooperation with artists from other fields of art..

In addition, she writes essays and lectures on the aesthetics of technology and music, of sound and space, especially in contemporary compositions. She also writes commentaries on her own and other compositions.

Dorothee Schabert herself says:

Perception, precise sensitive perception, above all hearing – that’s how I explore my environment. Sounds and noises, their changes, developments, processes, their places and movements.
I often find my source material in these. Sounds as they are provided by nature, people, traffic, machines. Sounds of voices and instruments. Speeches, music.

I am interested in touches and similarities between sounds and noises.
It’s fascinating what possibilities are contained in the sounds and noises, what I can conjure from them, elicit from them. Other possibilities also mean other interpretations and altered designs.

Perception means listening carefully. A reverence to Luigi Nono’s “Ascolta! Listening is the prerequisite for respect and acceptance, for appreciation, be it of people or the environment, thus the basis for tolerance and also my commitment to the environment, species and climate protection.
Perception and our perceptive interpretation create from our surroundings what we call landscape, as Georg Simmel defines it. Listening, I basically do the same. Thus, landscape as a stimulus for musical ideas pervades my compositions.
I have combined some of these compositions in the cycle HörLandschaften, a concept that brings together several artistic genres (photos and landscape painting, literature) and also justifies this theoretically in an essay.

Space: A parameter that always accompanies my musical work is spatiality. I always think and
and design my compositions as spatial structures. I accompany and emphasise tonal gradations through
and underline tonal gradations through spatial arrangements, sound directions, distances. Spatiality is not only
a parameter of timbre. Compositions as sculptures with spatial expansion and development already differ
development already differ in compositional design from compositions that are conceived of as linear
melodic-harmonic sequence in time, as “sound speech”.

Electronics: The fact that the touch of computer and instruments, of human and technical sound
combination and interaction accompanies my work is a result of the above, as well as of my
and from my involvement with and production of the works of Luigi Nono.

texts, science: I have never wanted to limit myself to a single way of perceiving, taking note of and describing the world around me.
to perceive the world around me, to take note of it and to describe it. Scientific
I am just as interested in scientific work as in expressing my thoughts and feelings artistically.
artistically. I therefore not only write in sound, even if I am increasingly focusing on music as my medium of expression.
as my medium of expression, I also write in words. Travelogues, poems; theoretical
theoretical clarifications of my artistic activity.

Source Dorothee Schabert: http://dorotheeschabert.de/