Title: Noli me tangere (Touch me not)
Instrumentation: Choir (24 singers)
Year: 2027
Duration: 25 min.
Premiere: Eclat Festival 2027
Performers: SWR Vokalensemble
The Xuanji tu, or Star Gauge, is a palindrome poem composed in the fourth century China by the poet Su Hui. The poem can be read in multiple directions, forwards and backwards, each conveying a different meaning. In Noli me tangere (Touch me not), this text is combined with the anagram poems of Unica Zürn where each line is a strict permutation of the letters of a given line or phrase, usually the title line. The reversible poems of Su Hui’s Xuanji tu suggest a temporal process in which time unfolds both forwards and backwards simultaneously. The anagram poems of Unica Zürn imply a temporal process that is always unidirectional until no more sensible permutations of letters are possible. The formal processes of transposition, permutation, and retrograde that structure these poems are set to Johannes Ockeghem’s Missa Prolationum and Josquin des Prez’ Missa L’homme armé super voces musicales, both masses that are constructed through proportional canons in which each voice maintains a temporal distance from one another and never touch. My process of “reverse-transcription” uses the syllables and line breaks of Ezra Pound’s China Cantos as a rhythmic structure to rewrite these masses with text from Su Hui and Unica Zürn. The process of reverse transcription foregrounds the noise-like sound production of the choir – the body, lungs, throat, tongue, teeth and lips – by relying on a continuous process of creation and erasure, or the adding of new layers while retaining traces of what has gone on before. Reverse transcription in this context addresses the relation between memory and time with processes such as transposition, permutation, and retrograde that attempt to preserve something which experiences loss through its ungraspable materiality.