Sirens Cycle

Since his first quartet Korrespondenz (1992), Peter Eötvös has been interested in the transcription of phonetic elements to music, in order to make instruments speak. For Sirens Cycle, Eötvös’s latest string quartet, premiered by Calder Quartet on October 1st, 2016 in London, Peter Eötvös asked Serge Lemouton to analyse three different texts in three different languages about the sirens: a short text from Kafka (in german), an excerpt from Homer’s Odysseus and a passage from Joyce’s Finnegan’s Wake.

bach was used to musically transcribe the pitch of spoken texts, previously analysed with Audiosculpt; all these transcriptions were used by Peter Eötvös to write his score (see picture below).

sirenscycle