We owe this short piece of music to the actor and writer Thomas Kamper, who gave me the opportunity to compose the overture to his play Jokebox. For the play, in which Beethoven’s Grand Fugue can be heard playing from a jukebox while various muted TV programs are running on screens, I selected a few basic elements for my work: excerpts from the spoken text; five seconds of sounds derived from Beethoven’s string quartet; and recorded TV sounds.

In the first part, the original text of the piece (spoken by Thomas and Barbara Horvath) is stripped of its spatiality and reconstructed in the harmonies of the quartet. Layers of choirs result and they ultimately end in a drone interrupted by a shot (actually the sound of a firecracker).

The second part consists only of TV sounds, condensed into a homogeneous noise on the one hand, and dissolved into individual short percussive elements on the other.

In the third part, I used my brand-new model of a resonating bar, which is then “hit” by tiny particles of the spoken text. At the end, a tunnel-like space opens up in which the condensed TV sounds are emitted again.