Utopie und Nähe (2020)
(for six voices and violin)

The text of "Utopia and Proximity" is based on an early work by Ernst Bloch, "Spirit of Utopia", written in 1916, in the middle of the First World War. The book touches on topics of culture, society, politics and much more, but what attracted me were his recurring and ever deeper questions about the localisation of one's own being: who this perceiving entity actually is. And closely linked to this, Bloch creates a very strict ethic, not unlike René Char's "habitable head". The question of localisation leads me to Job and his question about the place of origin of light. In his late writings, collected in his posthumously published book "Experimentum Mundi", Bloch delves even deeper into this question. Leonardo's sentence, which is sung in the epilogue, precedes Bloch's very beautiful book on Avicenna and reflects in a different (and very Copernican) way on the question of the location of being. 

Sidney Corbett, Februar 2022