Brunnen (2013)
(for violoncello solo and orchestra)

The orchestral piece "Brunnen" was inspired by an everyday sound: "Many years ago, the composer Urla Kahl played me a recording she had made of a fountain on an alpine meadow in Graubünden in Switzerland. This irregular gurgling of the runoff, the sounding centrifugal force never lets go of me and I try to capture it musically. Day and night, without end, you can hear this sound of the fountain there on the alp." However, Brunnen is not merely a compositional treatment of this one source of sound. In her piece for orchestra and solo cello, Carola Bauckholt has created multi-dimensional, multi-layered connections, interlockings, contrasts and correlations between everyday noises and orchestral sounds. There is, for example, the level of the interlude: the splashing and gurgling of fountains is used in the piece, specifically the aforementioned "fountain on an alpine meadow in Graubünden, Switzerland", but also "drainage of a sink in Tyrol" and also - at that time still sound impressions from a country at peace - "drilling work in Kiev". Such acoustic finds in the sense of a musique concrète mingle with the orchestral sound in Brunnen. At the same time, the field recordings also become impulses for developments in the orchestra.

But there is another level of negotiation between noises and orchestral sounds: The instrumentation in the orchestra in Brunnen consists not only of its traditional instruments, but of additional sound generators that also come from everyday life. For example, the score calls for: "Corrugated cardboard, rubbed with mailing bags", "Oven grate, rubbed with telephone card" and "Harp with ultrasonic toothbrush". In this respect, Brunnen by Carola Bauckholt offers a multi-dimensional mediation between orchestral sound and sounds from everyday life on various levels.

However, Carola Bauckholt still points out an essential aspect in this complex and extremely differentiated hall of mirrors between orchestral instruments, everyday sounds, mimesis, mixing and demarcation when she emphasizes: "The transfer and connection of sounds from our reality with the artistic world of an orchestra is very appealing to me. I try to extract and orchestrate the characteristic and essential aspects of the sounds as precisely as possible. Of course, this doesn't result in illustration, but at the same time the characteristics of the sound body, the instruments and the structure of an orchestra emerge."

Brunnen was premiered in September 2013 at the Klangspuren Schwaz festival with Francesco Dillon as soloist on the cello and the Tiroler Symphonieorchester under the direction of Johannes Kalitzke. 2013 was the 250th birthday of the writer Jean Paul. In her unbiased, curious and intelligent approach to the auditory world, as she has further developed in Brunnen, Carola Bauckholt therefore refers not least to Jean Paul: "Jean Paul looks at things and his characters as if through a microscope. This process of drawing closer, observing and reproducing creates poetry, not just an imprint of reality."

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