Doina (1996)
(for voice and string orchestra)

"Doina is a Romanian folk song of a plaintive, ultimately cheerful character in a Dorian or Aeolian church tone with small-interval melodic embellishments."
Dictionary of music, edited by H, Lindlar

"Pain is a means of warning and protection that only comes into its own at the higher levels of the animal world and represents, so to speak, an achievement of advanced development. In contrast to ordinary, physical pain, there is the pain of the soul, the psychic feeling, heightened to the point of affect, which arises from certain processes in the spiritual sphere, in the realm of the imagination, whether these are of a more intellectual or more moral nature."
Meyers Konversationslexikon

With these two definitions, Carola Bauckholt outlines the background to her composition Doina, which she began in Romania. “Lament” and “pain” seem to play with baroque topoi, especially due to the countertenor instrumentation (David Cordier's vocal art was a major source of inspiration for this work). But far from it: the lament of the male alto voice – the Romanian doina is usually assigned to women – creates a veritable panorama of expressive means that are anything but retrograde. In the multifaceted interplay of voice and strings – the latter are, as it were, the sensitive, noisy resonating body of the former – an elegy of the nameless emerges, which is immensely differentiated in terms of movement and playing technique, in which the voice is not only deprived of its gender-specific connotation, but also, as in other Bauckholt compositions, of the symbolic nature of the word – in the world of phonemes, sound reigns, not meaning.

Starting from rhythmically notated speech sounds and breathing noises, to which the divided violins pile up flageolet fields, the voice becomes increasingly emotionally charged, finding concise motifs in the prevailing small steps, which are heightened by micro-intervals. Soon, the strings form a quarter-tone scaled octave cluster in triple fortissimo, which is then sung out linearly by the voice “with all strength and devotion” (performance instructions) – the prelude to a “mourning work”, in which the singing is no longer a formative ennoblement, but represents the radically turned “Ach und Oh des Gemüts” (Hegel), which culminates in the excessive cry and, even more, in the terrifying, bottomless fall into the general pause – a traditional metaphor for death.

Above the dense but technically stifled rhythmic foundation of the strings, the lament collapses and finally, lonely, emits another “extreme cry of pain” (performance instructions), only to find its way, selected by the strings, to an exhausted relaxation, which is released in stable glissandi over an extended, liquefied lamenting bass – not reconciliation, of course (nor “serenity”, as the dictionary definition would have it), but a precious moment of integrity, knowing that there will be a beginning again.

Horst A. Scholz