Kranetude – étude for a crane – is the four-movement score – composition and sound design – Austrian, Berlin-based drummer-composer Katharina Ernst and German electronics player-composer Stefan – Schne – Schneider for Austrian choreographer Florentina Holzinger’s experimental performance piece for crane risen high above the water, four drummers and eight bodies of water. Schneider is Holzinger’s longtime musical partner. Kranetude searches for new performative-theatrical contexts for dance, with feminist approaches and connected to the element of water.
Kranetude was recorded live at the world premiere of this work at the popular natural lake Müggelsee on the eastern side of Berlin in June 2023 during the Leisure & Pleasure Festival, and since then been performed only once more. Kranetude documents and commemorates this exceptional work with its complex rhythmic score that demands mechanical precision and organic movement.
The opening, dramatic piece «Under Water» features the international, five female percussionists ensemble plus Schne’s layered synths create ambient, stormy waves of percussion sounds, always on the verge of a cathartic explosion, while the musicians are underwater and slowly pulled to the surface under the direction of conductor Sibylle Fischer. The delicate «Rising I & II» feature a quartet of differently tuned snare drums with electronics, later joined by Shiau-Shiuan Hung’s marimba, sketching more structured and refined, intricate polyrhythms with an ethereal, synth-driven dimension of flowing water. These pieces gravitate toward surprisingly harmonious, hypnotic pulses and conclude with another percussive climax, that is suddenly abrupt. This powerful work ends with «Above Water», with a 2×3 meter thunder sheet hung up with percussionist Nettie Nüganen by the crane, 15 meters above the water, who keeps shaking this highly resonating thunder sheet while Schne distorts these sounds via live processing. A final accelerando of all drums marks the conclusion of this impressive work as well as the highly immersive listening experience, sealed with three decisive strikes on the gran cassa and tamtam.
Eyal Hareuveni
Katharina Ernst (prepared drumkit, cymbals, snare), Schne (electronics, synthesizers, live processing), Stina Fors (gongs, stones, cymbals, tamtam, snare), Shiau-Shiuan Hung (gran cassa, snare, marimba), Judith Schwarz (prepared drumkit, cymbals, snare), Nettie Nüganen (rigged thunder sheet), Sibylle Fischer (conductor)
