Grasschriften

Thank you for keeping an open mind and investing your time to understand my composition:   I appreciate that you want to appreciate, that’s awesome! First I'd like to tell you about my motivation for the piece, then I explain some interesting aspects to hear for in the music and finally I'd like to introduce you to some ideas, that guided the making of the film. I included the time frames so that you have a reference. This text is a little lenghty, but I hope it increases your enjoyment of my piece. A good Chinese friend of mine is a soprano. We studied music together and she asked me whether I could write her a modern piece for her concert diploma. I immediately said yes, because I always had the idea in my mind of finding a way musically to make the Chinese national anthem a little more tender. And that is already the main idea. The anthem is a quite fast march and has a pretty bloodthirsty text, a little like the French Marsaillaise. The Chinese anthem is not my...

This blog’s subtitle is “In China steckt Ich” which means “China Contains I” and to me that’s my major insight into China. Everything I’m subjected to here, I observe here, I indulge in here, I detest here, I like and learn here, helps me to reflect my own self. One such reflection of China is the difference between the people’s republic of China (PRC) and the republic of China (ROC or Taiwan ). The Chinese refer to it as the question of the two coasts . It is a long and complicated story and I want to dwell only on one aspect, I particularly connect strongly to: their national anthems, especially in relation to the German anthem. The country I was born in, does not exist anymore: the German Democratic Republic (fun fact: a “socialist” country). For the UN the ROC does not exist too and for the PRC Taiwan is undoubtedly a provence of China and no sovereign country. Yet the ROC has “embassies” all over the world and takes part as Chinese Taipeh in the Olympics, where it needs a nat...