I’m a huge fan of challenges when it comes to singing. If someone would give me a lounge jazz score, I wouldn’t know what to do with it. I’d sound bland. I need extreme melodies that cover all corners and registers. I also like a score that’s full of different rhythmic time feels. And I like to be “on the border” in the register of what I’m capable of singing ‘cause that’s where the magic happens! Technically challenging registers (where you potentially can fail) offer an enormous opportunity to ‘shine’ when it comes to emotional and artistic expression.
That’s why I chose to sing TIERKREIS – because I love the melodic landscape and it has everything I just mentioned. I love it as a composition with all its theatrical eccentricity but I’m also using it for my own vocal expression. It seems to me that Karlheinz Stockhausen used performers to fulfill his ideas for his compositions. I do the opposite: I use his music to complete my vocal vision, capabilities, expression and possibilities! It offers me an opportunity to dive into all the corners of my different timbres, techniques, registers, capabilities, emotions, you name it! I’m not crazy about labeling all this, nor talking about ‘technique’ as I approach the piece from an emotional angle (and not mental) with the attitude of a (jazz? contemporary? folk?) singer telling a story about the different zodiac signs.
As I’m a very visual person (being an artist as well) , I also love the fact that TIERKREIS has this incredibly individual shape and personal energy for each sign (the built-in different time feels certainly helps to create it). One can see the zodiac animals, and the melodic shapes really fit the energy of each zodiac sign. I’m not sure how Stockhausen composed it because I’m not a specialist on his music, even though I took his 2 summer courses in Germany where I initially studied TI ERKREIS . Still, I feel that the different time feels happens so naturally, they can only be consequences and a result of the artistic idea and not vice verse. I myself always said, I’m honestly complete as a musician when I sound like a “transcription of myself” or of my own talking in daily life. (Ever heard of anyone only talking in 4/4?
I have not.)
— SOPHIE DUNÉR
Karlheinz Stockhausen was the innovative, controversial leading figure in postwar German music — an electronic music innovator — a creator of multidisciplinary works combining theater, dance, music and multimedia whose works delved into matters spiritual, mythical, and interstellar. He influenced The Beatles, Miles Davis, Brian Eno — and Swedish jazz vocalist Sophie Dunér, who studied for two summers at Stockhausen’s legendary music courses.
In her newest release and Urlicht AudioVisual CD debut, Sophie, together with acclaimed new music pianist Steve Beck, deliver their unique jazz interpretation of Stockhausen’s zodiac-inspired and most accessible work, Tierkreis with vivid character and virtuoso vocal flourishes, in an exciting and accessible program coupled with American composer Francis Schwartz‘s witty and colorful The Neon Pterodactyl .
RELEASE DATE: MAY 23, 2025
