Breathing Meditation by Ursel Schlicht

BREATHING MEDITATION
 


In 2020, Ursel Schlicht initiated IMPROVISATION ÜBER GROSSE DISTANZEN / IMPROVISATION ACROSS LONG DISTANCES
 
This is a 41 minute modular work that may be experienced as audio (presented here on bandcamp) and/or as a sound installation, experienced in a physical space through loudspeakers, with or without additional live musical performance. Please feel free to listen to excerpts or to the whole thing.
 
The work is intended to be a meditation more than a performance. It uses sounds produced on musical instruments to guide or follow thought as much as it explores the playing or composition of sounds as the goal. It proceeds at a pace and rhythm that originates from our breathing. And our thoughts.
 
Because Breathing Meditation was recorded under lockdown/pandemic conditions by three musicians at three separate times in three countries (Germany, Ireland, USA), and also because in its sound installation manifestation listeners will make their own choices about which parts of the audio will be audible, we are releasing the audio one musician at a time, in the order in which they were recorded, on consecutive Fridays in May, 2022. We encourage listeners to listen to it in its different versions in order to experience it in different ways.
 
On Friday May 6, 2022 we release the piano part. On May 13 the saxophone. On May 20 the percussion. Plans are in the works for Breathing Meditation to be presented as a sound installation in Kassel, Albuquerque, and New York in 2022 and 2023.
 
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A fundamental motivation behind Breathing Meditation was simply to respond to the early days of the pandemic by attempting to maintain a strong and ongoing musical connection among the five members of the Sonic Exchange ensemble even though live meetings were impossible at that moment. Musicians were based in Kassel/Germany, in Cork/Ireland, Brooklyn/NYC and The Bronx/NYC.



Ursel Schlicht founded the ensemble when she lived in New York. In 2017 members Catherine Sikora, Stephanie Griffin, Hilliard Greene and Andrew Drury came for a 10-day residency to Kassel for concerts and workshops during documenta 14, the worlds largest avant garde art exhibition.


This proved to be an important bonding experience creating a strong artistic bond and trust.



How to find creative paths during the isolation that many of us were going through to create strong emotional and musical connections? How to use the pandemic as a creative space, a time of reflection and reassessment? How to address the situation creatively?



Those were the questions once the pandemic hit. Catherine experienced a heavy lockdown period in Ireland in which police barricades prevented citizens from travelling more than three kilometers from their homes. Ursel was able to travel to Berlin in June 2020 for a live performance and mass demonstrations of outrage against the killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis. The contrast couldn’t have been bigger.

Shortly afterwards, Catherine and Ursel spoke about the emotional power that we need, and can have, by continuing to share music via long distances.

Ursel began to record solo piano improvisations strongly imagining the voices of the other musicians, leaving space for others to improvise. Keeping the aspect of spontaneous improvisation was very important to her.


She remembers: “In my mind, I hear a fleeting viola sound and connect mentally with Stephanie, I hear Andrew breathing into his snare drum, I hear Catherine sharing ideas about breath being the current topic in her teaching, and I get into a mental space where I feel very quiet and pensive, and begin to play something that expresses breathing. The improv keeps going and going…. I am surprised later on to find out how long this one was and called it Breathing Meditation.”



We had discussed the importance of breath in many different ways, and the idea of being and staying peaceful, focused and providing space for others.



In addition, during the summer of 2020 the Black Lives Matter movement was protesting the murder of George Floyd around the world. Suppressing a person’s breath until death, despite Floyd uttering repeatedly “I can’t breathe” was the ultimate aggression. We all were profoundly affected by this and participated each in our way to support the Black Lives Matter movement.

Breathing Meditation seeks to provide a space of calmness and reflection, of openness and connection.



 

Ursel Schlicht, pianist and composer, focuses on improvised music, jazz and intercultural collaboration. In addition to a deeply personal solo practice, she initiates varied musical interactions with her international community in her “SonicExchange” projects. Building musical relationships with musicians who have experienced flight and migration has become increasingly important in recent years.