for cello and 8 ( or 2)-channel audio
by Hildegard Westerkamp
Commissioned by Open Ears Festival
Premiere: April 30, 2005, Open Ears Festival, Kitchener, Ontario, Canada.
Performed by Anne Bourne, cello

Length: 22:24

Liebes-Lied/Love Song is based on the poem Liebes-Lied by Rainer Maria Rilke and its newest translation into English, Love Song, by Canadian poet and writer Norbert Ruebsaat. (Another work, based on the same poem Für Dich - For You had its world premier at trans-canada, a festival for Canadian electroacoustic music at the Zentrum fur Kunst und Medientechnologien (ZKM) in Karlsruhe, Germany, in February 2005.)

Liebes-Lied/Love Song is a collaboration between Hildegard who recorded the sound materials and composed the sound track, and Anne who created all cello sounds for the electroacoustic portion and completes the piece through cello improvisation in live performances. Liebes-Lied/Love Song is a meditation on Love, and takes the Rilke poem and its English translation as its starting point. Readings of the text combine with recordings of environmental sounds and Anne's improvised explorations on the cello to create the soundscape of the piece. Over this composed soundtrack Anne performs her own free improvisations live. The piece uses the resulting dialogue between recorded/live and composed/improvised to explore the meanings of the poem.

The original German poem is spoken by Hildegard Westerkamp, the English translation by Anne Bourne. In addition small excerpts of the poem are spoken by Wendelin Bartley, Susan Benson, Louie Ettling, Peter Grant, Andra McCartney, and R. Murray Schafer.

Liebes-Lied/Love Song was commissioned by the Open Ears Festival with the financial assistance of the Canada Council. The soundtrack portion of the composition was completed in Westerkamp's own studio in Vancouver. An 8-track version of it was created by Darren Copeland.