Fork
Andrea Neumann
Fork
My deceased godmother was an aristocrat. During her life, she had supported me from time to time with material and immaterial goods. Part of that was the family silver, which she intended, piece by piece, as my inheritance. Engraved on each piece was the family coat of arms and her initials AvG. I wasn’t aware of what family-historical importance cutlery can embody up until then.
The first time I saw forks used as instrumental preparation objects was with pianist and spinett player Christoph Schiller. The prongs are stuck between 2 or 3 strings of the piano. Setting the fork end in motion, the fork vibrates between 10 seconds and several minutes, depending on quality and string tension. It creates a bright sound, rich in overtones, a pulse which slows down and eventually ebbs. A light push is enough, and the fork sounds. In 2004, I performed with Steffi Weismann and Ana M. Rodriguez in a project called “Scrap” at Werner-Otto-Saal at Konzerthaus Berlin. Inside-piano sounds were processed and transformed through a computer and a video camera projected details of the instrument onto a large screen. My godmother was sitting in the audience and saw how the camera moved along a fan, a glass ball, an EBow, a peg, a shaving brush, a bamboo skewer and zoomed onto a delicately vibrating silver cake fork, whose bright sound rich in overtones spread in the entire room and which in close-up revealed the initials AvG.
Andrea Neumann is a composer/performer (inside piano, electronics) based in Berlin.