The Completely Normal Life

‘It's a piece about everyday life, certainly related to my current opera project ‘All these days’ in terms of its intention, which is about young people's descriptions of everyday life. New music certainly doesn't deal enough with ‘normal’ life, which is never that normal, at any time, neither in the past nor in the future. Everyday life is a construction with which we come to grips with reality. The piece draws its tension from the confrontation between the everyday and the non-everyday (a classical orchestra), while at the same time attempting to define a new, formally clearly structured musical aesthetic and language that avoids the intellectual blind alleys of the avant-garde and postmodernism. Music cannot depict everyday life, but it can show how this everyday life feels, and that is what it is all about. In doing so, ironic exaggeration and exaggeration is also an adequate means of revealing the emptiness and sadness that lies behind the hyperactivity of our time.’ (Moritz Eggert)

Moritz Eggert's work ‘Das ganz normale Leben’ for performer group, percussion ensemble and large orchestra was commissioned by Spektrum Villa Musica as part of the New Music Network, a large-scale funding programme of the German Federal Cultural Foundation, for a project by AG Neue Musik Grünstadt. The piece is conceived for an unspecified number of young participants, who do not have to be professional musicians. These are divided into two groups: ‘Extra Percussion’ (various unusual percussion instruments) and ‘Performers’ (mainly scenic actions).
However, the composer emphasises that ‘Das ganz normale Leben’ is not an educational project, but an equally important collaboration. The young people take on extra percussion and performance - fried eggs are fried on stage, there is boxing, cycling, phone calls, jumping on a trampoline, running, arguing, singing and shouting. Using iPhone apps specially programmed for the piece, orchestral sounds are also changed live through movements. The young people also act as sound detectives - all the original sounds used in the piece (e.g. motorways, city life, football stadiums, television commercials, etc.) have been selected and recorded by them.