Clara Maïda

"I have known Clara Maïda’s compositions for years and I am impressed by its sound richness, its originality and the expressive intensity of this music."

"Clara Maïda’s music is not easy, but it amply rewards close attention. The formal processes are fascinating. They are often using unusual, even "found" material as the basis for transformations which go their own way, leaving in their wake a dialectic between recognizable objects, very faintly discerned, and a formalized "dance of the elements". Finding form is rewarding to the subjectivity of at least this listener for the very reason that it is a discovery that is made unaided by any traditional props, one has the feeling that it needs to be done ex nihilo. That a strong negative can give birth to a new and strong positive is one of the important functions of true art. Clara Maïda’s art is in the vanguard of pioneers who are stretching our culture to its new phase."

"I consider Clara Maïda as a composer with a composition profile of her own (autonomous, independent) [...] Her works are virtuoso and highly expressive and -- what convinces me particularly --: these works take also aesthetical risks, [...] original works which deserve to be heard."

"I have a considerable admiration for your writing! [...] The endeavour to pulverize the form and to re-establish it in a sort of flux is most interesting. Thank you!"

"Everything is connected to everything" - for composer Clara Maïda, this truism became the breeding ground of her creativity.
The composer of mixed French-Sicilian origin came to composition in a roundabout way, and twists, ramifications and networks are at the heart of her work.

For her, being educated as a psychologist, they can be the labyrinthine of the urban networks as well as the nervous system. The subterranean world of the metro in Paris and the psychic depths both inspired her composition concepts which simulate, for instance, an apocalyptic screenplay prompted by the confrontation with the atomic bunker located underneath The Story of Berlin museum.

In Maïda’s music, the nuclear chain reaction, fission and fusion, scientific processes, are represented by sound masses made of tiny particles, which move, gradually transform, explode and assemble in new "sound molecules", thus inducing an atmosphere of disruption.

The lengthy essay with in corpore vili (Editions RZ) is similarly packed with references to Lacanian psychoanalysis and the violent effects of the symbolic on bodies both human and musical. Since my analyst was a Lacanian, you won't find me making glib remarks about whether such a discourse is or is not relevant to music at this late post-Bush II date. On first hearing, her string writing undeniably evokes Xenakis, but a wildly individual sensibility soon becomes apparent - discontinuous, willful and extremely aggressive. The score excerpts in the booklet, as brief as they are, make it clear that Maïda, who studied with both Lachenmann and Grisey, hasn't made things easy for herself by taking any shortcuts in the notational elaboration of her ideas.

Maïda attempts to reenvisage the complex, erratic processes that take place in the subconscious through the fraught structures of her music. Mutatis mutandis [...] moves through violently urgent passages of massed, wrenching screeches and frantic plucking, dropping intermittently and unexpectedly into silence. [...] The intensity and expanded palette of Psyché-Cité/Transversales is pared back in the earliest composition here, the short single movement string quartet …who holds the strings… performed by the Arditti Quartet. The sense of turbulent torsion remains here, the strings attacked rather than caressed, and entangled mass of high and low register swoops and scrapes colliding in the space. [...] An invigorating, if unnerving music that pulls no punches as it delves into the hidden recesses of the human mind.

The Wire Magazine - Contemporary music journal (Richard PINNELL) - London, May 2010

The rich matter of a texture which clears away in an ethereal way. French composer Clara Maïda pictures herself as a researcher who wants to simulate flux and structures of psychic unconscious energy with sounds; a self-poetical field of reference which would be the music of her mind. Whether they occupy a large space or they condensate in a solo part, the compositions move to the core, make a din even when the sound level is very low. In all the pieces, one can find again a tormented jubilation, an elastic time, a longing for being, for emerging. In Mutatis mutandis, performed by the excellent Resonanz ensemble, the amplified strings seem to weave autonomous sound filaments, such as an inanimate texture, hanging from the ceiling of a factory. However, an invisible cooperation results from their presumed proximity and suddenly, sounds are torn up one after the other as in a field of forces. This composition process is also present in the other pieces (in Doppelklänger for prepared and amplified piano), in the body itself of an auto-dissolution. Sonorous despair but not without any hope.

Aufabwegen - Magazin - Contemporary music web journal (Till KNIOLA) - Berlin, May 2010

When French composer Clara Maïda was invited by the Berliner Künstlerprogramm (DAAD) in 2007, she made the disturbing discovery of the cold war’s evidences which were cast in concrete. She elaborated a system from a hostile bunker in which human survival seemed hardly conceivable after an atomic catastrophe. Maïda had developed earlier an artistic project linked to the gruesome atmosphere of the Paris subterranean networks and she followed up her research in her series Shel(l)ter, with the macabre atmosphere of an atomic shelter considered as a curiosity in Berlin. The Radialsystem V was a particularly appropriate venue for the première of her work on the subterranean labyrinth, for it was in the past the entrance of a liquid waste pumping-station, which spreads out its ramifications.

Itinéraire ensemble, conducted by Jean Deroyer, presented Maïda’s sound cosmos. The title Shel(l)ter plays on different meanings of the word "shelter" and "shell" (insertion of the letter "l"), this last word being used with both meanings (the shell and a weapon). Escaping from Maïda’s composition is as hard as from an atomic bunker. The predominant use of percussions and seven massive loudspeakers simply surround the audience and install the listener at the heart of events with the insistent will of making them imagine they need to find shelter in a bunker.

DAAD-Magazin (Horst Willi SCHORS) - Berlin, February 2010

It is not easy to make a name for oneself in the small world of contemporary music. French composer Clara Maïda made one for herself in Berlin during an artistic residency. Since then, she has been shuttling between both countries and will present Shel(l)ter at Ultraschall festival at the end of the month. A musical project which is supported by the quite recent French-German funds for contemporary music.

The idea of Shel(l)ter came to Maïda while she was visiting the atomic bunker located underneath The Story of Berlin museum. She likes to take her inspiration from subterranean worlds and she found matter in this claustrophobic environment.
"I like to refer to sound space. In a bunker, sounds are very muffled when they come through, it is a depopulated space, with a closed geometrical structure". The musical project materialised during an artistic residency in Berlin in 2008, via the framework of the prestigious DAAD programme (Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst).

Shel(l)ter is not soft and joyful music. In four acts, this contemporary piece makes use of the flux and echoes of a subterranean pre- or post-atomic world. A musical experience for the audience to find themselves "in a total sound structure, a sort of acoustic envelop, whose membranes would be put into vibration and enclose the listener on the sensorial level in the same way as the shelter encloses people on the material level", the composer explains.

Paris-Berlin - The French-German News Magazine (Stéphanie PICHON) - Berlin, January 2010

Ipso Facto by Clara MAÏDA, French composer, tries to connect the psychic and physical experience with the urban world, by abolishing the opposition between objects and living creatures. Originally, this piece is composed to be played on seven independent audio canals.

Arte Sonoro - Portal for the broadcasting of sound art - Mexico City, September 2009

An enigmatic Shel(l)ter - später... ( ) ...Winter, for clarinet, bassoon, cello, three percussion players and electronics by French-Berliner composer Clara Maïda.

Beside its quasi-homonymic assonance with a famous noisy hit by the Beatles, this piece, to my mind, will deserve all our attention. The composer, visibly attracted a lot of attention from Jonathan Harvey and her website visibly teems with sound samples in which music seems so fragmented and rearticulated as a deoxyribonucleic acid molecule (a recurrent visual of the site). "From ever more numerous diffractions to more and more fragmented and migratory objects, the musical fabric is pulverized in floating and residual particles. [...] The piece attempts to redraw the process which occurs at the heart of matter and the laws which govern it.", as the programme note of her piece Kinê-Diffr(a)ct explains.

Clara Maïda first studied psychology. But her wish to compose became overwhelming. Today, she has won an international recognition and she composes for conventional ensembles as well as for electronics. She often uses material she has found by chance as a basis for her compositions in order to create new forms. Thank to her sound richness and her originality, one can find in her music extraordinary expressivity.

Fluctuatio (in) animi, by French composer Clara Maïda, for flute, string quartet and electronics, was one of this year’s submitted compositions in which acoustic instruments and electronics were merging. We believe that this field still offers a big potential, and Fluctuatio (in) animi should be used as a outstanding model for next years' presentations.

Iniji by the young composer Clara Maïda, musical piece of half an hour or so, is based on a text by Henri Michaux. This creation uses onomatopoeias as a sound material while adding the work on space, sounds, images, lights, thus inventing a poetic environment.

Taktik, Marseille, May 1999

Il libro del sogno by Clara Maïda, ultimate discovery of the evening, displayed a very tense instrumental writing, with sharp ridges. A work which would have deserved to be placed at the beginning of the evening.

At La Criée, a premièred work Io, by Clara Maïda, State and GMEM commission, called for a piano, played by Nathalie Négro, a cello, Bernard Amrani, flutes, played by David Dreyfus, clarinets, by Magali Rubio, and then, for electro-acoustics.
The instrumental conversation, diversified, complementary, with no whimsical effects, gradually imposed its unity, its logic, and especially a poetic permeation closely related with the electro-acoustic part.
Quiet at first, playing with the timbres, some brief melodic fragments, mixed with a score of sounds sometimes evoking those of a giant glass harmonica, and through which comes several times a female voice, distant and spectral, the works then amplifies and gets more feverish, more clashing.
Before ending, all the instruments become silent, in slow and obsessional bells sounding like a toll up to the conclusive perdandosi.
Let’s say it again, a very poetic general impression, in which lyricism played its part, and which will justify the reception made to the composition, to her author and to the performers.

Io by Clara Maïda explodes in echoes, mirrors in which the senses, the sounds, the colours echo each other in a Baudelairean way.

Io ("I", in Italian) is a GMEM commission, for instrumental ensemble and electro-acoustics, through which Clara Maïda purses her interests in the place of the composer-creator in the work and questions the unconscious as a form of production of meaning. As the titles indicates, Maïda did her "music self-portrait".