Q&A with Marianne Schuppe and Deborah Walker about Two Paths
“I see the challenge in balancing words and sounds, so meanings stay undetermined, fragile, and on the edge of disappearing.” ーMarianne Schuppe
“After many pieces, you think you know how to do things, but then you realize that every experience is different, you have to stay open.” ーDeborah Walker
Aus dem Zeltbuch (excerpt)
Yuko Zama (YZ): I am a big fan of your and Deborah's previous releases, respectively. I think you two are a great duo that delves into profound areas of music. How did your collaboration with Deborah begin and develop into the co-composition of Aus dem Zeltbuch? What fascinates you about Deborah's cello and her creativity?
Marianne Schuppe (MS): Deborah and I met in 2020 through our connections with Wandelweiser, and, as I have been regularly in Berlin, Deborah’s place of residence then and now, a collaboration soon took shape. I had been interested in Éliane Radigue’s work for some years already and meeting Deborah, who had been working with Éliane since 2012, opened the opportunity for a voice and cello piece in Éliane’s Occam Océan series. We started on our own with some ideas and quickly found a level of musical and personal understanding. Deborah then proposed a collaboration to Éliane, and in 2022 we encountered her for the first time as a duo.
Deborah’s way of working is both open and focused. Maybe it’s how she listens and how she is with her instrument, through which much of what happens in our playing seems to come together almost by itself. It’s a great joy.
In both pieces, Occam River XXIX and Aus dem Zeltbuch, voice and cello interweave in a delicate interplay, without either being a soloist. Each time, a slightly different path is taken. Having discovered this kind of accordance in the course of working on the Radigue piece, we soon wanted to develop a jointly authored work that could stand alongside Occam River XXIX, while turning toward a different material: language, words, this particular privilege of the voice.
Marianne Schuppe and Deborah Walker at the premiere concert of ‘Aus dem Zeltbuch’ and ‘Occam River XXIX’ in Walcheturm, Zürich (26 April 2023)
YZ:Aus dem Zeltbuch is a very intriguing piece to me. Your voices, mostly German but occasionally English, change my perception of the sounds each time they shift between the two languages. It's as if the light were coming from a different angle. During the calm atmosphere of the music, yet with a wide dynamic range, the shifts add subtle ripples to the music, which is fantastic. I understand some English words used but not much German, so the German words sound more like music to me horizontally, while the English words hit me vertically with clarity. Could you tell me a little about this piece?
MS: Thank you for describing your perception, your words clearly resonate with me. Interesting how you feel the words leading you horizontally in one and hitting you vertically in another language. I myself observe a different physicality being in one or the other language and I value the distance of a foreign language. Words are a musical material for me. I do not wish to control what is understood, though I am aware that semantics remain subcutaneously, speaking and shimmering from below through texture and surface. I am very fond of words, but in a musical context they tend to absorb attention. I see the challenge in balancing words and sounds, so meanings stay undetermined, fragile and on the edge of disappearing. This does not concern only the cello part, but also shapes my way of speaking. I actually regard speaking a way of singing
Marianne Schuppe’s Zeltbuch-booklet- score
Deborah Walker’s annotations of Aus dem Zeltbuch
YZ: Deborah, I love your previous releases, especially the ones you did with Silvia Tarozzi, 'Canti di guerra, di lavoro e d‘amore' (2022 Unseen Worlds) as a duo, and 'Occam Ocean 3' (2021 Shiiin) as a duo and a trio. Silvia is also one of my favorite musicians. What was your experience working with Marianne, especially when co-composing Aus dem Zeltbuch?
Deborah Walker (DW): The duo with Silvia Tarozzi is very special because we've been playing together for 23 years! But I always liked very much playing in duo, and it happened a few times in my life, very spontaneously, to play in duo with women musicians with whom a profound friendship grows from the shared musical work. And this happened with Marianne too. Since we met we started a very intense exchange, an ongoing dialogue, a back and forth process between music making and exchange of views in a variety of fields. It was a work on our togetherness and it is actually still an ongoing process! It is a relationship that allows each individual a space to re-discover oneself and the other, to find new ways to activate yourself and to relate to what is around you. Aus dem Zeltbuch comes out of this space which we have allowed one another to explore. I would speak about allowing things to happen - allowing a form to establish itself. The piece grew very organically, playing together - listening back to what we have done - playing again. Thinking. Talking. Playing again. And a form, with its own rules, emerged. And at one point it felt established. It is a composed piece that isn’t written down, framed into a score. We play it from memory and we keep annotations. Each time we perform it the piece is slightly different, but the work is always recognizable.
YZ: I am also a big fan of Éliane Radigue's music. It's fascinating that all the pieces in her Occam Océan series were made for specific performers through a close collaborative process. How did your collaboration with Éliane Radigue begin and develop into Occam River XXIX?
DW: In the last 15 years I was regularly involved in the making of works in the Occam Océan series, from solo to large ensemble pieces. Working with Éliane had a strong impact on my musical path. The way she has chosen to work with musicians, making pieces for specific performers through a collaborative process is very beautiful, it involves a lot of respect from every single person and of the music itself. This attitude also has to do with the music she wants to create. Éliane has been looking for something subtle, capable of captivating the listening and shifting our perception. Sounds that are capable of unfolding themselves, as if they could tell a secret. We often speak about the centrality of spectral qualities in her music, but it isn’t only about this. The way the sounds let partials and subpartials emerge is also very important, somewhere between control and letting happen. The control of instrumental techniques is absolutely important, as much as leaving the sounds finding their own way almost independently. This results in a listening journey that brings performers and listeners close to one another.
I am very happy that Éliane agreed to make a piece for us. It was the first time I was involved in a piece with a singer in the Occam Océan series and it was fascinating to observe our work evolving. I have learned a lot from this experience. With Éliane it is also like that! After many pieces you think you know how to do things, but then you realize that every experience is different, you have to stay open.
Éliane Radigue
YZ: Your duo's co-composition Aus dem Zeltbuch and Éliane Radigue's Occam River XXIX both focus on two different aspects of voice and its relation to the cello, instrumental qualities on one side and a field of words on the other. Could you please explain why you decided to pair these two pieces on this album?
DW: These two pieces were born almost at the same time, they are connected but also independent. Especially while recording and mixing them we were surprised to discover how different they are. And at the same time, both of them are open compositions that allow us to breath inside a given structure.
These works also reflect an encounter between three women of three different generations. To be honest, I am unable to explain what that means exactly, or how precisely it affected the music. But for Marianne and I it definitely meant something, it gave a certain profoundness in what we were doing. Because of her age and health, Éliane recently decided to stop making new pieces; we feel very privileged to have been able to do this piece with her.
It is true that the presence of words in Aus dem Zeltbuch marks a big difference between the two pieces. And at the same time the importance of words in this piece is also in the moments they are not there anymore. I think that Marianne and I are both attracted by sound situations that leave space for something mysterious and unseizable.
Marianne Schuppe and Deborah Walker at the premiere concert of ‘Aus dem Zeltbuch’ and ‘Occam River XXIX’ in Walcheturm, Zürich (26 April 2023)
YZ: Marianne, I read in your bio that you studied vocals under Michiko Hirayama in Rome. I was pleasantly surprised because my late aunt, who was a vocal professor at a music college, graduated from the same Tokyo University of the Arts as Ms. Hirayama, but two years earlier. I found their names together on the same page of the list of graduates from those years online. After graduating, my aunt also moved to Rome to study opera, but she had to give it up after catching a bad flu that left her unable to sing at a high volume.
I'm not sure how these things are connected, but when I first listened to your duo's recording of Radigue's Occam River XXIV, your voice reminded me of my late aunt and filled my heart with nostalgia. Your voice also evokes Japanese aesthetics in me—the humble, noble, simple and beautiful values that old Japan used to possess (and something that my aunt and parents possessed as well). I wonder if you acquired this special quality from Ms. Hirayama.
Could you tell us about your experiences learning from her, and what you gained from the time you spent with her?
MS: What a surprise! I had a long-lasting and unique student-master-relation with Michiko, meeting her not only in Rome, but also in other places in Europe. Maybe at some point we have the opportunity to meet in person and talk about this coincidence.
Working with Michiko marked an important phase of my life. But 5 years before meeting her I had been in South India to study Carnatic vocal music in a daily four months practice. This experience deeply formed my understanding as a singer in being a vessel, a medium for music. In the many concerts I visited I felt that the music was much more celebrated than the musician. This attitude resonated strongly with my understanding.
Between 1988 and 2003 I travelled regularly from Basel to Rome to take lessons with Michiko. I attended her concerts, I was in the studio, when she recorded, I sang when her 80th birthday was celebrated in the University Sapienza in Rome. Our encounters were accompanied by long conversations about voice and Scelsi’s music, which wouldn’t exist without Michiko and her essential work in developing all of Scelsi’s vocal cycles.
I learned that the ever condemned vibrato of voice may be adequate in certain moments as long as it is used with a musical vision. And I got an inkling of why she had refused to sing Madame Butterfly in Salzburg. She was courageous and she was reverential. She was Japanese, but she had left Japan behind. She made me sing Bellini when I wanted to work on contemporary stuff and when we started to work on Scelsi’s vocal repertoire – her proposal to me – we worked meticulously bar after bar. We were both detached and close in certain moments. We shared a deep commitment to singing and a compromiseless attitude towards what we wanted to sing. I am extraordinarily grateful to her and when I reread my answers to your questions now I see the line of generations that are present in my work.
(Interview conducted in January - February 2026)
Deborah Walker and Marianne Schuppe in Berlin (June 2022)
Éliane Radigue - Occam River XXIX (excerpt)
Swiss-based German vocalist/composer Marianne Schuppe and Berlin-based Italian cellist Deborah Walker present two duo works: Aus dem Zeltbuch, co-composed by Schuppe and Walker; and Occam River XXIX, a piece by French composer Éliane Radigue.
Aus dem Zeltbuch (2022/23), based on a text-collage by Marianne Schuppe, reveals a surface of a word-sound texture on the edge of acoustic intelligibility. Aus dem Zeltbuch questions our perception of language in a musical context by creating bilingual areas of sound. As words and sounds overlap, they may reveal a path of sound through narration, meaning, and understandability.
Occam River XXIX (2023) is part of Occam Océan, a large body of work that Éliane Radigue began in 2011. The compositional process involves imagery, oral transmission, and memory, resulting in a creative relationship between the composer and the performers. Like all the pieces in the Occam Océan series, Occam River XXIX was made for and with Schuppe and Walker through a close collaborative process. The music develops from the inner life and nature of sounds, their spectral complexity, internal evolution, and mutual interaction. It features a unique approach to being inside a sound together and reacting subtly to what is constantly becoming.
