York Holler, "Schwarze Halbinseln"

YORK HOLLER
York Holler was born on 11 November 1944 in Leverkusen. From 1963 to 1967 he studied music pedagogy at the Cologne Musikhochschule, where until 1970 he also studied composition with Bernd Alois Zimmermann and Joachim Blume, piano with Alfons Kontarsky and Else Schmitz-Gohr, and conducting with Wolfgang von der Nahmer. He also took courses in musicology and philosophy at the university. After attending Pierre Boulez's courses in analysis at the 1961 Darmstadt Summer Courses for New Music, Holler was inspired to take up both the theoretical and practical sides of serial music. For his degree in music pedagogy he wrote a dissertation, "Kritische Untersuchung der seriellen Kompositionstechnik" (Critical Study of the Serial Technique of Composition, 1967), drawing on ideas from information theory and Gestalt psychology which, even today, still underly his music. He also wrote a piece for orchestra, "Topic" (1967), freely adapting serial procedures, and a "Sonate informelle for piano (1968) which was stimulated by Theodor W. Adorno's hypothetical notion of "musique informelle".

In addition, Holler was fascinated by the potential in electronic music for generating and manipulating sound - a potential which is far from exhausted. In 1969-70 he worked with Herbert Eimert in the Electronic Studio of the Cologne Musikhochschule; and in 1971-2 he was invited by Karlheinz Stockhausen to the Electronic Music Studio of the Westdeutscher Rundfunk in Cologne. Here he created his four-channel composition "Horizont" (Horizon, 1971-2). Since 1978 he has frequently worked at IRCAM, Boulez's research centre in Paris. Since then Holler has been a freelance composer living in Cologne, where he also is a part-time staff member at the Musikhochschule, teaching analysis and music theory. He has made the fusion of instrumental and electronic sounds the hallmark of his work, as shown in pieces such as "Klanggitter" (Sound Lattice, 1975-6) for cello, piano, synthesizer and tape, "Antiphon" for string quartet and tape (1976-7), and several works uniting orchestra and tape: "Arcus" (1978), "Mythos" (1979), "Umbra" (1979-80) and "Resonance" (1981).

Schwarze Halbinseln (Black Peninsulas)

"Schwarze Halbinseln" for full orchestra, voices and electronic sounds was written in 1982 and received its premiere from the Symphony Orchestra of the Westdeutscher Rundfunk in Cologne on 27 November 1982, the conductor being Diego Masson. The title and voice parts of the work (which Holler dedicated to Stockhausen) are taken from the expressionist poet Georg Heym: the title refers to a metaphor from Heym's poem to a "metaphysical country" whose "black peninsulas reach deep into our fleeting days". As his text Holler chose Heym's poem "Die Nacht", or "The Night":

All flames died that night on the steps.
All wreaths withered. And there below.
Lost in blood, moaned Horror. Sometimes, from afar,
Dark cries echoed as from beyond the portals of the dead.

High above, a torch leaned from the passageways,
Ran in chorus. And sank like the hair of daemons,
Red, spluttering. Yet outside, the tips of the woods
Grew in the storm and stretched their length.

And above, in clouds, with wild gibbering
Came the hoary greybeards of the storm,
And giant birds started across the sky
Like ships with damp sails hanging from the waves.

But lightning bolts, wild and blood-shot, rent
The night, lighting the bleak halls,
And there in the mirrors, garish, brandishing blackened fists,
Stood the dead.

Stay with me. Let our hearts not freeze
When the doors open softly onto the darkness
And It stands in the silence. -And Its iron breath
Congeals our blood and dessicates our souls

So that, narrow as a sigh, they rise from the deep
And flutter into the night, sinking, falling,
Brittle as leaves wafting forlornly on the ground,
Cast into the emptiness by the evil wind.

When the laughter of thunderclaps fades in the dark.

Yet not until the end of the piece does the poem appear on the tape in its original, unadulterated form. Until then its speech-rhythms, expressive gestures and images infuse the music, as it were, in the background, where the text is electronically distorted and parcelled out to a solo female voice and a women's chorus. For exemple, 15 seconds after the piece has begun, the opening lines of the poem ("Alle Flammen starben in Nacht auf den Stufen . . .") are whispered by the female soloist, yet modulated to such an extent that while the articulation remains intact the individual words become unintelligible. Just like the instrumental sounds, Holler harnesses even these vocal sounds to attain a synthesis between natural and electronic sounds. For "Schwarze Halbinseln" he has created a sound repertory of nine categories, some of them further divided into subcategories: (I) electronically generated sound material (subdivided into noises, sounds, and compound sounds); (2) instrumentally generated sound material (sounds and noises); (3) instrumental sounds subjected to electronic transformation (by means of ring, filter or amplitude modulation); (4) vocal sounds; (5) vocal sounds subjected to electronic transformation; (6) mixtures of vocal and electronic sounds; (7) speech; (8) electronically transformed speech; and (9) electronic sounds modulated by speech. The tape which Holler produced at the Electronic Music Studio of the Westdeutscher Rundfunk, Cologne, from July to September 1982 contains - in addition to the electronic sounds - the parts for women's chorus and female voice as well as several instrumental sounds which would have been difficult to synthesize in comparable form.

Holler's "Schwarze Halbinseln" is not only a prime example of the extreme sophistication available in the early 1980s for merging electronic, instrumental and vocal sounds; it also reveals a carefully planned compositional design and execution. The work opens with an introduction lasting almost a full quarter of the piece. This introduction, based on a 12-note row, presents the musical material of the work. The main section which then follows comprises five interlinked but musically contrasting sections, and derives from a 31-note "sound aggregate" containing all of the essential compositional features of the work as regards melody, harmony, form and rhythm (see above). -- Christoph von Blumroder (Translation: J. Bradford Robinson)