Hans Zender, "Canto II"

Canto II

Few composers of the avant-garde have divided their work as evenly over two areas as has the composer and conductor Hans Zender. Not only does his conducting guarantee him a basic income which allows him complete independence in his creative work; it is also a means for presenting his own works and those of other composers to the public in competent performances - a goal to which he attaches great importance. As he once wrote in a programme essay, "The Responsibility of the Performer": "The performer's task is, first and foremost, to give the audience access to its own times. There is only one way to accomplish this: by doing everything in our power to present the most convincing performances possible. Not by speaking about music, but by letting 'the musik speak for itself.'

Hans Zender was born in Wiesbaden in 1936. From 1956- 1959 he studied in Frankfurt and Freiburg, where he attended 'Wolfgang Fortner's composition class. He worked briefly in the theatres in Freiburg and Bonn before, in 1968, being appointed general music director in Gel. Since 1971 he has held this same position at Saarland Broadcasting. Like his friend Bernd Alois Zimmermann - whose works in particular Zender has always championed - Zender's thought as a composer hinges on the notion of time: the creation of musical continuity in time, its articulation and formation.

In his works, he seeks to subject the ineluctable progress of time to a rigorous logic, and - as is particularly apparent in his "Schachspiel" (Chess Game) of 1969 for double orchestra - to sublimate the undefined teleological goal of the passage of time by means of a well-grounded process based on causal connections. In his compositions with voice - which make up a sizable part of his oeuvre - he has experimented with the text in many and varied ways, making a significant contribution to the subject of music and language.

"Canto II'' is one of a group of four works all bearing the name "Canto". Zender intends this word to be understood in the sense used by Ezra Pound, whose "Cantos" also provide the texts for these compositions. "Canto I", for instance, combines a Latin hymn and an excerpt from the Greek version of St Matthew; "Canto 111'' uses the first part of "Don Quixote" and a poem in Spanish by Cervantes, while "Canto IV" draws on passages from the Old and New Testament, selections from the writings of Thomas Muenzer and Martin Luther, and the "Hymne la matiere" by Teilhard de Chardin.

"Canto 11" consists of five distinct sections:

Introduction, to rehearsal number 7, lines 1-9
Main Section I, rehearsal numbers 7-18, lines 1-26
Main Section 11, rehearsal numbers 18-28, lines 27-61
Main Section 111, rehearsal nulmbers 28-5 I, lines 62-96
Coda, from rehearsal number 5 I, lines 97-101

Thus the music follows as a whole the course of the text, rearrangement being required solely in the 2nd and 3rd Main Sections where several non-contiguous lines of text are heard simultaneously.

Zender hiimself has spoken of "Canto II" in relatively explicit terms. His comments - which appeared in the programme notes accompanying the premiere on 26 January 1968 at West German Radio in Cologne - are worth repeating as they point out the main features of his compositional approach. We shall reprint them here, at least in excerpt, merely noting that they invite further comment and continuing discussion.

When I set Pound's "Canto XXXIX" I had two principal ideas in mind: first. the absolute structural unity of voice parts and instruments - the chorus and orchestra act in a sort of "mirror image" of each other, and even the slightest separation of these two groups is impossible. Zender does not illuminate the point any further, and it remains in this cryptic form. The reason why he stresses the inseparability of the instrumental and vocal groups (i.e. chorus and soloists) is thast their interaction is one of the key features of the formal design. In the Introduction, the orchestral writing and the choral parts are practically unrelated, while in Main Section I they combine as closely as possible, forming rhythmically and melodically similar lines or even sounding in unison. In Main Section I1 the two groups are made to contrast by the fact that the chorus almost exclusively speaks. Main Section I11 strikes a balance between connection and separation, with partial congruence being realized by means of heterophony, ornamentation by the instruments of sung pitches, or by rhythmically displaced borrowings. Finally, in the Coda, all these modes of interaction are briefly recapitulated.

Second, the declamation of the poem in a clearly defined "tempo": each line (or couplet) is declaimed within a fixed time span, namely I I seconds - the text is swept forward in a fixed, wave-like macrorhythm (as Pound put it, "to the rest of the measure", "with one measure, unceasing").

The link which Zender draws between the contents of lines 76 and 84 of the poem and the macrorhythm of his piece, being a mere superficial analogy, is hardly convincing. Yet there exists a further correspondence with the work's form: as a poem made up of lines of equal length, the text is brought into immediate relation with the music, which likewise falls into sections of equal magnitude. In Its second version the work has 53 of these sections (three less than in the first version).
The 11 seconds mentioned by the composer represent an average duration; as can be determined from the metronome markings, the length of the sections varies between 9 1/3 secs (Section 9) and 13.6 secs (Section I I). Length, "metrical" grouping and the type of agogic modifioation employed are the distinguishing features of the sections. The use of these features to shape the sections, as well as the linking of similar sections, provide an additional formal device in the aforementioned five divisions of the work.

The possibilities for structuring this sort of "time-wave are, of course, limitless. Adjoining waves may be simi1ar or dissimilar in form. This fact alone leads to three possible formal processes: adjoining waves of similar structure will create a continuum (either static or evolving toward a goal); adjoining waves of conflicting structure will highlight the individual wave form by their discontinuity; or, when both types are combined. i.e. when two inwardly continuous but outwardly conflicting series of waves overlap, the result is a sort of collage technique.

This addresses the key issue of che work, and at the same time an essential aspect of the poem: the relation of the part to the whole, in regard both to content and to progress in time - in other words, the question whether the parts combine to form a unified process or convey the impression of a disiunct series. Ezra Pound's detailed elaboration of this question is one of the outstanding features of his poetry, which incorporates, as is well known, items of disparate provenance (in "Canto XXXIX" rhese are taken primarily from "Canto I" of the "Odyssey", Ovid's "Metamorphoses", Catullus's "Carmina", Vergiil's "Aeneid" and Dante's "Paradise").

In "Canto II" Zender has turned these three "possible formal processes" into distinguishing features of the five major divisions of his work. The decisive point - or so it seems at first - is not so much the form of ,the individual sections but rather the relation between neighbouring sections. This imparts continuity to the relatively loose-structured and hence similar sections of the Introduction. and discontinuity to the series of self-contained but contrasting parts of Main Section I. If, in the Introduction, the continuum takes the form of static immobility, in Main Section I11 it becomes a continuous evolution, above all because of the gradual increase in motion.

Nevertheless, with the "collage technique" that governs Main Section 11, the shape of the sections themselves is clearly a determining factor in the choice of 'the formal processes. Loose-structured sections in free motion will not constitute a discontinuous process even in combination: instead they produce a static surface - or, when combined, a multi layered texture - and fuse into an indissoluble whole. For this reason Zender also draws the ape of the se~tionsin to his account and speaks entirely of continuous series of waves. The layers they produce - which overlap in Main Section 111 - are the orchestral writing on the one hand and, on the other, the choral parts supported by a few percussion instruments and electric guitar. The choral writing is likewise divided into levels which contrast in 'the metre and language of their respective lines of text. -- Christian Martin Schmidt
(Translation: J. Bradford Robinson)