Werner Heider, "Bezirk"

Werner Heider is a composer who has never considered his activities as both pianist and conductor to be mere drudgery and after many years he still pursues both with ardour. At the age of seventeen he already made recordings with the Bayerischer Rundfunk in their Nuremberg studio - Heider was born on the 1st January 1930 in Furth (adjoining Nuremberg) - and on occasion was able to record his own compositions: "Typen fur Saxophon und Klavier" for instance, an early work written in 1948.

After completing his studies in Nuremberg (1945-5 I) with Willy Spilling and Richard Lauer (violin) he attended the Musikhochschule in Munich where he studied with Karl Holler (composition), Maria Landes-Hindemitch (piano) and Heinrich Kappe (conducting). Since that time Heider has played more than 80 works by contemporary composers in concerts and on the radio and he works as pianist, conductor or as artistic director in and for a whole series of musical ensembles who devote themselves to the performance of contemporary music: "Colloquium musicale", "Confronto" (chamber music and Jazz), "ars nova ensemble nurnberg", as well duets and trios with Deinzer and Colbentson-Deinzer.

Heider considers the cultivation of a "personal style" to be uncreative and inartistic and prefers to find an appropriate formative process for each new work. Accordingly Heider does not cultivate in his compositions any stylistic orthodoxy or reject techniques which have developed in the past. Twelve-tone technique, serial, post-serial or aleatoric methods are thus to be found in Heider's works just as much as Klangfarbenkomposition or tonal structures. Each new work springs from a real new beginning, and is "a product/project complete in itself, whose 'problem' has to be solved or dealt with each time. The next. new work" as Heider writes in a commentary, "has nothing whatever to do with the preceding one. Each of my pieces is the encountering and dealing with a special 'situation' and consequently is an original/individual. A 'unique event' so to speak. There are no continuations - a region which has been explored is checked off and the journey is continued in new territories.''

This unprejudiced treatment of the possibilities of composing at the present time, of new musical material, of stylistic and artistic attitudes allows Heider to play Jazz also and to this day he composes pieces for Jazz ensembles. "Rock-art fur Sinfonieorchester" (1981) is witness to the fact that Heider has remained faithful to this aspect of his work as composer.

Heider once characterized in notes the fields of interest to which the individual works belong. Here one finds "Geometrisches und Graphisches aus der Bildenden Icunst" with reference to pieces written between 1959 and 1974: "Plakat" for Orchestra. Heider speaks further of "Events in special, strict forms" and mentions works between 1963 and 1966: "Plan" for 12 string instruments. "Menschliche Verhaltensweisen" (types of human behaviour) is the name given by the composer to his next standpoint and he notes pieces written in the seventies, including "einander" (each other) for Trombone and Orchestra (1970). Works which were composed between 1967 and 1982 - "Musik-Geschichte" (musical history) for Piano and Orchestra amongst ochers - are characterized by the following: "Musik-Geschichten/Begegnunge /Gestalten/Erscheinungen: on no account programme music, always a musical programme, a compositional one." This is followed by the mention of "Preference: 'Concertos' = the individual in the masses / the solo instrument with the collective of the orchestra". To this belong such works as "Bezirk" (1969) and naturally "Musik Geschichte" for Piano and Orchestra (1982). Further notes by Heider refer to the instrumental scoring and finally there are works which the composer is unwilling to classify, which were "unique" concerns.

Heider often quotes Karl Valentin, and Valentin's subtle art of ingenuousness would seem to be an excellent perspective from which to approach Heider's oeuvre. For the purposes of this biographical sketch the composer made a few notes on the composer's metier which are given here.

Werner Heider - Thoughts

Who do I in fact compose for? For me - for you - for us - for some - for a few - for several - for many: for all!
I would like to write music without limits.
In art there is neither reason nor tolerance.
I like the strange, the unusual, the peculiar.
The density of events in a small space.
The best place to be is "between" the stools; at all events it is better than sitting firmly to the right or to the left.
I do not model my works on those of any one, but I picture things to myself. I imagine "pictures" of my music, of my ideas, my thoughts, I picture to myself the path I shall take in the future, the one that I would tread as a musician. I want always to gain more self-awareness, thus I am my own model.

Bezirk

On hearing Werner Heider's Piano Concerto - written in 1969 - for the first time, an analytic mind will soon become aware of a musical idiom whose spontaneity, and whose inclination for large orchestral outbursts as for chamber-musical lucid expressiveness or for monologue is unmistakable. And the whole work - of almost 13 minutes duration - seems on reflection to be a delicate balance between instrumental timbres and striking figures, of statistic and pointilliste structures, of precipitate orchestral structures ot vibrant orgiastic character and chamber-musical stretches or passages for piano monologues.

Werner Heider's musical idiom does not deny the tradition of serial music, its gestures of large intervals, an inclination for figuration, the significance of clearly perceptible caesuras and a structural disposition of the over-all compositional process in which the degrees of density become the criterion of composition. The composer has given the following plan as the formal basis of his Piano Concerto: "Four marginal districts' of equal size surround four 'main districts' of varying sizes, which differ from each other specifically in register (treble or bass or universal), dynamics, and instrumentation. The centre of the piece is the 'cadenza' with a kind of orchestral 'obelisk' as the culminating point."
The concerto is grouped around a central axis and is symmetrical. The positioning of the instruments in the orchestra corresponds to this formal idea where the piano, the string quartet and the horn are placed in the middle. To the right and left of these are two groups, each consisting of a string quintet, a percussion group and a trumpet or respectively a tuba. This disposition must be kept to at all costs, "as the form and instrumentation of the piece is related to it". The resultant stereophonic effect belongs to the structure of the composition.



Werner Heider's "Bezirk" also is witness to the fact that not only is he an experienced pianist and jazz pianist but that he also is versed in the art of improvisation as well as in that of composition: be it in the company of chamber-music ensembles, or as a soloist or with other (jazz) musicians. This talent for quasi improvised events, for spontaneous instrumental ideas is revealed by many places in the score and in particular in the writing for piano. For instance, in the central structure of the concerto - the "cadenza".

Here several strata of sound are sustained on the principle of "near and far" which are then constantly broken up or resolved in figurations. But Werner Heider's Piano Concerto is also a work that fits in to a certain extent in the contemporary tendency for Klangfarbenkomposition" of the sixties which was inaugurated by Ligeti and Penderecki. Certainly, the orchestral clusters, the rotating or precipitate orchestral passages are often enriched with figurations and only seldom composed as pure "Klangfarben-passages. And the fact that Heider's composition attempts to mediate between figurative and "Klangfarben" structures and that its compositional point of departure is to be found there, is indicated by the directions in the score and a type of notation which alternates between precise notation in the traditional sense and vague notation or uses both forms simultaneously. And this is so in both dimensions of Heider's writing: in that of pitch and of the durations of notes.

In the directions for playing there can be found, both for the wind players and the strings, instructions such as: "note oscillation (upwards and downwards)", "glissandi up and down", "vibrato", "senza vitbrato, directions, that is to say, that have the tendency to obscure intervallic relations or give them the character of timbre changes or, as in the case of "vibrato" together with dynamic markings or bowing, also more suggest differences in timbre rather than clarity of intervals. On the other hand there are the composer's directions such as: "strict, angular", "burst in", "hard, dry", which give character to the musical figure and so define it precisely.

In a commentary the composer deals with the terminological question as to whether "Bezirk" for Piano and Orchestra in fact belongs to the genre of the piano concerto.

"Between 1962 and 1982 I composed seven 'concertos': Konturen for Violin and Orchestra, Strophen for Clarinet and Chamber Orchestra, Bezirk for Piano and Orchestra, - einander for Trombone and Orchestra, nachdenken uber . . . for Trumpet and Orchestra, Musik-Geschichte for Piano and Orchestra.

I couldn't really call any of these pieces a 'concerto', as the orchestra does not have a subordinate, accompanying function in relation to the solo instrument. The main artery (the solo instrument) is dovetailed and intimately bound up with the orchestra - it is embedded in it. Contours are made clear, obscured, hidden, only to stand out again for a shorter or longer time in order to give it more character." -- Wolfgang Burde (Translation: John Bell