Dieter Schoenbach, "Canticum Psalmi ad Laudes"

-- Liner Notes --

Dorothy Dorow, Soprano
Sinfonieorchester des Norddeutschen Rundfunks, Andrzej Markowski

Dieter Schonbach was born on 18 January 1931 in the town of Stolp in Pomerania. From 1949 to 1959 he attended the Northwest German Music Academy in Detmold, studying composition with Gunter Bialas and choral conducting with G. H. Kurt Thomas, and the Musikhochschule in Freiburg, where he was a composition pupil of Wolfgang Fortner. In 1959 he became director of stage music in Bochum, moving in the same capacity to Munster (Westphalia) in 1968 - a position he still holds today - and to the Basle City Theatre in 1973. He wrote his first multi-media opera "Die Geschichte von einem Feuer" in 1968, and attracted attention with his multi-media show "Hymnus 2", which he wrote and staged for the 1972 Olympics in Munich. Since 1980 he has been working with a new theatrical medium - the audio-visual Raumklangtheater (Theatre of Space and Sound).

Canticum Psalmi ad Laudes

The composer has described his work as follows: " 'Canticum Psalmi ad Laudes', fur soprano and instruments, was written in 1965 during a phase of my compositional development in which, for the first time, I attempted rigourously to incorporate a key element in my work - the 'Klangkurve' (sound curve) - into the system of geometric rays. The artist and avant-garde sculptor Gunter Weseler made a one-metre graphic sketch for my piece, creating arc segments from plan and punctiform figures until they became abstracted from the other material and formed a web of ascending, descending and interlocking curves.

When translating this graphic design into music I was able, with the aid of parabolas and hyperbolas, to arrange these curves into a fixed hierarchical system, giving my composition (in keeping with the Vulgata text) an almost glass-like rigidity occasionally lightened in the jubilant outbursts of the soprano." The text derives from Psalm 144 (verses 1-7), "Exaltabo te deus meus rex", which is found in the Vespers for Saturday. As the psalm belongs strictly speaking to the laudatory hymns, Schoenbach's setting bears the title "Canticum Psalmi ad Lauds". -- Clytus Gottwald (Translation: J. Bradford Robinson)

Hans Otte, "passages"

-- Liner Notes --

Hans Otte (born 1926) does not seem to have passed through a continuous stylistic development in the course of his career as a composer. And yet it is precisely the stylistic differences that stress the continuity of his artistic aims: "A Journey of a Thousand Miles Begins with One Step" (1979) is a typical title in this connection of a piece for the theatre in seven scenes with music. In Otte's case, it is not so much a matter of how he writes, but of what he reacts to. After instrumental and orchestral music in the fifties, and critical pieces for the music theatre in the sixties in which, together with Ligeti and Kagel, Otte was a leading figure, Otte's aesthetic credo became increasingly unequivocal: the search for the uninfluenced self (knowing full well that this is a utopian quest) and the search for the character and independent life of sound per se, which, stripped of superimposed structures must be found and experienced again. The composer looks upon the dialogue with sounds as a process of discovering their nature. "It is an old dream of mine that the nature of sounds is discovered and that they are not used in order to express something else." (Otte)

Heavily influenced by Asiatic philosophies and cultures, Otte believes in intensive work with his audiences, whose ability to receive and communicate is a more or less structural part of his works: for him this is the only way of trying to recover the lost faculty of mental reception which prevents any real understanding. Otte's inclusion of the fine arts, video techniques, theatre and film, electronics and environment in his works is not done simply to achieve an interesting extension of the available material, but, on the contrary, as a form of "self-denial" (as he once called it), in order to reveal relationships and expose structures. He is very much involved with Brecht's and Benjamin's central term gestus, without reading into it the same pedagogical, or political, implications. Otte frequently emphasizes that the composer, the interpreters and the audience should ideally achieve an uninfluenced self-awareness, a dream, as it were, of their unity, a dream also of unshared perception. This concept is so important to the composer, that he is scarcely prepared to comment on his works any more: "That would defeat my very aim. It would deprive the listener of approaching a new piece of modern music without prejudice." (Otte)

The early critical works, of which "daidalos" is one, should be regarded as a stock taking of superannuated structures rather than a challenge. The whole output of the last ten years is no longer directly concerned with social and political themes, but only indirectly - with the negation of this society,., with its division of labour - in that it represents a search for reasons and meaning, a search which is no longer occidental in nature: the spiritual and material sources are the philosophies and methods of the Asiatic search for awareness, the American school around John Cage, and all the elements of present-day intermedial art, which make Otte one of the most important representatives of visual music. The choice of titles alone already seems significant in relation to this inward route towards the "indivisible whole" (Otte): Book for orchestra - text - biography - writing - harmony - yes:no - body music - what's the difference between you and me? - reflex - I.

A brief close look at a few selected works: In "tropismen" for piano, written in 1959, individual figures are modelled from a central note, and despite the still very clear connection with serial music, the colour value of the individual sound, its harmonious delicacy, is already very characteristic of Otte's language. "Passages", for piano and orchestra (1965), which caused a scandal at it's first performance in Donaueschingen in 1966, opens up an immense source of utopian sound, and, with quasiquotations, and some tonal elements, makes provocative fun of any idea of progress along such lines. "Touches" for organ, composed in the same year, is a montage of kitsch sounds directed against the emptiness of habit and consumption. Otte initially composed "daidalos" in 1960 as a seven-part ballet for two pianos, guitar, harp, and two drums. He formulated seven structural elements matching the seven stages of the classical legend of Daidalos, who created artificial human beings and animals, and is regarded as the originator of the labyrinthian dance: dynamics, metre, articulation, density, sound mixture and noise, pitch, and the combination of all the parameters. Independently of Otte's work, but with similar aims, Helms developed a literary-compositorial form based on the concept that puppets are the equivalent of mass man, who can only experience a objectized existence. He uses the international phonetic alphabet, and phonetic and semantic alienations of phrases and cliches. Thus, due to their common ground, the two works are related to each other "like two parts of a whole" (Helms).

"Modell" (1963-6~), one of the first music theatre pieces, is one of Otte's most important works of this genre, and has sub-titles indicating that you can only test something by trying it, and that the piece is intended to demonstrate the "speechlessness of language". It is an attempt to use the banality and cliches of language to expose disguised lack of communication, and has some great godfathers: Gustave Flaubert, James Joyce, and Theodor W. Adorno.

"alpha-omega I and 11" (1960 and 1966) lashes out savagely at secularized liturgical language and empty colloquiallisms. "nature morte" (1960) marks the first step away
from criticism, away from the concreteness of false communication to the concreteness of sound: with the aid of the consonants and vowels of the title the development of a sound, of a word and a picture is demonstrated. This also represents the first reversal of producer and recipient - from which Otte was later to draw other, multifarious formal consequences: for example, the dramaturgy of "On Earth" is based on the reversal of actor and spectator; this "stocktaking of human culture" requires a sound landscape of 36 loudspeakers. Thus the pieces are not so much compositions as realizations - for example, the use of one's voice in "vox" (1976) or the use of photography in "hier" (1976-79).

"nolimetangere" (1966167) is a further scenic-filmic and verbal onslaught on society and ideology: the form, the intermingling of music, action, and picture characterizes - typically for this period - Otte's theatre of consciousness. "terrain" for large orchestra (1974) is a radical realization of Otte's idea of gestus: a single musical form rises throughout the orchestra and subsides again. The delicate rhythmical structures are reminiscent of American minimal music. Here the ability to understand is virtually the subject of the composition. A similar aim but different method is to be found in "Book for orchestra" (1968): the splitting of the sounds into the smallest possible particles and their individualization. Again and again the subject is sounds, texts, spaces - as also in "show down" (1979), a large-scale sound landscape in which one goes in search of sounds with the aid of the movements of the loudspeakers. The switching back and forth from major to minor helps to make a sound wholly visible and audible - this is Otte's immanent protest against consumability, it is a composition along the lines of "modell". "orient:occident" (1979) is a work that completely ignores the process of producing, and utterly concentrates on forms of perception. In it, intervals are held for - for Europeans - almost unbearable lengths of time against a contrasting background of waterfall-like electronic sound. and clusters of major, and minor thirds. The effect is like an attempt to recover the original beauty of a single interval - stressed by the intonation of the wind instruments.

Hans Otte was trained as a pianist (he attended Walter Gieseking's master class) and began a promising career as such, playing with various European orchestras of note. But the interpretation of Classical and Romantic music could not give him lasting satisfaction. As a composition pupil of Paul Hindemith, he won a number of important prizes and a scholarship for the Villa Massimo in Rome. In 1959 he became Director of the Music Department at Radio Bremen, a post that he still holds. Otte's works are performed at all the important festivals of contemporary music, and are also performed at the "pro musica nova" biennale in Bremen. -- Ute Schalz-Laurenze (Translation: John Bell)

Johannes Fritsch, "Modulation I"

-- Liner Notes --

The broad range of Johannes Fritsch's activities as a performer, theorist and producer of music was already discernible in his years at the university and Musikhochschule in Cologne. His musicological studies were complemented by philosophy
and sociology, his composition classes under Bernd Alois Zimmermann by lessons on the viola, in which he took his performance degree sin 1965. A major influence on his future development was his close association with Karlheinz Stockhausen, in whose ensemble he played viola from 1964 to 1970.

Since the 1960s Fritsch, who was born in 1941, has not only made numerous concert tours, recordings and radio broadcasts as an instrumentalist but has also developed remarkably as a teacher. In 1971 he was appointed head of the new music seminar at the Darmstadt Academy of Music, and he also teaches harmony and "media aesthetics" at the Musikhochschule in Cologne. In order to work independently of the musical establishment he founded, with Rolf Gehlhaar and David Johnson, the Cologne Feedback Studio in 1971, and one year later the like-named publishing house, the "first German publishing house operated for and by composers".

Trained in one of the centres of German avant-garde music, Fritsch turned at the outset of his career to electronic music as a perfectly natural and even pivotal medium. Works with prerecorded tape or live electronic instruments - usually in combination with a chamber ensemble - or completely electronic pieces can be found at all stages of his career, and a considerable part of his work in the Feedback Studio has been devoted to developing new electronic instruments or equipping public auditoriums with autommic and semi-automatic sound-producing devices. Yet his output is particularly conspicuous not only for the almost equal importance of electronic and traditional sound-producing devices, but also for the large number of his srage pieces and film scores, betokening an undogmatic view of his art and a readiness to escape the hermeticism of art music.

Fritsch's open-mindedness toward music is even more apparent in the content of his works. Many of them have an unmistakable collage-like character deriving from his multi-form combination of materials deriving from completely different sources: European and non-European music, compositions past and present, artistic sonorities and natural sounds up to and including everyday noise. His incorporation of "public sounds" in particular - especially in the orchestral work "Akroasis" of 1966-1968 and in "Modulation IV" of 1968 - underscores his intention to liberate his works from their isolation as abstract aesthetic objects by confronting them with the sound of their real environment and hence with the inexhaustible external source of all musical imagination.

A key concept in Fritsch's work is the acoustic transmission of the heterogeneous materials employed. The technical procedure for this his transmission he calls "modulation". By this he means not only a transition from one state to another - as in the traditional sense of modulating from key to key - but also in the sense used in electronics, namely the various ways of influencing acoustic properties. "Modulation" is even the common name of a series of four compositions. The first, "Modulation I" (the subject of this essay), is completely subsumed in the second, where it is joined by other layers played by further instruments or tapes: "Modulation 111" for capes, and microphones (1968), subtitled "permanent music for rooms or spaces", and "Modulation IV" for four groups of loudspeakers (also 1968) point the way to the further incorporation of public sounds - a path, incidentally, which Fritsch later abandoned. "Modulation I" (1966), written for the same forces as Schubert's "Trout Quintet", is primarily concerned with the transmission of internal musical forms and sonorities. Several themes or sections from earlier works of music are combined, by means of modulation, with avant-garde instrumental sonorities representing practically all of ,the latest pianistic and string performance techniques. The piece opens with four themes from 19th- ,and 20th-century works which then proceed to dominate the first section:



These .themes are introduced almost exactly as in the original; indeed, the first three are played in their original instrumentation. The Beethoven theme, however, is not only varied in point of instrumentation (it is played by piano and double bass), but is also transposed downwards by a half-step to form, as it were, a sort of tonal base one with the other themes. The sections which follow offer a few clear examples of modulation technique, i.e. the continuing alienation of the themes and their increasing proximity to the sonorities of new music: the sprinkling of a few fragmentary motives into a heterogeneous texture (from rehearsal number 3), the displacement of meaning by successive combinations of motives from different themes (from rehearsal number 3), the blurring of motivic contours by altering sonority and rhythm (from rehearsal number 4), and finally the use of contrapuntal variants such as cancrizans and inversion (from rehearsal number 5) - a procedure to which greater significance is attached in "Modulation II" than here.

The borrowed themes, though immediately recognizable (Fritsch indicates their origins in the score), practically never sound like quotations. This is due to the way they are embedded in the texture. For instance, when the four opening themes appear together in the exposition hardly a single motive is discernible on the surface. And even the relatively exposed passage from Mahler's Fourth Symphony (4th movt, bars I 5 3-61) which appears completely intact from rehearsal number 9 apart from one interruption avoids the impression of a quotation thanks to the fragmented quality of the original. The two-part writing for viola after rehearsal number 8 appears at best as a deja-vu, while B-A-C-H (from rehearsal number 14) is completely embedded in a six-part texture derived from the motive itself. Fritsch was quite right to say, in a lecture on "Modulation I" given at the 1974 Darmstadt Summer Courses: "The listener no longer hears certain things openly as quotations but rather as gestures arising from the sum total of the modulations of the various materials, forms and contents." Thus, modulation is not only the object of the piece: it begins at the pre-compositoion stage, and the borrowed themes enter the work in already modulated form. -- Christian Martin Schmidt (Translation: J. Bradford Robinson)

Erhard Karkoschka, "quattrologe"

Erhard Karkoschka (b. Ostraiu, Moravia, 1923) combines composition with a sizable practical interest in music theory and teaching. He studied musicology at Tiibingen University, graduating in 1959 with a dissertation on Webern's early works; he also studied composition and conducting at the Musikhochschule gin Stuttgart, joining the teaching staff in 1958 and becoming professor of theory in 1964. Among his writings on music, "Das Schridtbild der Neuen Musik" (The Notation of New Music; Celle, 1966) is outstanding.

In his works, which cover a wide spectrum in their scoring, Karkoschka has always taken note of the most recent developments in compositional technique. As early as 1960 he wrote an electronic piece, "Drei Bilder aus der Offenbarung des Johannes" (Three Scenes from the Revelation of St John), and his "psylex" of 1968 and "Mitlgegen sich selbst" (Witldagainst oneself) of 1970 both call for tape. Later his interest turned increasingly to group improvisation and aleatoric music. Yet his works characteristically stand out from those of most other avant-garde composers. This derives first and foremost from the emphasis he places on form, i.e, on creating a far-reaching and yet readily accessible large-scale structure. In pieces such as his "vier stufen" for orchestra (1966) he is even able to integrate sections of group improvisation into an overriding formal conception.

A further characteristic of the composer is his general inclination toward the pedagogical. For example, in light of the poor reception given to new music, he is not content simply to write works and have them performed; he also seeks to bring the listener closer to the meaning of the music by means other than acoustical perception or the printed score. For some of his works, e.g. "vier stufen" and "quattrologe", he has written so-called "Horhefte", or "listening guides". In these booklets, the musical events are presented in - admittedly highly compressed - graphic diagrams accompanied by verbal explanations. "The Horheft", as Karkoschka remarks in the lbtening guide to his "quattrologe", "stands somewhere between a score and an introductory exegesis of the work. It clears the path from the work to the listener."

The string quartet "quattrologe" (1966) consists of five movements with following titles:

evolution and metamorphosis I
dispute
metamorphosis II
serenade pathetique
metamorphosis III and destruction

The first, third and fifth movements are thus related by their titles which at the same time separate them from the intervening movements. They are also linked by content, as all are based on a single compositional idea: the emergence of a clearly defined musical complex in a series of distinctly articulated sections. This design recalls a traditional set of variations; but, however clearly 'the arrangement of the movements may derive from variation form by falling into sections and focusing on a theme, it departs considerably from this form in its actual content. For instance, just to mention the most obvious first, a complex of themes (Karkorschka calls them a "block") is merely hinted at in the opening section by means of isolated fragments of sound rising out of the void: not until the second section does this complex take on identifying features.

The first, third and fifth movements form a unified whole punctuated by the second and fourth movements, which form, so to speak, extraterritorial episodes. The duration of the movements shows that this relation is conscious and deliberate: the 88 seconds of the third movements and the 1OO seconds of the fifth exactly equal the 188 seconds of the first. Even their content follows this subdivision. The third and fifth movements draw respectively on the two main processes found in the first (though ignoring the number and length of the sections): namely, the third reverses the process of developmental variation which Karkoschka calls "metamorphosis", and the fifth confronts 'the "evolution" of the first movement with "destruction".

Evolution and destruction are the opposing poles at the beginning and end of the piece. They turn the work into a unified whole, providing a framework, as it were, for an organic, cyclical process. Equally cyclical are the "metamorphoses" in the first and third movements. which by standing in a mirror relation to each other impart unity to these movements too. In the first movement the opening thematic "block" is extended and stretched, and then restored to its original form: in several sections this is followed by a temporal compression of the opening block, producing a broad intensification of the tonal motion which only at the end returns to the block in its original form. The third movement moves in precisely the opposite direction: opening block - compression - opening block - stagnation - return to opening block. The difference from variation form is unmistakable: it is not the variation of a theme which is at issue here, but rather the filling in of an overriding formal design, the organisation of a process in time.

One time-honoured means for illustrating the cyclic principle in a composition is the use of canon. And in "quattrologe" the canon is the dominant compositional device. Karkoschka, however, is not concerned with creating a contrapuntal fabric; the end of the second movement, with its tone colour canon, is proof enough of this. Instead, he is more concerned with representing temporal relations - succession, concurrence, overtaking. The penultimate section of the first movement is especially rich in this regard: here the various tempo modifications to the melodic lines let now one part, now another appear as the Dux or Comes of the canon. A similar process takes place between the two violin parts in the fourth movement, though here the underlying idea is the juxtaposition of parts in free and precise rhythm (in this (interplay of exactitude and variability in the compositional details, which also has an effect at the diastematic (level, one can see an analogy to the formal processes of evo1ution and destruction). The most sophisticated elaboration of canonic layers can be found in the section following the static part in the third movement. Two sets of paired voices linked by rhythm and dynamics form both a rhythmic and - independently - a diastemaoic canon which runs parallel to a tone-colour canon. Furthermore, the cyclic principle is further intensified by a division of durations reminiscent of Messiaen's "noninvertible rhythms" (the note values of the first part, in semiquavers, are: 6 - 5 - 4 - 3 - 2 -I - I - 2/3 - 2/3 - I - I - 4/3 - 4/3 - 4/3 - 2 - 3 - 4 - 5 - 6).

Karkoschka has entitled his string quartet "quattrologeu, ' i.e. "quadro-logues" or "conversations with four participants". The canon presents him with one optional means of realizing" the many possibilities inherent in a conversational situation - simultaneity and succession, agreement and divergence, separation and unification. Thus, the title of the work finds its most apt, but certainly not its sole correspondence, in the second movement, the "dispute" - which, significantly, I ends in a canon. -- Christian Martin Schmidt (Translation: J. Bradford Robinson)

Nicolaus Huber, "Parusie - Annaherung und Entfernung"

Huber was born on the 15th of December 1939 in Passau. He studied at the Musikhochschule in Munich from 1958 to 1962; he subsequently studied composition with F. X. Lehner und Giinter Bialas until 1967. In 1965 and 1966 he worked together with Josef Anton Riedl in the Electronic Studlio in Munich. From 1967 to 1968 he stayed in Venice in order to study compositon with Luigi Nono. In 1969 Huber was awarded a prize by the ci,ty of Munich; in 1971 he received a scholarship to study at he Cite Internationale des Arts, Paris. During this time he was a member of Riedl's ensemble. From 1971 to 1974 Huber was Vice-President of the German section of the ISCM and was appointed Professor of composition at the Folkwangschule, Essen in 1974.

Parusie - Annaherung und Entfernung

"'Parusie' is a concept taken from Plato's philosophy and meaning the participation of the idea in things, i.e. we can recognize a chair as a chair, despite its dissimilarity from other chairs, because at some earlier time or mind visualized the idea of a chair and can recall this idea. The underlying idea of my piece 'Parusie' is a principle of motion: approaching vs. withdrawal."

Huber's definition can also be extended to theology, where 'nagovoia' means the reappearance or return of Christ, the notorious absence of which has been theology's eternal Gordian knot. Huber has elevated something quite unphilosophical - approaching vs. with dranal - to the level of a philosophical idea, to something fixed and immutable shining through the world of appearances. Strictly speaking, his idea is quite un-Platonic: in fact it is rather reminiscent of Heraclitus and his doctrine of eternal flux and the emanations of the primordial fire or "logos" to which all individual appearances eventually return. Admittedly Heracliltus, a confirmed atheist, described change as something immobile; but this immobility only receives meaning by virtue of the logos - reason - which manifests itself in eternal motion. A view of this sort has its snags: the fact that the logos governs the course of the world in all its contradictions - good and evil, peace and war - robs it of that very quality, rationality, which defines its status as the logos, making it instead blind and irrational. Nonetheless Huber is correct, in a metaphorical and strictly musical sense, to say that approaching and withdrawal form a principle. As he says: "The approach withdraw principle radiates its strength in all parameters. As reagards pitch, it produces compositional devices such as canon and heterophony, and performance techniques such as glissandos, trills and tremolos." The principle is most clearly evident in connection with loudness: forte sounds closer, more direct than piano or pianissimo. Even in regard to rhythm, approaching and withdrawal can be vividly represented by having rhythmic patterns suddenly coincide and then separate as rhythmic dissonance."

Fluctuation of this sort at the micro-level corresponds at the macro-level to the approach and withdrawal of quotations: "A full gamut of clarity in employed, from genuine quotation to mere analogy. Direct quotations can be easy or difficult to recognize; imitated compositional devices and performance techniques can function as quotations. Midway through the piece, bars 1-7 from Webern's op. 9 no. 5 appear. This most obvious (and only genuine) quotation is the key to the quotation level as a whole. The intervals in this bagatelle for string quartet gradually expand, and in this sense Webern's music and mine have the same principle of motion. However, their exposed position and electronic amplification in my work emphasize 'the alien quality, which only becomes comprehensible when the listener is aware of the level of quotation. There is an abundance of obscure quotations ranging from Robert Franz's 'Es hat die Rose sich beklagt' to individual notes such as the low Bb for contrabassoon from Webern's 'Orchesterstiicke' op. 6, or the timpani F from the Scherzo of Beethoven's Ninth. These isolated notes are, basically, no longer quotations and can only be understood as analogies."

A quotation technique reduced to the level of the timpani F from the Scherzo of Beethoven's Ninth seems absurd. Yet Huber has grasped a key point: the historical basis of musical material. Notes are not just conglomerations of dead matter to be moulded at will, but living cells bearing the imprint of history. It is more important to be reminded of this now then when "Parusie" was composed. -- Clytus Gottwald (Translation: J. Bradford Robinson)

Hans-Joachim Hespos, "dschen - das erregende ist wie eine offene schale"

Hans-Joachim Hespos was born in Emden on the 13th March 1938. In an interview with Hanspeter Icrellrnann in 1975, which was published in the periodical "Musica", vol 3, 1976 under the title "Stolperdrahte zum Neu-Anderen" (Tripwires to the new-other), Hespos recounts: "Born in Emden. There is war. The first decisive years of my life are spent with I mother and younger sister in the peaceful sequestration of the Franconian village of Hohenstadt, living in the ample tranquility of farm, forest, meadows, streams, birds . . . Return: Bombs raining on Emden, destruction, fear - confused rushing around . . . later - other, new things -. My father comes home after being a prisoner of war. From now on one meets in our house to play string quartets. I experience, hear how people play music with great passion. At the age of eight I learn the violin, give my first concert in Emden when I am ten, shortly afterwards nave my own string quartet, my life is filled with music. At about the age of twelve I develop and write down my first, own musical ideas. At first without any knowledge of musical handicraft. Everything is done for the joy of making music. Technical knowledge is gleaned in laborious study of a multitude of books and scores.

During my studies at the Padagogische Hochschule in Oldenburg I make myself familiar with the abundance of traditional rudiments of musical theory and composition. My imagination is fired by authentic encounters - with Schoenberg's theory of harmony, the works of Berg and Webern, Adorno's insight into counterpoint - also by the encounter with modern painting, with philosophy and the important modern sciences. Completely new ideas, entirely different, take shape in my mind. After more than thirty "carefree" pieces of chamber music, orchestral music, concertos, ballets, I the first work of a new way of rhought is written in Oldenburg in 1960. In the following three years 24 more works appear - rejections, vacillations -, until in 1964 the beginning of a catalogue of works was made with the composition 'For Cello Solo"', and which now includes 61 works; chamber music, works for ensembles, for orchestra, radiophone music, works for the stage and ballet. After some twenty years as a teacher and co-founder of an experimental school Hespos now lives as a free lance in Delmenhorst.

In the foreword to the prospectus "Hespos" published by Edition Modern, Munich 1969, Heinz-Klaus Metzger says in reference to the first ten works of the composer: "when the representative composers of the epoch finally abandoned their systems - varying from the masterly to the schoolmasterly - , which relieved them of the burden of composing, in order to create something themselves, it was of little avail: it became evident that they no longer existed. Hespos, an opponent from the start of the prevailing alienation of the metier, always did everything himself: he shows that there are no systems and no technical refuges any more. - (theatre director who must do everything himself from the very beginning, must even beget the actors. a visitor is refused entry, the director is busy with important matters of the theatre. what is that? he is changing the nappies of a future actor - franz kafka)"

Fred K. Prieberg: "Zeichen zum Menschen, Hespos und das Triadische Ballet", complete manuscript for broadcasting by the Hessischer Rundfunk, 1978 : "Amongst today's composers of contemporary music Hans-Joachim Hespos occupies a truly unique position. . . The demands which he makes and makes with persistence there where he makes things difficult for himself, are quite intimidating. Hespos struggles against the insensitive ears of his contemporaries who live in a world full of the most varied sounds and thereby lose the sensitivity of their hearing. Hespos struggles against this progressive loss - it is, after all, the loss of one of the human senses, - the forfeit of a bit of humanity in the broadest sense of the word - in that he, so to speak, gives acoustical signals. His compositions may well be regarded as signposts."

At a time when comDosers all over the world and almost without exception are still busy searching for intellectually abstruse systems, complex mathematical support, outworn formalisms and programmes, psycho- and socio-political concepts out of which they hope to make music, Hespos treads other paths. He makes a study of the enigmatic phenomena of musical hearing, makes important discoveries about silence, makes researches into the diversity of instrumental sound in this world, from the present time to the mos ancient. His musical thought is determined by his ear - that organ for inhaling sound waves. The procedure: listening - doubting -again and again listening - gradually feeling one's way -,tortuous processes - perception - make room for experiences. "With regard to Hespos's music, whose specific technology is to be measured more with a view to its expressive intentions than to any plan of construction - indeed it is literally note by note the absolute negation of any conceivable scheme - to undertake a genetic analysis at the present state of methodology would be hybristic. For the unique devices of which the music is constituted and which should be the concern of theory, there exists no terminology as yet - not even colloquialisms." (Heinz-Klaus Metzger: "In Extremis, Musiktheoretische Spekulationen uber Partituren von Hans-Joachim Hespos", MS for a broadcast in 2 parts by the Hessischer Rundfunk Frankfurt, 1973)

Composition is for Hespos a conscious risk. Music is an adventure for him. Adventure to do something unheard of. It is the opportunity to discover via the sense of hearing other, new senses, to marvel at the vitality of growth and decay, to reconsider things through hearing in the light of nothingness and vibration.

"Hespos's music is concerned with the protest of the individual against his approaching historical liquidation - and this by no means ideologically, but it is quite clearly discernible in the technical constellations of his designs. But one may not speak of 'Neo-expressionism' on any account as this would suggest some attempt to revive an earlier state of musical language or even the restoration of the historic expressionism. At a stage in the general social process under total capitalism where the autonomy of the individual is doomed unless some revolution should yet succeed, Hespos' heroic attempt to constitute music strictly from the subjective aspect would be his own affair and irrelevant were it not for the fact that this music, in all its technical configurations, has assimilated fully the objective historical tendencies of musical material that were to be observed for a brief period in the serial revolution and then in those forces that were released through the decay of its organisation. Hespos's oeuvre is 'expressionist' only in the technical sense, in that it undertakes the enormous task of resisting an over-powerful trend even in the smallest detail of its method.. ." (Heinz-Klaus Metzger: "In Extremis")

Hespos's musical material arouses the interest, encourages one to listen and sets out to astonish ,the ear, already buffetted by the nonsensical noise of everyday life, with the new and unfamiliar. To astonish one into alertness. Hespos: "To give courage to hope for new possibilities. It is of the greatest importance to resist vigorously the present-day lassitude, the sluggishness which threatens to stifle us, ,the fashionable timidity, the indolence of the 'no future' outloolt. And music is the medium for such resistance. It is necessary to arouse thoughts and emotions concerning the world in which we live, and the whole gamut of musical phenomena is to be brought into play, from the barely perceptible to the overwhelming, from the almost void to the bursting fullness, from the apparently irreconcilable to the glaring contradiction in one and the same thing, in order to reveal the possibilities of unheard-of expressive potentialities."

In his remarkable essay written for the Deutsche Welle in Cologne in 1979, Reinhard Oehlschlagel observes: "Without a net, without any systematic safety devices, to compose without crutches, without expedient techniques, that is to say, to think music, develop it, write it down; this conception is the one that Hans-Joachim Hespos has followed most radically. . . Hespos occupies an important position in the question of aesthetics as an antipode to Cage's aleatoricism and Stockhausen's systematic method. It would need, however, a productive dialectical imagination which would combine such opposites in a musical composition in order to rise above
this. In Hespos's most recent stage works - 'ITZO-HUX, a satirical operatic spectacle' (1980-1981), 'OHRENATMER, a scenic event' (198 I) in which the special manner of performance hinders the normal hearing of the composition and induces an unimaginable, different form of perception, 'SEILTANZ, a scenic adventure' (1982) and 'ABUTAK for bajan and electric conflict' (1983) - perhaps such things, unknown and unnamable as yet, have been revealed."

dschen - das erregende ist wie eine offene schale
(that which excites is like an open vessel)

The composition was commissioned by Thomas Baldner for the Rheinisches Kammerorchester and was written in 1968. It is scored for 6 violins, 3 violas, 2 violoncellos, I double-bass. Heinz-Klaus Metzger who attended the first performance of this work on 23rd January 1969, reports: "Hespos does not allow (the string orchestra) to play with expressive ardour, but also does not make it play with the fashionable aggressive glare, bu~t grind in obscurity, he cruelly stifles it: Hell is hung with violins, and the double-bass is allowed a sort of counter-solo, and at times gets at the throat of the orgiastic saxophone. On hearing how it is used one is tempted to feel that the late Ansermet, who loathed the instrument as being difficult to integrate, was not so far from the mark when he maintained in his pseudo-scientific work that the sound of the tenor saxophone penetrates with ease the syncopations like the phallus through the spasms during the coitus and with the same corporeality. Certainly nobody had ever used the saxophone like Hespos."

The first performance in Austria of this work a year later, on 13th October 1970 with Karl-Heinz Wiberny and the Rheinisches Kammerorchester conducted by Thomas Baldner in the Brahmssaal of the Gesellschaft der Musilrfreunde in Vienna caused a scandal. "The Viennese, as ever, unmoved by Free Jazz or Aleotoricism, reacted just the same as in the past - to be exact at the end of March 1913 - in the great hall of the Musikverein when Schoenberg, in that memorable concert of the 'Akademischer Venband fur Literatur und Musik' introduced his pupils Webern and Berg to the public. Laughter, hissing, applause, whistling and the banging of doors were recorded by the chronicler. And again in 1970. Interruptions, general exodus of the angry and offended 'music-friends'. heated discussions. . ." (Express)

The present recording, made on 20th February 1980 with Hanns-Wilhelm Goetzke and the "ensemble 13" conducted by Manfred Reichert may be rated as a rarity on account of its correct rendering of the score - something which seldom occurs in the numerous performances of Hespos' music. -- Hespos (Translation: John Bell)

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

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)

Manfred Trojahn, "Architectura caelestis"

Architectura caelestis

When Manfred Trojahn referred to his "Kammerkonzert" (Chamber Concerto) of 1973 as an "attempt to break away from rigidly constructivist, fully documentable and explainable musical phenomena in favour of an intuitive, emotional, living piece of music - albeit not at the expense of a restorative aesthetic", he made a crucial statement not only about his own work as a whole but about the aims of the composers of his generation. It is tempting to think of composers such as Trojahn, Miiller-Siemens, Schweinitz, Stranz, Bose, Dadelsen and perhaps Hamel and Rihm as a "group" since they have so many prominent features in common. Yet it looks as though the progress of the musical avant-garde so strongly encouraged parallel approaches of this sort that composers had no need to form a group (the opposite was often the case in previous decades). Indeed, all of the above-named composers have set out on independent paths, each of them with a well-honoured intellect and an urge toward expression.

Trojahn commented on this development as follows: "Most past, by what we might call an 'undisguised' link to his new aesthetic approaches are marked by a window on the tory and by specific criticisms of the avant-garde machinery of the 1960s. Any premature attempt to attach labels to superficial similarities for the purpose of condemning, praising or marketing this movement wholesale will only cause wonder and puzzlement in a young composer who, imagining himself to be an individualist, suddenly finds he is a member of a school whose features are known to everyone but himself. . . The push to 'new pastures' which led in ,the 1950s to the notion of total organisation, and seemed to guarantee a pristine musical universe, has failed, and this has made me wary, even towards myself. As a result, composition is a protest against my own doubts, an act of almost irrational hope."

Manfred Trojahn was born in 1949 in Cremlingen near Brunswick. He studied orchestral music at the Lower Saxony Music School in Brunswick, specializing in flute and obtaining his degree in 1970. Later, at the Hamburg Musikhochschule. he studied flute with Schochow and Zoller and composition with de la Motte. Since 1974 he has won numerous prizes in Stuttgart, Boswil, Hamburg, Hitzacker, and from UNESCO. He has been a fellow of the "Studienstiftun" des Deutschen Volkes" and of the Villa Massimo in Rome, where he remained for over a year.

Trojahn's chamber music is set for various, even bizarre combinations in which his own instrument, the flute, has a leading role. He has also written a string quartet and several orchestral pieces. His First Symphony premiered in Hannover in 1976, was followed by "Architectura caelestis" for eight female singers (solo or chorus) and full orchestra. This piece was written from 1974-6 and first performed in Royan during the 1976 "Festival International d'Art Contemporain", conducted by Friedrich Cerha; in 1979 it was produced again and broadcast by the Norddeutscher Rundfunkt, Peter Keuschnig conducting.

Mention may again be made of the "Kammerkonzert" which receded this orchestral piece. Both works seek, in a manner of speaking, a creative rejection of the old avant garde without denying its existence. The music combines and contrasts searing dissonances in ultra-high registers and as sound layers with swirling, explosive passages, tremolo transitions and slowly decaying: chords reminiscent of sounds emitted when an'organ'mgtor is shut down. The end of "Kammerlronzert" fades away in slow contemplation, as though Wagner's "Tristan" had just preceded it and was lying prostrate in its final twitches.

The impulse to write "Architectura caelestis" came from the painter Ernst Fuchs, namely from his "sacred, ornamental picture of Christ called 'Architectura caelestis' and from his book of the same title. Today," the composer continues, "I find it difficult to interpret the connections between his book and painting and my music. More importantly, I see in my work a point of discontinuity within my own development, a discontinuity which made possible my next work, the string quartet, and in which my serious confrontation with the music of the past took shape. The beginnings of this confrontation were at least announced in 'Architectura caelestis' - particularlv at the end. where a texture of dense micropolyphonal clusters relaxes into broad chordal sonorities, but also in the middle section with its re~ressed cantabile. In this work I wrote a farewell to micropolyphony, to the cluster, to Klangfarben speculation, and most of all a farewell to what today we still call avant-garde."

Whether or not a new "avant-garde" will arise from the old, Manfred Trojahn has taken an individual path which will figure in the music of tomorrow. -- Wolf-Eberhard von Lewlinski (Translation: J. Bradford Robinson)

Walter Zimmermann, "Phran"

-- Liner Notes --

The key influence on Walter Zimmermann in his childhood was the music life in his native village, in particular the song festivals organized there by his father. Born in 1949 in the town of Schwabach in Franconia, Zimmermann was given piano lessons by a village piano teacher from the age of five. Many further stimuli came from his father, a trained music teacher and master of five instruments who, however, took up a career as a baker after the war. The boy often improvised at the piano, borrowing voraciously from the music library in Nurernberg. He is self-taught in the sense that he worked his way through the history of music on his own, using sheet music. His early works - the earliest dating from the age of 12 - are adaptations of Ravel, Bartok, Stravinsky and Boulez. He took lessons in the violin and oboe and attended the Humanistic Gymnasium in Furth. Later, he received piano lessons from Ernst Groschl, a concert pianist resident in Nuremberg. Groschl introduced him to Werner Heider, who engaged him as a pianist in the Ars Nova Ensemble and gave his lessons in composition. From 1968 to 1970, when he moved to Cologne, Zimmermann remained in the Ensemble, playing works of Bo Nilsson, Luciano Berio and Gilbert Amy which left a deep impression on him. He wrote composition and orchestration exercises for Heider and produced the earliest works which he acknowledges today: "nothing but" for piano, celeste, harpsichord and electronic organ (1969), a piece dealing entirely with the repetition of microstructures; "gliss" for five trombones (1970) which explores different ways of using trombone glissandi; and "as a wife has a cow" for piano four-hands (1970) to a text by Gertrude Stein.

After moving to Cologne he abandoned his plan to become a pianist. He took part in Kagel's "Cologne New Music Courses" in radio plays (1971) and music therapy (1973). From 1970 to 1972 he studied electronic music and the theory of musical perception under Otto E. Laske at the Institute for Sonology. Here he became acquainted with the inner life of sonorities and found his own footing as a composer. In 1973 he studied comparative musicology at the Jaap Kunst Centre for Ethnomusicology in Amsterdam, playing in the gamelan orchestra. His first commissioned piece - "Akkordarbeit" (Piece-Work) for piano, orchestra and three loudspeaker channels - was performed in Hannover in 1971. This work, based on the "Grand Paganini Etude" by Franz Liszt, is a demonstration of the basic components of labour, and involves people giving orders, others carrying them out, and still others monitoring the results.

The composition "einer ist keiner" (one is none) for seven instruments (1972) is an attempt to translate human relations as accurately as possible into music on the basis of "81 phases in the evolution of personality". "In understanding music the sound dies" (1973) was to be the first of a gigantic but unrealized "Orgon" project intended to shed light on widely varying problems in music and therapy. In 1974 he made his first trip to the USA to study computer music at Colgate University in Hamilton, New York. In "Beginner's mind", a piece which moves from the complex to the simple, he composed his most significant work up to that time.

Returning to America in 1975, Zimmermann held discussions with 23 American musicians and published the results in a book entitled "Desert Plants" (Vancouver, 1976). In a period of deep contemplation he wrote "Gelassenheit" (Composure, 1975) for alto and two guitars and "Die spanische Reise des Oswald von Wolkensteinw (Oswald von Wolkenstein's Journey to Spain, 1976) for singer and five instrumentalists, in which he took as his subject the influence of Islam on European music and the merging of two cultures. In 1976 he conceived "Inselmusik" (Island Music), a project incorporating the music of four insular cultures: the Siva Oasis, a Pittsburgh ghetto and an Indian reservation in Montana (the fourth, originally intended to be a jungle area in Columbia, became the Furth hinterland). "Aus Nah und Fern" (From Far and Near, 1977) for triple chorus is a setting of a childhood experience with 30 choruses which makes use of approaching and receding motion. In this same year, in Cologne, he founded the "Beginner's Studio", which offered weekly concerts largely of experimental music and exists today in the form of a semi-annual "Beginner Festival".

The project "Lokale Musik" (Local Music, 1977-8 I) ushered in a new period in Walter Zimmermann's creative output, supplanting his earlier phase of searching with a clear conception. The project in its entirety displays the manifold relations between music and landscape. At present he is working on a cycle entitled "Glockenspiel - Brettspiel - Schnurspiel - Saitenspiel" (Glockenspiel - Board Game - Jump Rope - Lyre) with non-centric tonality, and on a further cycle based on the works of Meister Eckehart and entitled "In der Welt Sein - Vom Nutzen des Lassens - Abgeschiedenheit" (Being in the World -The Usefulness of Letting Be - Solitude).

Phran from "Lokale Musik" (Local Music)

"Lokale Musik" is divided into three cycles. The first is an orchestral piece called "Laendler-Topographien" with movements entitled "Phran", "Topan" and "Topaphran". The second, called "Leichte Tanze" (Easy Dances), contains ten Franconian dances "sublimated" for string quartet, 25 Karwa melodies "substituted" for two clarinets, 20 figure dances "transformed" for string ensemble, and 15 "Zwiefache" (a dance common to southern Germany and Austria) "transcended" for guitar. The third and last cycle bears the title "Stille Tinze" (Silent Dances) and comprises the movements "Wolkenorte" (Cloud Localities) for harp; "Erd-, Wasser-, Lufttone" (Earth, Water and Air Sounds) for piano, musical glasses and trombone; "Riuti", woodland clearings and abandoned land for solo percussionist; "Keuper" (a type of sandstone found near Coburg) for string quartet; and "Namenlose Zwiefache" (Zw'iefache without a Name) for 13 instruments.

The entire project is based on dance melodies from old peasant chapbooks and music albums which Zimmermann gathered in the course of several field trips. His collection is made up of waltzes, "Zwiefache", "Schottische", mazurkas, "Rheinlander", galops and so forth. These dances were collected in the 19th century by vicars, country doctors or village teachers who, as a rule, provided them with evocative titles. It is just these titles which the composer wishes to eradicate: "This assigning of names and designations must be offset by a process of neutralization, even to the point of anonymity. This will restore the dances to the nameless, flexible, spontaneous, accidental and improvisatory world from which they came. In concrete terms, this means that none of the melodies handed down in written form should be viewed as a finite eight bar piece, say, but rather as a transnotation of improvisations without a beginning or an end, without a title or name. They represent material pure and simple, free of the human foible for assigning names, a foible which springs from nothing less than our mania to control nature."

The "Landler-Topographien" last about 50 minutes, and establish the relation between music and landscape. Part I probes the intrinsic structure of landler tunes. "On the one hand, the characteristics of a landscape - its vegetation, the lay of the land, geological formations, climate - shape and modify the music over the ages, with typical features of the landscape finding their image in melodies. (In other works, the intrinsic structure of melodies is a vehicle for the features of a landscape.) On the other hand, melodies can be continually revitalized by the structure of the landscape."

In "Phran" the intrinsic potential of the melodies - here a collection of eight-bar landler - is divided into melodic, harmonic and rhythmic components, each component being gradated into a scale of 12 values. The composer uses the mean values of these components to draw relations to the orchestration in such a way that expression does not come into play and thus the inherent structure of the landler is revealed. The instruments are assigned melodic cells. Now the original melody is probed to establish whether or not it can be represented by these cells. The result is a grid-like polyphony, the melody appearing in scattered fragments. The same process is applied to the harmonies, which are interrupted by rests, and to the rhythm.

"This seemingly complicated use of matrices and tables to interweave and neutralize enables the various manifestations of the landler principle to be given their own sonority, i.e. the composer's personality is neutralized to the extent that, at the very most, his task is to function as a vehicle and transmitter of these mechanisms, neutralizing the intrinsic potential of a melody and rendering it audible in the instrumentation. 'Phran', the first part of the orchestral piece 'Landler-Topographien', presents the interior landscape of a melody, turns it inside out and projects it into the space of the orchestra."-- Gisela Gronemeyer (Translation: J. Bradford Robinson)

Hans-Jurgen von Bose, "Travesties in a Sad Landscape"

Travesties in a Sad Landscape

"Experiments with material have had their day; the main thing now is the will to expression which will put an end to material fetishism." With this curt pronouncement in 1974 a young composer just turned 21 attracted considerable attention, at first verbally and later with compositions which seemed to herald the advent of a new generation. In a surprisingly short time several young musicians emerged with a different notion of the "avant-garde" and little patience for the well-known avant-garde composers of the time. Although the public had been waiting for signs of this "anti avant-garde, it was no easy matter for these young composers to prove themselves, for the musical establishment defended its interests, pointing out that a composer cannot simply call himself "modern" by ignoring the achievements of the serialist school and starting out afresh from Alban Berg.

Hans- Jurgen von Bose went further still and claimed that a composer must set out from Robert Schumann, arguing that since Wagner there has been a trend away from basic forms of expression towards a blind faith in material and a mania for progress. But even Bose soon learned that it is not possible simply to turn back the clock of history, even music history, and that a composer must set out from the status quo and come to grips with the music of the preceding generation. Bose's proposed plan was to form a synthesis of Ligeti, Berg and Bartok, to reintroduce tonality, and to seek a direct impact on the listener.

This was easier said than done. At times his clear intellectual resolve proved to be an obstacle to the musical results of his deliberations. Bose developed an increasingly individual style marked by a sharp intellect capable of sophisticated thought and an emotional disposition which craved, and found, its own form of expression. Bose always leaves the listener with a sense of powerful feeling kept in harness, of fantasy with a justification, of wilful ambition. He makes things no less difficult for himself than for his listeners, even when he wishes to present them once again with "listenable" music. But the shrewdness of his intellect has kept him from triteness and easy solutions.

Hans-Jurgen von Bose was born on 24 December 1953 in Munich, where he spent part of his childhood and later returned to live. He also grew up in Beirut and Frankfurt-on-Main. By the age of 8 he had already begun composing. During his school years he studied at the Hoch Conservatory in Frankfurt, later transferring to the Frankfurt Musikhochschule under Hans Ulrich Engelmann and Klaus Billing. In 1974 he produced a remarkable first string quartet; this was followed by "Funf Kinderreime" (Five Nursery Rhymes) from "Des Knaben Wunderhornu, set for alto and instruments. He soon shook free of the influence of his teachers and started relying on his own intelligence and ingenuity. With his orchestral piece "Morphogenesism of 1976 Bose produced a substantial work in an idiom which was thoroughly "modern" rather than merely restorative and yet had a strong individuality. Ernest Bour conducted the premiere in Baden-Baden, and in 1977 Bose was awarded the Berlin Art Prize for this work.

Bose felt irresistibly drawn to the theatre. He wrote two one-acters, "Das Diplom" (The Diploma) and "Blutbund" (Bond of Blood), which were premiered in Ulm and Hamburg respectively. These were followed immediately by a successful large-scale ballet for the Deutsche Oper in Berlin and numerous commissioned works for orchestra and for chamber ensembles, among them a second string quartet, a string trio, three songs for tenor and chamber orchestra as well as a set of variations for chamber orchestra for the London Sinfonietta. This last-named work, "Travesties in a Sad Landscape", received its first performance in London in 1978, conducted by Elgar Howarth. It was preceded by Bose's Symphony no. I, which he conceived in typical fashion as "gestic music". His "Variationen fur I 5 Streicher" (Variations for I 5 String Instruments), commissioned by the Frankfurt Bach Concerts, likewise avoid easy categorization in their compositional approach. Just as in Bach's day one spoke of a "mixed style", Bose sees it as a task of our own day to create a "mixture", possibly a synthesis, of the given material. Here Bose always proceeds along strictly constructivist lines, though the listener need not be aware of the constructivist features when listening to the piece.

"Travesties" is likewise based on an intellectual, constructivist principle. This conforms to his view that "inspiration" can also result from hard thought rather than from the whisperings of the Muse in some vacuous nether realm. He admits to a fascination for "translating certain visual techniques and ideas into the medium of music, for example film techniques such as montage or sharp cuts. Also for copying various clearly defined musical forms and superimposing them to form a new unity. Hence it is this more or less rigorously applied montage technique which determines the overall form of the piece. One point where music and film intersect seemed to me to lie in the attempt to translate certain results of electronic music to the chamber ensemble. For example, the piece contains tape loops (a particular kind of ostinato), tempo distortions (some of them on several levels at once), and structures which overlap by running forwards and backwards simultaneously. The ultimate point of all these techniques is to create a sort of magic realism in the music. One point of intersection with the visual arts seems to me to be use of familiar images in alienated contexts. Hence the piece also contains a 16th-century German folk song, 'Der Wald ist mir entlaubet'."

The English title of Bose's work doubtless results from the fact that he wrote it for the London Sinfonietta on a commission from the Goethe Institute. All of Bose's works, whether speculative or thought-provoking, are self-contained, and always reach a high intellectual and musical level. -- Wolf-Eberhard von Lewinski (Translation: J. Bradford Robinson)

Wolfgang von Schweinitz, "Variations on a Theme by Mozart)"

Variationen iiber ein Thema von Mozart
(Variations on a Theme by Mozart)

In 1977 the Westdeutscher Rundfunk in Cologne, in its concert series "Musik der Zeit" presented two "mini-festivals" on revealing topics. One of these, in January, was on "New Simvlicity". This was explained as follows: "New Simplicity refers to cross-connections beyond historical and geographical boundaries. It stands outside all categories of style and genre. The 'new' thing- about it is that it reflects the complications of serial and post-serial music, which forms a backdrop for its basic procedures. 'New Simplicity' means the close kinship of periodic music from the USA (Steve Reich) to gamelan and African music, of new European monophony (John Cage, Morton Feldman, Walter Zimmermann) to the musical tradition of Korea. 'New Simvlicity' is a stance towards contemporary music which can be observed in many different countries: the basic simplification of the sound and the displacement of complex structures into the 'interior' of musical forms and performance."

The second topic, obviously closely related to the first, was called "Encounters with Traditions". Here there was no confrontation between young composers and their immediate forebears such as Stockhausen, Boulez and Nono; instead they completely avoided these potential mentor figures and cast a backward glance a.t the great composers of the past. Several of them took up Beethoven and then Schubert - and not simply for extrinsic reasons such as centennial celebrations. They were seeking a foothold in the past which they could no longer find in the present.

One of the composers who probed deeply into both of these topics - and not just in 1977 - was Wolfgang von Schweinitz. As early as 1974 his search for new freedom in fixed forms as a response to aleatoric music and the "anything goes" attitude of the years immediately preceding had led him to write a piece for three winds and two strings with the revealing title "Motetus". Allegiance was pledged to the uncoinpromising "simplicity" of Morton Feldman. Monistic form united with strongly constructivist principles and novel harmonic and rhythmic constellations, resulting in clear sonorities which increased and decreased in density without sacrificing formal stability.

In Schweinitz's Second String Quartet op. 16 of 1978, an "Hommage A Franz Schubert", he took up what might be termed Schubert's early attempts to break the bonds of tonality. At first one has the impression one is sitting in an airplane 1isteni.ng to Schubert amidst the surrounding noise. Scarcely does the original appear than it is destroyed, rent asunder, rhythmically displaced, harmonically distorted. A feeling of despair is invoked as the composer compresses the layers of sound. sometimes cleverly, sometimes with heartringing expression. Exhausted, the piece ends in a fade-out of heightened tensions or, as the composer calls them, harmonic "pollutions".

In this work Schweinitz attempted to "think back to the music and expressive universe of late Schubert: images emerge as in the labyrinth of memory, their former utopian beauty now contorted and thus apparent only to the imagination". In later works he sought a "tension between the yearning for beauty and the awareness of an unresponsive and forbidding reality" and trcied to project a "message about the present world with its hypertrophized rationalism and materialism, a world in which our need to overcome our increasing alienation is becoming more and more urgent and less and less possible".

These words mark the composer. Wolfgang von Schwein, itz was born on 7 February 1953 in Hamburg, where he also received his first instruction in music. From 1973 to 1975 he studied with Gyorgy Ligeti. He then spent a year at the Center for Computer Research in Music at Stanford University, California. A further grant enabled him to spend 1978-9 at the Villa Massimo in Rome. Even before his term with Ligeti he had visited the USA, studying theory and composition with Esther Ballou at the American University in Washington, DC. He was made a fellow of the "Studienstiftung des Deutschen Volkes", and received the Hamburg Bach Prize and the Stuttgart Prize for Young Talent. When the city of Darmstadt celebrated its 650th anniversary Schweinitz wrote a concert overture which he referred to as a particularly radical "experiment in tonality as a utopian allegory of a non-alienated, psychically integrated harmonic language. Whereas in earlier works the harmonic progressions were subjected to a precompositional process and were limited to a few elementary tonal roots, in this work the harmonic connections are more varied: rather than being pre-programmed they are largely allowed to form their own spontaneous functional relations".

Remarks of this sort indicate that Schweinitz does not wish to be categorized in a narrow "group" of "neo-tonalists", as all too hastily happened. Like his like-minded friends Wolfgang Rihm, Hans-Jurgen von Bose and Detlev Muller-Siemens, his aim is to "give a hearing to individual spirit and expression", not by turning back to the 19th century but by confronting afresh the music of the 50s and 60s as well.

Notwithstanding this outlook Schweinitz repeatedly provokes "encounters with traditions", as for example in his "Variationen uber ein Thema von Mozart" of 1976 for full orchestra. This piece was given its premiere on 20 May 1977 at the ISNM International Music Festival in Bonn, with Hans Zender conducting the Saarbrucken Radio Symphony Orchestra. As the composer himself commented the work was written in California and uses an eight-bar excerpt from Mozart's Masonic Funeral Music KV 477 as its theme: "In their sequence of moods the Variations resemble a symphonic cycle in miniature - as it were, an extreme compression of the symphonic principle: Introduction: Adagio; Theme: Adagio (bars 13-20); Variation I: Largo (measured, quietly intense); Variation 2: Scherzo I (very fast and emphatic); Variation 3: Trio, Pastorale (Andantino - mild, dreamily indistinct); Variation 4: Scherzo 2 (as for Scherzo I); Variation 5 : Adagio (slowly and with utmost intensity of expression); Variation 6: Funeral March (march tempo, with emotion); Coda (tripartite).

"Variation 6 leads to the climax of the piece, marked by a solo gong stroke. Once the gong has faded away the coda begins with a quotation of the final eight bars of Mozart's piece (very soft, as though dimly recollected). The final chord (C major) grows into a quotation from the First String Quartet by the Munich composer Hans-Jurgen von Bose, here used to obscure the harmony. This quotation leads to the final section which integrates the chorale 'Es ist vollbracht' from Bach's St John Passion and musical material from Variation 5 (with utmost intensity of expression). The harmony of the piece is quasi-tonal in that it derives rigorously from the harmonic progression of Mozart's theme in the manner of a passacaglia. However, it is permeated with trenchant microtones, and these form the main vehicle of expression within the harmony. A similar process takes place in the melody: the expression is heightened by the heterophonic splitting of the melodic lines, at times intensified almost to the breaking point."

In short, a composer of strong sentiment with a wealth of ideas. -- Wolf-Eberhard von Lewinski (Translation: J. Bradford Robinson)

Gunter Bialas, "Introitus - Exodus"

-- Liner Notes --

Gunter Bialas was born in 1907 in the town of Bielschowitz in Upper Silesia. He studied music in Berlin, particularly with M. Trapp. In 1947 he was appointed director of the composition course at the Northwest German Academy of Music in Detmold, where he became a professor three years later. From 1959 until his retirement in 1972 Bialas taught composition at the Munich Musikhochschule.

A Profile

In 19th-century Germany the history of music was largely coloured by the debate over programme vs absolute music. Here it was the theorists who tried to make a hard-and-fast distinction rather than the composers, who doubtless realized that, in the final analysis, absolute music also has its programmatic traits and programme music does not stand outside the norms of the absolute. As a result, this debate has left our century, and German composers in particular, with a somewath consorted relation to any form of illustrative music. Significantly, Gunter Bialas has noted this fact with regret. This is significant first of all because in large parts of his oeuvre he has attempted to reconcile these two admittedly never fully disparate ideals, instilling into his works a characteristic tension between the absolute and the illustrative. Bialas's music uses suggestive images to put pressure on the listener and express (its meaning intelligibly in sound. His musical language reveals with exemplary clarity the truism that music is a priori always more than something with a one-dimensional meaning. His works take illustration beyond the realm of banal tone-painting and are fully capable of standing on their own.

A good example of this point is provided by his "Haiku" series, ideally matched settings of concise Japanese lyric poetry, even though they only represent a small if characteristic segment of his work as a whole. "I intended to grow no older/But the temple (bells . . ." Bialas captures a musical image of the relentless tolling of the bells in a melodic ostinato. Yet he goes beyond this to attain a purely musical evocation of perseverance: the osoinato "stands" for a manner of musical expression that neither shuns concrete images nor falls foul of the strictures of absolute music. In this way, subjective vision and the objective shaping of time coincide for one brief instant, both image and music uniting in the "primary sound-form" of the bell strokes.

This aesthetic of reconciliation between image and music accounts not only for the strong influence of literature in Bialas's work - even in his untexted instrumental pieces - as the composer himself has emphasized. It also explains his unmistakable fondness for the miniature, or rather for musical distillation. After abandoning the driving, extrovert, dangerously mechanical music of the 1950s Bialas was able, by discovering and cultivating archaic techniques such as "primitive" heterophony in the 1960s, to attain an art of deliberate omission, choosing as his goal the greatest possible simplicity. This goal manifested itself in a judicious and calculated renunciation of plenitude and abundance: he regards technical manipulation and musical constructivism as an inescapable transitional stage which every progressive composer must pass through and leave behind. In the back of his mind is the realization that only by passing through musical technique does a form of musical compression become possible in which omission itself Is discernible. In Hegelian terms, the omissions are "sublated" in the music.

Discernibility (perhaps lucidity is a better term) is a key notion in Bialas's view of music. It doubtless accounts for his almost violent rejection of the mindless application of serial techniques which, in his opinion, leads to indiscernibility and hence to the imperceptible and meaningless. Musical meaning is the keystone of Bialas's work as a composer, though this is not to equate meaning with one-dimensional signification. Particularly in his later works Bialas's musical language becomes increasingly multi-faceted with a clear tendency toward shades of mood, always trenchantly formulated. His Heine cycle of 1983 provides a clear instance of his search for shimmering, disparate realms of expression. This, as the composer himself remarks, is fully in keeping with Heine's own personality as a poet, hovering precariously between lyricism and irony. Even Bialas's operas likewise strike a precarious balance between tragedy and comedy. Here the balance is expressed in varied devices of psychological and emotional alienation fully in accord with the aristocratic irony which marks the personality of this highly cultured composer.

Bialas sees himself as part of a sorely tried transitional generation which, though violently bereft of valuable years of creative work, nevertheless was given the opportunity of a radical and rewarding fresh start. At all events his music represents an important aspect of German post-war culture, and his art of musical illustration and expression, his abstract conaiseness and sublime shades of mood will probably be more greatly appreciated in the near future than is presently allowed by the current death-throes of hyperstructuralist music.

Introitus - Exodus

When traditional labels for musical forms and genres are applied to 20th-century compositions they most often summon up a broad panoply of meanings. Much can be learned of the work in question by examining the