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)
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)
Labels: Avant Garde Project, jodru, Johannes Fritsch
posted by jodru at 15:04
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