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Robin Hoffmann, Dieter Mack, Mark Andre, Klaus Huber |
Robin Hoffmann (*1970) [01] 11:54 Locken (2006) für Birkhahn-Septett Hanna Petermann • Andrea Nagy • Kristof Kerremans World Premiere
[02] 16:47 Kammermusik IV (2004) für 17 Spieler Ensemble Modern
[03] 14:45 …ALS… (2001) Trio für Bassklarinette, Violoncello und Klavier Internationale Ensemble Modern Akademie (IEMA)
[04] 30:32 …à l’âme de descendre de sa monture et aller sur ses pieds de soie… (2004) Rohan de Saram, Violoncello • Max Engel, Baryton total time: 74:00
ROBIN HOFFMANN Who is luring whom? Is it the huntsman, as he lures the black cock in front of his muzzle? Or is it the fowler, as he imitates a bird call and encourages the rooster to leave its cover, as if nature herself had beckoned. These sounds make the rat catcher’s art pale into comparison. The concert hall as a biotope for the black cock. Admittedly, these creatures did not make a smooth landing. They sort of whizzed by, and fell apart at the limbs, before we put them back together. The biotope in question is peopled more by the undead, by zombies, cryptids, UMAs and the odd jackalope. The critters seem quite happy somehow. And it does not take much to feel at home – birds of feather if you will. Noisy timbres will do. As for the actual pitches we would like to palm off on you, they are the cuckoo’s eggs in the nest we built. When it comes to the crunch, it is just part and parcel of daily life. A sense of poise emanates. For nothing is a problem for these black cocks. Other than that, you had better leave them in peace! Robin Hoffmann
Kammermusik IV is the next work in a series of chamber music compositions in which I attempt to explore the relationships between an idiomatic and individual performance, and a collective one. Whereas Kammermusik III focuses on the individual types of “musical speech” of an instrument or a player, it is the various instrumental combinations in Kammermusik IV (kinds of mixed registers) that play the major role and act as “individual” groups. This all takes place within a relatively strict formal plan. After an introduction, which serves to present in compressed form fragments of the following sections, there follow eight episodes each with their own character and attributes. All these sections are characterised by a) a single central note, b) a certain kind of interaction with the respective main instruments that form the group, and c) various commentaries by other instruments or groupings. The metaphor of a large house may be proffered here – a building that is concomitant with a “safe” environment and which allows the observer or listener to wander through various rooms of an experiential nature, ones which threaten to collapse due to their latent morbidity. The final section may be understood as a strongly “negating” commentary from outside the structure. Here, the stable walls of the house fall away and become the corollary of that which had previously been made safe, characterised as this is by unstable episodes that form the core of the work itself. The vocal part is given no text and is treated in this work as a member of the instrumental ensemble, as opposed to a solo voice. The specific intensity of vocal colour lends expression to the piece. The composition is dedicated to Christine Muschaweckh. Postscript: the day on which the preliminary version of the work was finished, 26th December 2004, coincided with the tsunami disaster in South East Asia, impacting on me too for obvious biographical reasons. I therefore hope that the piece will be understood as a commemoration of the victims of the catastrophe, although it had been composed previously. Dieter Mack
MARK ANDRE The title is drawn directly from a passage found in the Book of Revelation in the translation by Martin Luther: “And when the lamb had opened the seventh seal, there was silence in heaven about the space of half an hour.” I wanted to represent this stillness in my music. “I am Alpha and Omega, the first and the last, the beginning and the end” – these verses unify the “beginning” and the “end” that I complemented with finiteness and infiniteness. On the one hand, …ALS… exists as a kind of musical architecture of stillness and palpability, one which emerges as diametrically opposed a priori parameters and compositional categories engage in dialogue; on the other hand, affect and concept are inextricably enmeshed. My grateful thanks go to Wolfgang Stryi. Mark Andre
KLAUS HUBER “Our view of the world is distorted. Klaus Huber, 29.4.2002 In my contribution to the Festschrift “75 Years of the Donaueschingen Festival” I wrote: Statistics remain the unchallenged sovereign that allows everything – well, almost everything – to disappear as part of the vengeance exacted by conspicuous consumption: and only the very few reap notable profits. This “disappearance of reality”, which in our multimedia age is being replaced more and more with a virtual reality, leads in a paradoxical way not to a simultaneous and assiduously propagated freedom of any “super individual”, on the contrary, it allows an increasingly powerful potentially manipulative world to unfold. The result? The stereotypical reification of humankind and – perforce – its art, which plods relentlessly on. (See also: Klaus Huber, Umgepflügte Zeit, Schriften und Gespräche [Furrowed Time, Writings and Discussions], MusikTexte, Cologne, 1999) The further we intrude into the potential of music as an art form, the more apparent it becomes that music lacking a transcendental aspect has lost its worth. The question “what lies on the outside?” (that which is material) and its corollary what “remains on the inside” (that which may be experienced without the need for it to become material) take on an even more drastic nature when applied to music, as opposed to the other arts. Music is at its very foundation always going to be something like a tangible representation of the world within the medium of its temporality. In the twelve years during which I preoccupied myself with Arabic music and especially with its concomitant traditional musical theory, I was accompanied along the way by my examination of Sufism. I thus came across an ode written by that epochal and universal savant, Ibn Siná-Avicenna. In this text he describes the path and the fate of the human soul in a series of mystical tableaux that he disputes in a philosophical manner. One only needs to consider that Avicenna, an early enlightened spirit from the first millennium, could find no antilogy in such an odic singing of the Sufi “unison experience” of creation – or “unbrokenness” – in which the existential journey of the human soul is described. Ernst Bloch was one of the very first to address the questions posited by Avicenna. In a work dating from 1952 – Avicenna und die Aristotelische Linke ([Avicenna and the Aristotelian Left], Edition Suhrkamp, 1963) he analyses the significance of Avicenna’s and Averroë’s philosophy for the development of Western thought. When I opine that we Western artists should – not only in our aesthetic positions but also with regard to our very existence – provide the groynes that would defend the wave of objectivity and reification threatening us, it raises the following question: how are we to accomplish a rationally anchored but nevertheless effective resistance? In his Frankfurt address on the occasion of receiving the 2001 Theodor W. Adorno Prize, Jacques Derrida attempted a stupendous feat: a reassessment of dream thought. For the dream itself, Derrida demonstrates a high degree of rationality, one which is able to surpass the usual sentient state. He draws upon a train of thought that none other than Walter Benjamin had dreamt and subsequently formulated with great particularity. Is it not time to acknowledge as reality the inner, holistic existence of humankind, i.e. its soul, which, just like other external realities, is also rational in its observation of the entire world. Here, Derrida took a first step. But let me return to Avicenna’s ode, a text that from then on would simply not let me go. It accompanied me from the original notion of a cello concerto right up to the premiere in 2002 in Donaueschingen. No sooner had I extended the solo forces – always staying close to Avicenna’s ode – than I was interrupted by the present. In April 2002 I read a previously unpublished poem by the Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish, one he had written in January that year in the occupied city of Ramallah. His poem touched me so much that it drew me away from Avicenna’s ode – although this remains the conceptual background to my composition – and thus leads me into the present. Regarding the poem “The soul must dismount and walk on silken feet”, it came for me both as a surprise as well as a kind of confirmation to discover how, thousands of years later, Darwisch is so obviously able to reach in a central verse of his text Avicenna’s mystic depth – whether he does this knowingly or not I can not say. As I react to the present – in this I have no choice – I hope with this work to have made a humble contribution that will help stem the flow of reification with which humanity (and its soul) is presently confronted, and that this will ultimately prove the salvation of that which is human in an age that has set itself other aims. I do this in full awareness of an extremely brutalised present, one not only affecting Palestine. Un autre monde est possible. For me, Mahmoud Darwisch is at once an exemplary figure and – like all the others – its antithesis. But in such situations of great conflict, what can poetry and what can art do? Klaus Huber For the new work the composer reworked both Die Seele muss vom Reittier steigen (The Soul Must Dismount, premiere Donaueschingen 2002) and …à l’âme de marcher sur ses pieds de soie… (The Soul Must March on its Silken Feet, 2004).
Locken nach Darmstadt
Zu den Internationalen Ferienkursen für Neue Musik, die alle zwei Jahre in Darmstadt stattfinden, locken nicht nur hochklassige Kompositions- und Interpretationskursen mit allem, was in der zeitgenössischen Szene Rang und Namen hat, sondern auch so manch außergewöhnliches Konzert. Was davon bleibt, muss wohl jeder Zuhörer zunächst für sich selbst entscheiden. Eine kleine Nachlese erscheint jedoch auch diskographisch festgehalten, in diesem Jahr zum ersten Mal beim jungen Label Neos. Vier Werke von Robin Hoffmann, Dieter Mack, Mark André und Klaus Huber bieten einen musikalischen Rückblick auf die 43. Ferienkurse 2006. Paul Hübner |
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