Court-circuit will be premiering Foggy swing by Annette Mengel on 8 May 2010 at the Théâtre de Saint-Quentin, as part of the Festival Iles de découvertes. We asked the composer a few questions.
As a German composer now living in France, how do you position yourself in terms of the musical aesthetics of the two countries ?
I'm very attached to my German musical background which is connected to tradition (Bach, Beethoven, Schumann...) and to the second Viennese School. But I also feel like I'm in synch with contemporary composition in France. In Germany the approach is more conceptual and at times ideological, which isn't the way I tend to apprehend things.
You lived in Turkey and worked with Turkish musicians and their traditional instruments. What did you learn there
It wasn't as much the organology that caught my attention, but the fact that Turkey is a country with a real tradition of non-occidental composition in which certain composers are enormously respected. The best known composers are probably Buhûrizade Mustapha Efendi Itrî (1640-1712) and Dede Efendi (1777-1846). Various types of musical notation have developed since the seventeenth century and coexist alongside the oral tradition, which is still going strong. Unlike in western music, however, these notation systems haven't generated composing techniques.
My work as a composer was inspired by the subtleties of the melodic development in this completely monodic music, which has no harmonic restrictions.
You mention a form of swing in "Foggy swing", which you wrote for Court-circuit. Can you tell us about your relationship to rhythm ?
Although the twentieth century has been influenced by the focus on timbre, I think it's important to work on every aspect of music. Since music takes place over a period of time and it is impossible to imagine anything different, the organisation of time has always been one of my main focuses. My rhythmical research in Foggy swing is based on the observation that a rhythm is more easily perceived if a limited number of lengths is used. In serial music, which uses 12 different durations, the rhythm seems to be completely diluted, or annihilated, as it were. I try to make the rhythm perceptible while also avoiding the repetitiveness of "minimalistic music", which also annihilates the emergence of rhythm in its own way.
You come from a generation of composers that is still attached to pitch. How do you feel about the "saturation" and "concrete instrumental music" movements the younger generation endorses?
Since we're still attached to writing music down, I think it's very important to develop a single kind of notation that shows how the different modes de jeu - new playing techniques - should be done. Musical notation software is helping this become a reality, I think. New playing techniques are being classified and shared more and more often. All these things make them more widely available.
"Saturation" and "concrete instrumental music" are two completely different approaches in my view.
The second term can only be applied to the music of Helmut Lachenmann, who built his aesthetic on refusal and negativity, and steeped himself in Adorno's texts and Nono's music. I don't think he was trying to find new sounds, but simply to avoid tradition at all costs, specifically the "bourgeois" tradition of the German music he disliked (perhaps too much ?).
"Saturation", on the other hand, reflects our current environment, as far as both sound and things in general are concerned: everything is becoming more and more violent. These are the realities of the iPod generation, which I don't belong to. "Saturation" contains echoes of "popular", "amplified" and "contemporary" music.
When you look at music history, the rejection of pitch seems like a regression to me. I have other things to worry about: I feel that every kind of art music, both European and extra-European, is in danger of being swept away by the so-called "popular", "amplified", "entertainment" music that is so much more widely listened to.
