Like Klaus K. Hübler, Art-Oliver Simon is a composer of exceptionally high aesthetic integrity and straightforwardness in his thinking and his musical creations. As a musician, he is someone who consistently and uncomfortably fights against the spirit of the times. This is reflected in his compositions, which, unmistakably, cannot really be assigned to any stylistic direction. He evades all conceivable clichés of new music. And this, combined with his rigorous compositional radicalism, like the Frenchman Claude Ballif, is what makes him so unique. His music is fascinating, arouses curiosity, listening to it and discovering what some people, not without reason, believe they have never heard before.
Art Oliver's music is permeated, sometimes more than his speech about music, by a strict relationship between all its constituent parts, from proportionality and polymorphism, and also emanates a lucid passacaglia-like variation technique, but even more: he has a very rational, complex constructive, form-creating approach to polytonal, non-atonal and at the same time highly emotional harmonic basic material, which indicates a tender, fragile soul. In addition, such music is unsentimental, so radically free of kitsch, the denial of reality, free of fashionable sprinklings, free of ideocratic-pseudo-aesthetic layers of clay. This makes this music as unpretentious and unpretentious as Art Oliver Simon himself appears as a personality. This emotionality of composing is characterized by a deep melancholy, sublime, mostly hidden, but also sometimes very direct and comprehensible.
In his monumental string quartet Passages – disturbed, which is considered one of his major works, the third movement, "The Great Change", contains an ironic waltz passage in bar 3, consistently composed against the meter (117/4 time), which at the same time is self-generating and derived from the musical context. It is full of Thomas Bernhard-esque sarcasm, stands out with black humor, almost perceptible as an extraterritorial element, but free of cynicism and marked by deep pain. Art-Oliver Simon is an incorruptible outsider, rebellious. He never ingratiates himself. This earned him unfair treatment from the industry early on. And just like Thomas Bernhard when writing, his feelings, his strife with the existing social conditions are the decisive driving force when composing and writing lyrics. Like Jonathan Meese (Diktatur der Kunst), he felt for a long time the urge to shout this reality out, so to speak. The all-determining subject of his work appears as a consistent and flawless “aesthetics of resistance” (Peter Weiss).
This radicalization of his resistance took place both chronologically in his music and in his daily interactions, comparable to the composer Galina Ustvolskaya in the form of a sometimes berserker-like, bursting homelessness that shattered all conventions. But this never led him to musical indiscipline, even in the late phase of his artistic work, before his life-threatening illness. This attitude of integrity, autonomously fed by inner necessity, never aesthetically "freaking out," gives the music of both Ustvolskaya and Simon its primal power. The early works of both composers, although composed in a similarly consistent manner, were of course tamer, less wounded by the personal injuries that both had to endure to a great extent. Art-Oliver Simon's string trio Fantasy Variation is a paradigmatic example of this. Art-Oliver Simon's work appears free and untouched by the fury of everyday life. It is precisely this objectifying distinction between everyday reality and artistic reality that makes this music so great and significant.
Art-Oliver Simon's music cannot be described as atonal in the traditional sense; it is based on whole-tone layers, which are sometimes clearly evident in his late work from the time of his illness. The basic model is a four-tone cluster that encloses a tritone. Since Art-Oliver Simon's compositions are always multi-layered, a "neighboring" cluster is always in sharp dissonance, usually structurally at a distance of a minor second. Two further structures of this kind, derived from the two whole-tone chords described first, and at a distance of a tritone from these, extract the chromatic total. From this, Simon develops the harmonic framework of his compositions and at the same time gives him the opportunity to flexibly control the degree of consonance or dissonance. Polytonal melodic lines, in contrapuntal relation to one another, quickly expand the tonal language into more dissonant realms, enriching it enormously in terms of timbre. Polymorphic shifts, possible in a seemingly infinite range of variations according to Simon's approach, used as a form-forming element, open up a limitless cosmos of structural and tonal configurations.