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CHRISTIAN OFENBAUER · DESTRUCTION OF THE ROOM / OF TIME As enigmatically abstract and of hermetic beauty as Christian Ofenbauer's music may sometimes be, it nevertheless reacts sensitively to the context in which it is created, to the performers for whom it is intended, to its general conditions. Certainly, everything composed communicates, even if it is through the alleged refusal to communicate. But with Ofenbauer there are several series of works that can even overlap and whose components are related to each other, the round dance of fragments about and the six string quartet movements; Compositions that enter into a musical exchange, refer to one another or emerge from one another, in which the same ideas are renegotiated and processes are further developed. This also applies to the three musical figures with the same title Destruction of the room/time, which is the stage direction for the final scene from Bertolt Brechts Fatzer-Material quoted: a work for string quartet from 1999 (and as such part of the complete recording of the string quartet movements by the Arditti Quartet, NEOS 11513-14), a piano piece from the same year and a composition from 2000 for the sum of these two instrumentations, i.e. a piano quintet. The two latter works were recorded for the first time for the present double CD by Johannes Marian and the Quatuor Diotima as musical pendants. Smoldering Discomfort / What does that mean: a room broken through time? Does this mean a speculative mathematical relationship? Or could the aging of a room be meant, its slowly progressing decay? And what would be the destruction of this process? The suspension of time, stopping its passage? It is no coincidence that these open questions revolve around the central themes that Ofenbauer poses as a composer. The fact that he makes the year of origin an integral part of the title of his work is a well-known outward sign of this. In this respect, it seems only logical that the two pieces presented here now appear to him as »early music«. But structurally, too, his work behaves very deliberately in relation to the time, yes, she wants to raise awareness of it: on the one hand, his works make her passing audible or, on the other hand, give the impression that they could play with her, compress her, stretch her or even bring her to a standstill. This leads us to the historical origin of the sounding triptych Destruction of the room/time, because it emerged from incidental music. In 1999 Lutz Graf staged Ödön von Horváth's drama at the Grazer Schauspielhaus Tales from the Vienna Woods, in which the social, political and economic situation around 1930 is dealt with without any hope of improvement. At that time it was already clear that Graf would also direct the premiere of Ofenbauers ScenePenthesileaA dream (1999–2000) and he invited the composer to make a musical contribution to the Horváth production. Ofenbauer decided on a sound installation that would spread subtle uneasiness throughout the evening in the house (an associative connection to the "room"?) - even before the performance, during the interval, after the end. He wrote a densely woven but very quiet texture for string quartet, which got by radically without rests or perceptible single tones, but with extremely stretched, often noisy colored glissandi and tremolos in all voices returned after 48 minutes and thus represented a kind of time warp , a hopeless infinity. The other instruments used are legitimized by the piece itself: piano, zither, contra-guitar and two violins. The audience of the theatrical performance could almost physically perceive the merciless, icy atmosphere that Ofenbauer achieved: his music, which hit the mark in many respects, did not exactly help Graf's production to record popularity, but it did make a decisive contribution to the truthfulness of this Horváth interpretation. All of this may suggest precise compositional calculations - and without question it was chosen with care - but the work on the incidental music was noticeably relaxed: he was not only proud of the final effect, but also had a lot of fun with it, as it were In retrospect, Ofenbauer recalls being able to write and watch the sounds unfold. This experience made him more relaxed about composing, which was a helpful, big step in his personal development. Transformation and Independence / The obvious idea was to prepare this »musique d'ameublement« for the concert hall and for direct communication with the audience. First of all, it turned out that the piano part of the incidental music could be used as a piece of its own rank: it became Destruction of the room / of time (1999) for piano solo – and would therefore also be in the fraction piece- line up. The notation is conventional and exact, albeit with many bar changes and repeatedly shorter, repeated groups of bars. Morton Feldman comes to mind, but the impression differs: due to a different structure of the repetitions, a different musical gesture altogether. There are isolated, delicate, seemingly improvised sounds that seem unintentional, all very quiet, self-forgotten, unpretentious. Many pauses (the piece already begins with one) and the permanently pressed pedal create space for extensive reverberation, in the acoustic as well as in the figurative sense in perception. And due to a relatively wide spectrum from which the pianist can choose his tempo (quarters = approx. 56-72), considerable fluctuations in the duration from performance to performance are possible. In addition, the string quartet's time warp also held the composer captive. But it wouldn't be Ofenbauer if the music didn't change through the abandonment of its original function and the removal from the former context, develop a momentum of its own, in short: change compositionally as well. For Destruction of the room / of time, concert version for string quartet and piano (2000) he subjected the piano part as well as that of the quartet to a new arrangement. The ideas remained the same, but Ofenbauer intervened several times in the concrete process, above all with (not really perceptible as such) accelerations in the string continuum towards the end of the 48 minutes, which were written in a space-time notation on paper are brought. And what previously had to lead back into itself now misses its beginning: the circle no longer closes. The piano also guarantees such a breakup of a supposedly fixed event, in that it begins at the same time with the string quartet, but due to its independent tempo structure it penetrates differently from performance to performance in its musical text, before it falls silent with the quartet after exactly 48 minutes . The different pitches are important here: 440 Hz is required for the strings and 445 Hz for the piano. This ensures that the sound drops of the piano are not absorbed by the string sound, even where the open strings may temporarily stand out due to playing technique. And suddenly a bridge seems to stretch back to the unfinished Decline of the egoist Johann Fatzer to arch, to that fragment which, significantly, was made at the same time as Horváth's Tales from the Vienna Woods. Brecht says in Heiner Müller's stage version: "The purpose for which a work is made is not / identical to the purpose for which it is used / the knowledge can be used / in a different place than where it was found .' So it applies to them Destruction of the room/time, which leaves its origins behind, which transforms itself, which in the form for piano solo as well as for string quartet and piano enters into an exchange with itself – back to back, but hand in hand. Walter Weidringer program: Christian Ofenbauer (* 1961) CD 1 [01] Destruction of the room / time 2000 48:16 Diotima Quartet John Marian, Piano CD 2 [01] Destruction of the room / time 1999 31:21 John Marian, Piano
first recordings |