Claus-Steffen Mahnkopf: Music for Oboe

MUSIC FOR OBOE

This CD looks back on more than 25 years. In 1985/86 I composed my first oboe solo piece, monad. (This work is not included on this CD.) This began a friendship with the Australian oboist Peter Veale that has lasted to this day. In 1987 we began to systematically study oboe playing technique. We literally wanted to know everything this instrument has to offer, especially with the multiphonics, which at that time could be examined with the computer for their harmonic content. The work lasted seven years, and in 1994 the basic work on playing technique for the oboe was finally published, which is still selling evenly worldwide to this day.

At the end of the 1980s, I had exclusive knowledge, so to speak. And planned my greatest work up to that point: Medusa for oboe and chamber orchestra, which was not only supposed to use the newly acquired sounds of the oboe, but at the same time radicalized my idea of ​​polyphony insofar as further sub-works were integrated into the score. (Medusa was published by Wergo on my portrait CD.) The oboe part – minus a middle section for cor anglais – is identical to gorgonion, the first track on this CD. Gorgoneion is the name of Medusa's decapitated head, which Athena wears as an apotropaion on her shield. Medusa embodies the paradox of beauty and destruction. The Gorgon Medusa attracted the viewer but petrified him with her gaze. Expressing this ambivalence is one of the ideas of this piece, which is like a symphony for the oboe.

Illuminations of Brouillard is a smaller duo for oboe and piano, which I composed in three versions to be performed over one concert evening. The oboe, which performs expressive lines, consistently uses unusual timbres (mezza voce effects, color grips and underblow tones), and the piano weaves the punctuated tones into a pedal fusion sound according to prescribed patterns. The pitch structure is the same in all three versions, but all other parameters (dynamics, sonority, use of the pedals, etc.) are always different. The result should be that the harmonious coloring, in addition to the »emotional aura« of different degrees of directness, will be different throughout, similar to wafts of fog that are flooded with light and colour. The title refers to this anamorphic idea and should therefore not be confused with the lyrical poetics of French symbolism.

In 1991, the Dutch oboist Ernest Rombout showed me the piccolo oboe, which sounds a minor third higher. An absolute rarity that I immediately fell in love with because of its sweet sound, which is not massive in the low range and not shrill in the high register. This is how the solo piece came about Solitude Nocturne. I later wrote an ensemble version: Solitude Serenade (published on the Mahnkopf Edition 3). Two literary sources come in the Solitude Nocturne (the name refers to the Solitude Castle near Stuttgart); on the one hand Lou Andreas-Salomé's psychoanalytical-anthropological view of eroticism ("... and that two are only one if they remain two"), on the other hand an aphorism about happiness from Adorno Minima Moralia, according to which inherent in the state of happiness is the forgetting of time, both of the moment and of having come in and finding out, so that happiness can only become conscious as a grateful memory.

In my several years of work at the EXPERIMENTALSTUDIO of the SWR, works from the Pynchon cycle (Mahnkopf Edition 1) were created, which can also be assigned to the oboe: DEATH and  WASTE Appears on this CD WASTE 2. The starting point is the novel The crying of Lot 49 by Thomas Pynchon, with whom I have a lot in common, above all the paranoid worldview of a thoroughly amoralized and deprived society, as can be seen in today's megacities. Deliberately setting myself apart from the other cycles - such as György Kurtág (Mahnkopf Edition 4) - the Pynchon cycle is about hardness, almost brutality, about the consistency of ultimately meaningless procedures that seem to convey everything with everything without meaning to be able to donate. The material I deliberately chose as »ugly« responds to such harshness; but the compositional and thus also the formal strategies are located at the limit of what is possible for a composer trained in the good European tradition in terms of distortions and distortions. Each of the works in the Pynchon cycle translates the narrative structure of the above novel (or an excerpt) into a mechanical sequence of numbers and proportions applied to as many levels of construction as possible. In this way, the cold rationality of a complex network meets a paranoid emptiness of meaning. "WASTE" is an acronym from The crying of Lot 49 and is called there: »We Await Silent Tristero's Empire«.

Finally, over time, the idea of ​​dedicating a work to the oboe and Peter Veale matured. The Homage to Hautbois. A musical ostracism is also one to Peter Veale, who gave the world premiere. The chamber scoring is peculiar, but has a certain logic: two of the same instruments (clarinet, also bass clarinet), two instruments of the same family (trumpet and trombone) and two instruments that can be considered special instruments in the orchestra: electric guitar and drums. The oboe stands alone. You could say: three couples and one single, imagine the group situation on a journey together. The couples play in sometimes very clear, sometimes rather hidden canons. You decide what happens. The oboe is delayed several times and then cut off from the rest. In doing so, however, they lose their energy and literally sink into ever lower registers, while the oboe retains its brilliant height. At the end, the six musicians are exhausted and the oboe plays a grand closing solo. In a way she wins but stands alone, which is an advantage musically. In the Greek polis, such as in ancient Athens, there was the ostracism, or ostrakismos. Upon request, the citizens could ban an unwelcome person, the person who received the most mentions on potsherds. It is the oboe that is banished in my piece. But as I said, musically it's a victory.

Claus-Steffen Mahnkopf