Dieter Schnebel: String Quartet

CONCENTRATES, GERMS

Dieter Schnebel wrote three compositions for string quartet: works of the genre in which the most concentrated, which corresponds to the expression of enlightened morals; in which living spaces were cultivated for sublime inwardness and the exchange of thoughts inspired by freedom; in which the technical arts unfold their most beautiful blossoms. Schnebel's exploration of the implications of this history-steeped genre has produced individual works of art: all of them are musical concentrates with implemented seeds and drives of a new kind.

Around the middle of the last century, the young Schnebel, like other representatives of serialism, was interested in Anton Webern's delicate tonal webs. Based on the reduced sound of his music, he composed his five short quartets in 1954/55 - half a century before the other two quartets Pieces for string instruments (string quartet), which were then integrated into the four-part cycle of »Attempts«. If the equilibristic miniatures are not played by eight but actually by four players (i.e. a string quartet), scordaturas are prescribed: the second violin has its G string on E and the viola its G string down on Bb, the cello his Tune the C string up to C sharp.

The restrictive rule of orthodox dodecaphony, according to which no note may be repeated before all the other eleven in a row have been sounded, was radically solved by Schnebel: he used only twelve notes per piece! And because there are interval multiplications in the structurally more complex finale, more than twelve are also heard across the registers. With regard to the timing of this delicate music interwoven with subtly arranged symmetries, Schnebel was faced with a different problem. In his analysis of Webern's Piano Variations, Op. 27, he observed that the use of tones on the "one", i.e. the difficult time of meter, was avoided there. Now cultivated in his own ensemble pieces, this phenomenon of the quasi-free-floating sounds demanded precise signals – given by a conductor, for example. "I think that was the first impetus for my gestural compositions," says Schnebel.

From the experimental miniature for the soloist to the large-scale works for choir, orchestra and multimedia players with such a wide range of forms and themes and perspectives: there is hardly any music in Dieter Schnebel's oeuvre, which seems kaleidoscopic but has grown categorically, which does not clearly play into the Gestural and/or vocal articulatory, scenic, multidimensional, visionary. Actions and signals from the human environment that are decoupled from the sound have become musical material. And there is the critical orientation towards tradition, there is the familiar, love-borne handling of the canonically sanctioned: updated, it begins to shine anew, blown through by relaxing breezes or storms from the spirit of creative experimentation.

Schnebels 2nd string quartet was created in 2006/07 as a commissioned work for a specific occasion, the 2007th Annual Congress of the International Psychoanalytic Association held in Berlin in 45. The motto of the event - "Remembering, repeating and working through in psychoanalysis and culture" - was derived from the title of an essay by Sigmund Freud published in 1914, which deals with the phenomenon that the memory of what has been traumatically repressed is often replaced by actual action, unconsciously repetitive actions. Remember - repeat - work through: Dieter Schnebel was happy to be inspired. He adopted the terms as the title for his quartet "with voices" and for the titles of the three movements of the work. The vocal part written by himself with sounds, snippets of memory, exclamations can alternatively be performed by the players or by additional actors. Recall. Images spring to mind; melodic particles emancipate themselves from a crackling atmosphere of noise. In the To repeat the tangible germinates: repetitive structures, quarter-tone circling of sonorous pulsations, active breathing, counting. Alemannic agreement in "So-dele" and "Now-edle". The density of events in the final movement is even more complex: canonical voices; Rhythms and Arrhythmias: a Working through remembered modalities.

With his String Quartet »In Space«, which was written in 2005/2006 and premiered in February 2008 by Quatuor Diotima, Dieter Schnebel tried to create a »string quartet par excellence«. Similar to his other quasi-encyclopaedic works – der Symphony X about - it was about the integration of all traditional and visionary aspects of a central musical genre.

The very strictly composed work is based on the basic material of a tetrachord and the quasi-serial arrangement possibilities of its texture of whole tone and half tone steps. The sentence characters are determined by contrasting or organically growing episodes. Their structures and details live from the interweaving of fields of tension between polarities such as tone and sound, the one and the manifold, centeredness and diffusion, tradition and experiment, harmony and white noise, movement and stasis. And everything finds its place and its expressive weight according to gradual measures.

Sounds wander: no space without time, no time without space. The players walk paths. They find together in different topographic orders. Sometimes they play facing each other in the normal position of the string quartet, sometimes they turn away from each other on swivel chairs. They act individually in the four directions of heaven, in pairs on the left and right at the edges of the podium, or standing in the center as a phalanx facing the audience. From Haydn's ingenious invention to Nono's probing poetology of the soul - what the string quartet was and is resonates in allusions, reminiscences, gestures.

From the possibilities of the tetrachord, which runs through the music like an infinitely changeable sigil, clear quotations are also consolidated: in the first movement, for example, one can hear the beginning of Stravinsky's Orpheus- recognize ballet; or, in the final part of the Adagio, the beginning of Bruckner's Fifth. Sounds, motifs, movements. Time-bound paths in space. Reconnections: the essence of Dieter Schnebel's art.

Helmut Rohm