Ernst Helmuth Flammer: superverso per organo

Ernst Helmuth Flammer superverso per organo

The artist's greatness is not measured by the "beautiful feelings" he arouses […] but by the degree to which he approaches the great style, by being capable of great style. This style has in common with passion that it disdains to please; that he forgets to persuade; that he commands; that he wants...

Friedrich Nietzsche
»The Posthumous Fragments« 14/61/1888

The organ cycle »superverso per organo« as a sacred draft

The Organ Cycle superverso was created in the years 1985-1992 on behalf of various institutions, including those that wanted to revive certain organs and promote organ projects. This organ cycle, originally conceived as just three studies, gradually grew and was completed in 1992 with a total of twelve pieces. As in the first three pieces, in each »superverso« (»total transformation«) the virtual counter-image of the original musical form will be reached at the end. In this way, stillness turns into movement, a vertical structure into a predominantly horizontal one that culminates in a melodic flow. The reverse path can also be followed.

to the individual pieces

The first three pieces, actually etudes for organ, were virtuoso occasional compositions in the truest sense of the word, stemming from a spontaneous idea that immediately pushed for realization.

At the beginning of the first study, repeated, melodic figures are opposed to a chord of sustained tones that gradually, almost imperceptibly, merge with each other.
Christoph Maria Moosmann later appropriately titled this piece genesis given.

Suspended tones, broken up by rapidly scurrying quintuplets with the same sequence of notes in different transpositions, characterize the second study. Towards the end, the sustained tones gradually disappear completely.

In the fourth piece there is a constant change of timbre in very small steps of two polyrhythmic melody arcs opposing each other contrapuntally, which only gradually transform into chord structures in the sense of a great compression in the final part of the three-part piece. This development is both interrupted and anticipated by a rigid middle section held in broken chords. Thereafter, the structures clump together almost beyond recognition and at the same time intentional hypertrophy. A first sheet of lightning of what reveals the limits of being, apocalyptic in the sense of a Johannine revelation of the biblical catastrophe. Accordingly, the piece is laid out as an endless progression with a passacaglia-like bass line and, accordingly, expansively, symphonically. I have it later Symphony I mentioned.

Sustained tones and fast repeated notes emancipate themselves into scraps of melody in the fifth piece.

The sixth piece is characterized by the virtuoso fireworks of a latent two-part chord progression. Here, too, the limits of the organ instrument's repeatability are far exceeded - with the result that a virtual sound screen is created as a firmament, enclosing the universe of the timeless: consisting of beats, echoes and Interferences, very rich in overtones, very spectral and very speculative, a sort of deductive secondary harmony that cannot be grasped in the notes.

The seventh piece is composed for a small organ. It is also miniature in duration. From monophony, transposing itself as a kind of "eternal melody" that could be continued indefinitely, a second and a very quiet third voice grow, which transform into chords. All voices are clearly differentiated from one another in terms of timbre, but are limited to one manual, which in many organs is structurally linked to the pedal.

With cluster study the eighth track is overwritten. It deals with the cluster technique in an organ-like manner, compositionally in the sense of a developing variation. But anyone expecting what is commonly thought of as a cluster will be disappointed. The voices emerge quietly out of nowhere. An upper voice gradually glisses downwards as seamlessly as possible, a lower voice develops in the direction of the treble. The tendency of the whole is reinforced by the composition of the registration, which is composed down to the last detail. The intersection of the two voices describes a Latin cross close to the golden mean as a symbol of suffering (»Le martyre de Jésus-Christ«), of death and of everything that goes beyond death: the ascent of the soul, of human existence into a virtual one , aeternal world; transmigration of souls.

color music, as the ninth piece is called, is limited to a few pitches. There are a total of four timbres, ie four register combinations in five voices, which are maintained throughout the piece. Each voice is assigned a certain tone duration, one voice 5 sixteenths, the next 7, the third 8, the other 9 and 11 sixteenths. Since all voices stick to their tone durations in a rigid and repetitive manner, a polyrhythmic structure of quite high complexity emerges. Seen rhythmically, there is a complete run-through, ie a measurement of the distance between two places where all voices start at the same time. color music is the icon de la Cité Celeste, the infinitely wide heavenly place of the universe of being, of which our physique is only a small part of time. The physical limit of a person only allows a limited duration of the infinite structure (infinite color melody). color music .

The toccata as a traditional expectation is questioned and necessarily disappointed simply because of its character, being narrative and thus musical prose. The due resolution chord after a developing melody arc, which got going after its sequencing, is denied. In the sense of »superverso«, the chords typical of a toccata gradually disappear in favor of polyphonic, horizontal structures with the ending, which is atypical for a toccata and draws the virtual image of the beginning of the tenth piece.

In the sense of a small sculpture (bozzetto), the eleventh piece is a sound sculpture that is sometimes clearly revealed to the viewer, sometimes disappearing into the fog like a dream image. The composition uses a technique that manipulates the air supply to the organ pipes, thus alienating the standing sound on the one hand, but also making it more present again. The profiling of the seemingly unhewn monolith becomes visible through figures that have more tonal presence than the standing chords. However, these figures that are in the other superverso-pieces that drive development forward do not change the static character of the piece that appears endlessly, hence the title sketch. The sound figure only appears concretely once, at the only tutti passage in this piece.

With Symphony II is also the title of the twelfth, the most extended piece of the cycle. Actually, in the sense of harmony, a summary of the idea content of the whole cycle is to be understood here. A bass melody builds up systematically, gaining increasing complexity, reinforced by the emergence of independent voices, first in fragments, then continuously in the manuals. The fourth piece, which is also symphonic, appears rhapsodic in the second of three large-scale apocalyptic climaxes. We find ourselves in a situation between dream and reality, between this world and the hereafter. The material is now analogous to Symphony I increased to the point of absurdity and suffers the process of its own destruction in the agglomeration. The cycle ends with five very quiet, spherical, otherworldly chords, presented very slowly, almost flowing out of time.

To the overall design

Although much more advanced in its musical composition and language, since historically speaking it was composed much later, the relationship between the superverso-Cycle' to Messiaen's great organ cycles unmistakably. Admittedly waived superverso per organo, unlike, for example, the great organ cycle Livre du Saint Sacrament by Olivier Messiaen in favor of a concrete theological titling of the individual pieces, and also withdrawn to musical and technical titling. But what they both have in common is the big draft of the overall program Trinity on the one hand and Time and time on the other hand, as non-mythological, rational, natural-philosophical approaches that draw belief in the Cartesian sense from a higher-level creation instance that orders our world and whose image at the same time constitutes the external and internal order of things in our living environment.

Our creativity is (like Messiaen's idea) a work of God. Aware of our limits and our limitations, we are called to humility as servants of the greater whole. What is the place of guilt and atonement as a result of the upsetting of this order? For me, this consequent burden in the Protestant sense cannot exist, but there can be an ethical imperative for what is to be accepted as given in this order as responsibility. To that extent superverso a »Catholic« organ cycle in the broadest sense.

»Trinitas« means here Trinité de la Nature, de l'Esprit et de l'Architecture as a Cartesian trinity of nature, of spirit, which creates structure out of unformed nature (matter) as an outflow of creative spirit. This is in the tradition of the medieval September Artes Liberales, the seven basic natural sciences or disciplines that explore the order of the world.

The presence of the Trinity arises in superverso-Cycle from the tripartite grouping of the pieces, which was conceived more and more consciously in the course of its creation, and which does not correspond to their order. Thus, pieces I-III are also combined as an opening on the one hand and on the other hand as a climax to a first climax, the fourth piece, as well as pieces IV, XI and XII. They are the longest pieces in the cycle, the eleventh piece even abandons a certain form of measurable temporality. Pieces V, VI and VII remain, and pieces VIII, IX and X. With them the clock works and the firmament is presented, the access to the Aeternum in the consciousness of our finiteness. This is also what the eighth piece about the cross symbol and that bird's voice that leads to the exit into infinity, whether this is the river "Styx" or the driveway, is anyone's guess. But the cross also stands for salvation. In color music the physique of the human being sets a limit to a musical structure designed for infinity (big passacaglia). Regarding the toccata the infinite melody disappears in the »nevering nothingness of infinity« (Heidegger). Here it is still a vision of a possibility, not revelation as a threatening (piece IV) and apocalyptic reality (piece XII). Just as the internal structure of the individual pieces very often has a three-part structure, the number of pieces »twelve« is to be understood as »symbolic«. Very few pieces can be performed individually. A change in the order is also difficult to imagine because of this program cast in music.

Ernest Helmuth Flammer