Georg Friedrich Haas, Beat Furrer, Manuel Hidalgo, Helmut Oehring, Markus Hechtle: Aleph Guitar Quartet

Changing Strings – Music for the Aleph Guitar Quartet

Let's start with pictures: In Edgar Reitz' film epic The second home (1992) the (fictitious) prospective young composer Hermann Simon travels from the Hunsrück to Munich to study at the music academy. A musical instrument accompanies him. In keeping with Reitz's romantic image of the artist, it is a guitar. A specific musical atmosphere spreads, which understands the guitar as an instrument of melancholic artist loneliness: Hermann Hesse and Georg Trakl settings are in the air. The music of the younger generation after 1945 definitely contradicted this stereotype. Pierre Boulez in particular has the guitar in Le Marteau sans maître (1955) or in his large Mallarmé cycle pli selon pli (1957/62) loved. But the spirit of exotic southern countryness wafted around them there too. Around twenty years later, Hans Werner Henze used it as an instrument of the virtuoso strings in the Shakespeare Illuminations Royal Winter Music (1976/79) a. And Helmut Lachenmann works subconscious sound realities of his »musique concrète instrumentale« in a guitar duo Salute to Caudwell (1977) out. Even the advanced attitudes of Boulez or Lachenmann shouldn't hide this: the guitar remains an instrument for the lonely, a vocal accompaniment par excellence. If it multiplies, the cliché of the fiery, classy flamenco quickly comes up.

The Aleph Guitar Quartet has been fighting against stereotypes since it was founded in 1993 and has commissioned composers to write pieces for this seemingly unusual line-up. The illusion of the unusual must be emphasized, because actually a guitar quartet proves to be consistent. After all, the guitars have something in common with the royal genre of chamber music, the string quartet. In both cases, these are stringed instruments with a similar body and extensive tonal range. The types of play are different, but boil down to two characteristics: there is a bow, here it is plucked. The ways of playing can be adapted to the personal style of composers almost without limit, or challenge composers to inscribe what is most their own in the harmony of the four individualists. The commissioned works that the Aleph Guitar Quartet received from the assembled composers Manuel Hidalgo, Beat Furrer, Helmut Oehring, Markus Hechtle and Georg Friedrich Haas not only testify to the redefinition of the guitar sound, the extraction of particularly specific and often refined playing styles, but also from the highly individual sound language of the most diverse textures that unfold in the hands of the four interpreters.

Manuel Hidalgo is most likely to tie in with a traditional guitar sound with his (fight dance) (2000) on. On the one hand, this is astonishing when one considers that Hidalgo, as a student of Helmut Lachenmann, was trained in the tonal transformations of his »musique concrète instrumentale«. On the other hand, Manuel Hidalgo also stays with that (fight dance) connected to the musical tradition of his native Spain, as in some of his other works. Rhythmic and tremolos predominate here. The tremolo in particular evokes an association with the so-called rasgueado style of playing, which is typical of the virtuoso, rapid tone repetitions of flamenco music. Occasionally the four guitarists have to put handshakes on the body of the instrument. And this is where things get ambiguous: because such a knocking percussion technique can be found in abundance in Helmut Lachenmann's work - but it is also not untypical for Spanish flamenco music. The »à la espagne« in Hidalgos (fight dance) is a highly ambivalent affair: it uses playing techniques from new music, which ultimately turn Spanish into a mirage.

You can't expect even less from Beat Furrers Fragments of a future book (2007) mislead. The piece for soprano and guitar quartet is based on a poem by the Spanish poet José Ángel Valente, but Furrer is more interested in the tonal images of the Spanish language. It's only superficially about songs with guitar accompaniment. Rather, the sound levels of voice and instruments merge into one level. The singer dabs at the vocals just as the guitarists deliver their jangling pizzicati. Furrer leaves the poetic images, such as falling leaves, entirely to the four instrumentalists anyway. Already after the first ten bars, the playing instructions for the guitarist are »speaking«. And that is exactly where Furrers follows Fragments of a future book the transfer of his own compositional aesthetics to the specific instrumentation: namely to breathe vocal and linguistic elements into the instruments. The meaning of the text is the least important - the song as a linguistic outpouring is completely absent here. And yet everything speaks.

Finally, Helmut Oehring and his quartet are clearly illustrative me.silence. from the year 2000. Oehring has always had a soft spot for cinematic music without a film. Perhaps one of the reasons why pictorial gestures predominate in his music is that he grew up with deaf parents. In me.silence. a kind of abysmal persecution film unfolds. Even the subtitle, which is based on a series Cruising/Sacrifice refers, owes a lot to the horror film. The playback that Oehring uses here consists of a breathlessly panting female voice, the sound of which leaves little to be desired in terms of clarity. The climax of the piece is a film music-like chase sequence, as if from the noise studio, in which fine plastic bags are played over the right hand. At the end of the sequence, the plastic bags are noisily removed and introduce the dramatic climax of a rapid narrow passage. What is otherwise called "fugue" is not meant constructively here, but figuratively: because "fuga" also means "escape". Why the piece isn't called "Threatening Danger - Fear - Catastrophe" is another matter. It is always accompanying music for a movie scene without a film.

Markus Hechtle's play line with hatching (2006) for four guitars and clarinet is a suggestive but also almost minimalist piece. The title line with hatching may at first sound like a poetic paraphrase, but it describes exactly the process of the piece, even though the sphere of the pictorial is touched on here again. The continuously running tremolo sound surface of the four guitars is the hatching. And even as a game gesture: it's like meditating hatching with a pen. The guitarists also use the Rasgueado – only that here there is hardly any association with Spanish. This sound surface forms, so to speak, a kind of foundation on which the lines of the clarinet unfold with their abrupt falls and long lines. Indeed is line with hatching an almost painterly piece: it is colored and coloring and at the same time minimalist like a piece of minimal art.

The  quartet by Georg Friedrich Haas from 2007 is perhaps the most idiosyncratic work from this repertoire selection by the Aleph Guitar Quartet. It unfolds with impressive consistency the composing with overtone chords and overtone series that is so typical for the composer Georg Friedrich Haas. He uses microtonal tuning systems that go back to the Russian composer Ivan Wyschnegradsky. Seen in this context, the guitar quartet represents a veritable link between his two orchestral pieces Dead natures (2003) and limited approximations (2010). From the former, the piece adopts dense overtone chords and a "singing," as Haas himself writes, in overtone melodies and sound wanderings through space from one instrument to another. A string sound refers to the later orchestral piece, which in limited approximations is intended for six microtonally tuned pianos, whose inner body is carried outwards, so to speak, with the microtonally tuned guitars. Finally, all three works are linked by an almost hallucinatory, overwhelming effect: After a certain, rapid time, one forgets that this quartet is also about guitars, that it is about instruments at all that could be known in any form of convention.

Bernd Kunzig

Georg Friedrich Haas - Quartet for 4 guitars

In my earlier pieces, I had the strings of the instruments tuned with the intention that playing with the open strings alone could create an overtone chord. With the guitar this is relatively easy: you only have to tune the lowest string down a whole tone, the 3rd string down a little more than a semitone and the second string up a little less than a semitone. If all fourths and fifths are then also tuned cleanly and precisely, a chord is created with the six open strings from the 2nd, 3rd, 4th, 5th, 7th and 9th partial of the contra-D:
D–A–d–f sharp (minus 1/12 tone), c' (minus 1/12 tone), e'.

Unlike e.g. B. with the violin, thanks to the frets, it is possible to intonate relatively safely despite the unusual tuning. For aesthetic reasons, the purity of the sound of the open strings calls for a turbidity: Therefore, the 2nd guitar is tuned a twelfth tone lower than the first, the 3rd guitar two twelfth tones (= one sixth tone) lower, the 4th guitar three twelfth tones (= a quarter tone) lower.

The music lives from the contrast between these “pure” chords derived from the overtone series (including their XNUMXth-tone or often XNUMXth-tone “shadows”) and XNUMXth- or XNUMX/XNUMX-tone passages composed in the free microtonal space, which take up the harmonic concepts of Ivan Wyschnegradsky.

In between there is always a "singing" in twelfth-tone clusters. This sounding together of pitches that are very close together is no longer a harmony, but it is not yet a chord either, but forms a sound rich in beats that is used in the composition like an expressive unison.

The  quartet for 4 guitars was written at the suggestion of Christian Scheib for the Aleph guitar quartet and the Musikprotokoll 2007.

George Frideric Haas