Georg Katzener: String Quartet

Georg Katzener · string quartets

The string quartets are certainly not the focus of Georg Katzener's extensive work, and yet they accompany his entire development as a composer: almost as if he wanted to redefine his own position at intervals of about 20 years using the traditional format. They are not the sum of his work, but important milestones, they do not offer an overview, but insight into an artistic career.

Georgkatzer, born in Silesia and raised near Magdeburg after the war, was initially a self-taught musician, because systematic music lessons were unthinkable in the post-war years. It took a preparatory year before he could be admitted to study composition at the Berlin Academy, first with Rudolf Wagner-Régeny and then with Ruth Zechlin. The master’s degree with Hanns Eisler from 1960, which encouraged him to try out the most diverse genres, was formative: the astonishing diversity ofkatzer’s work may find an explanation here.

So the career of the composer Georgkatzer did not begin with gradually growing into the commitments of an established musical culture: that may be the reason for his special relationship to tradition. It had to be valuable to him simply because he had discovered it himself and of his own accord, and for that very reason it was not sacrosanct and rigid, but alive – accessible to change. So he combined the traditional forms, concert and sonata movement, with a modern musical language, the composition with rows in the Schoenberg successor with a kind of tonal centering. At the same time, he constantly introduced new styles and techniques into music and crossed the boundaries of genres and genres. The effect was twofold: not only did it call into question tradition, but also the conventions of modern composition, such as the canon of rules for dodecaphony.
He experienced his breakthrough as a composer in 1966 – with the First String Quartet. Other much-discussed pieces followed shortly thereafter: the orchestral sonatas, for example, the string music. His Second String Quartet was also composed, which was neither performed nor published at the time, and the score of which was thought to have been lost in the meantime. Although it has recently reappeared, it remains unpublished as sketches for this work have since been integrated into the Fourth String Quartet. On the other hand, another composition for string quartet, which provided for an additional soprano solo, seems definitely lost. This explains the curious fact thatkatzer's quartet works only include numbers 1, 3 and 4.

String Quartet No. 1 (1965) is a good example of Katzener's compositional strategies: the contours of a classic three-movement structure, fast-slow-fast, can still be discerned, as can the contrasting effects of a sonata's main movement and the episodic structure of a rondo. But what happens within this framework - the alternation of asynchronous and more or less strictly synchronized movement patterns, or, if you will, collective and individual action - is utterly peculiar and ranges from hammered chord progressions, as it were, to aleatoric fields of dissolution, in which the Performers are free to arrange the given pitches rhythmically within a certain period of time. The potential for conflict circumscribed by these extremes can be easily read from the gestural character of the music.

More than twenty years lie between Georgkatzer's first and his third quartet, years of experience with the most diverse forms and genres, experimental music theater and, in particular, electronic music, which has been very important to him since the mid-3s. In the String Quartet No. 1987,katzer leaves the traditional form behind - but the palette of tones has unexpectedly expanded: Various trill, tremolo and glissando effects, playing on the bridge, on the frog, with the bow, or on the body of the instruments, different pizzicato effects, flageolets, extreme registers, crossed voices: all this constitutes the completely different sound world of this quartet. Meanwhile, familiar elements also appear: for example, the almost violent synchronization, which twice tries to force the largely individually conducted instrumental parts into step, once shortly after the beginning, and then again shortly before the chaotic, tumultuous end of the piece. If you want, you can see a political meaning behind it, after all it's the year XNUMX - butkatzer himself never thought much of such clear definitions. His own explanation of the Third String Quartet gives an almost inconspicuous reason for its creation: "On a summer evening I became aware of the singing of the crickets for the first time, I heard it as a dense, chirping texture around a central tone." apparently to the paradigm: a whole made up of nothing but independent individual voices. “Something else coagulates in the writing of an extra-musical stimulus: human experience in artistic analogy. In the context of the piece, the recurring sound fields that were triggered by the evening's listening experience can hardly be understood as natural phenomena. Rather, if you like, as an expression of nervousness and tension.«

Another long period of time, seventeen years, separates Georgkatzer's Third String Quartet from his fourth and most recent contribution to the genre. In between lies the year 1989, the fall of state socialism and German reunification, which gave the artists of the former GDR a paradoxical experience - it has been described often enough: You can now say anything, but nobody listens to you anymore - and the Realization that New Music is also a market. The skepticism that follows from such life experiences has entered intokatzer's String Quartet No. 4. He gave it an ambiguous title: »tempi fragili« – »Fragile dimensions of time« or is it: Fragile, endangered times? What is ostensibly aimed at a purely musical situation becomes a code for the great uncertainty that has become the defining attitude to life of our time: the piece oscillates episodically between walking and pausing, static and dynamic, mechanical idleness and rabid outbursts, treating time as broken Discontinuum, until towards the end all coordination is abandoned and in the end everyone plays spherical harmonics on their own.

Utopia or Entropy? No definition here either. But always composing up to date.

Ingo Dorfmuller