infotext:
H. E. ERWIN WALTHER · CHAMBER MUSIC In the avant-garde scene of the 60s, musical graphics were a common fad. The American Earle Brown was with him December 1952 gave the go-ahead – a now legendary score consisting only of horizontal and vertical lines. When such music graphics became widespread in Europe at the end of the 50s, they were welcomed as a way out of the serial impasse - these visually appealing playing instructions suddenly gave the musicians back immense freedom of interpretation. Roman Haubenstock-Ramati, not entirely without influence as editor of Universal Edition, organized the first exhibition of graphic scores in Donaueschingen in 1959. In the years that followed, many composers, some of whom were prominent (such as Ligeti or Schnebel), jumped on the bandwagon (and often jumped off again soon). When the relevant music magazines read about what exciting things were happening in New York, Darmstadt or Vienna, Maud Walther, the wife of the Amberg composer Erwin Walther, commented: “You see – you did that ten years ago been doing it for years!" In fact: Heinrich Ernst Erwin Walther (1920-1995) not only has to be counted among the pioneers of musical graphics - for him the phenomenon was also much more than a fad. From the beginning, the interactions between fine arts and music formed a central aspect of his work. As early as 1938, when he was still a conducting student at the Würzburg Conservatory, he had made his first attempts at graphic notation. After the war and internment, he made his debut as a pianist in Nuremberg in 1949 with improvisations on drawings by Franz Xaver Fuhr. From the mid-50s – and continuously up to Walther's death – what he called »audiograms« were created. More than 300 of these graphic scores survive - and, as you can hear on this CD, they are among the most inspiring exponents of the genre. The fact that hardly anything is known about it to this day is due not least to the character of a composer who seemed hardly interested in national impact and almost stubbornly stood in the way of the dissemination of his own works. H. E. Erwin Walther made a conscious decision to live in the provinces - for life in his native town of Amberg and against a career in e.g. B. in Munich. What he valued in the Upper Palatinate was the freedom: Here he didn't have to worry about dogmas and bans on thinking, posts and positions. And the Ambergers respected their composer, who made experimental music but also co-founded the jazz club. They loved the music teacher, who found techno "highly meditative." And they were proud of the sought-after film composer, who had contributed the music to many television programs since the 60s – including the jingle for »Title, Theses, Temperaments«. Some of these facets can be found in the completely conventionally notated Nine pieces for clarinet and piano (1963) again. Walther has recycled his film music for some numbers, while Bartók or Hindemith shimmer through the staves for others. Exotic arabesques stand next to exuberant jazz, contemplative moments next to evidence of odd humor. A piece like the sixth, for example, could probably only be written by a composer who counted Wilhelm Busch and Ludwig Thoma among his favorite authors. At the same time, it reflects Walther's interest in Bavarian folk music: because the piece begins as a veritable double, then declines through various metric variants before it ends with a quiet, tongue-in-cheek closing point. If these miniatures already sound like proof of Walther's artistic credo that he is "a colorful bird as a composer", the graphically annotated compositions make you think you are in a completely different world. Because during the Nine Pieces are committed to an expanded concept of tonality and solid motivic work - one feels reminded of the music of the 1920s in places - one finds oneself with the first few seconds rotations (1969) abruptly in the sound cosmos of the post-war avant-garde. Astonishingly, conventional compositions and music graphics do not represent different creative periods, but rather emerged side by side - also in a spatial sense: Michaela Grammer, the composer's daughter, remembers that her father drafted the conventionally notated pieces in his study, at the piano, smoking and tigering; the graphics, on the other hand, were often created outside in a garden chair. This undogmatic juxtaposition made H. E. Erwin Walther appear suspicious to the avant-garde scene of the time - for us today, on the other hand, that is what makes it so appealing. Conversely, Walther's aversion to any kind of dogmatism also meant respect for the creative freedom of the performers. He himself looked at his audiograms as "stimulants" and wrote: "In all my visual instructions there is no indication of a specific type of realization. In the case of the retroversion [=realisation], my personal acoustic ideas take a back seat to others.« Nevertheless, among the four graphic scores realized for this CD, quite different degrees of interpretative freedom can be identified. So in the case of that Kataria [Kettenreihe] for piano solo (1972) not only exceptionally fixes the instrument, but also notates each individual note head on the first of the 28 pages – not with a precise pitch, but at least with indication of the pitch register. Blue and red colors also suggest left and right hands. On the other hand, rhythm, tempo or dynamics are not fixed. In the course of the score, the notation is then supplemented by blobs, surfaces, blurred lines, interpreted by Frank Gutschmidt in this recording as clusters, clouds of tone or glissandi. In its highly virtuosic realization, the piece approaches the tonal complexity of, for example, Ligeti etudes, and one is amazed to see how Walther creates a dramaturgically coherent, organic arc of tension with this 28-page »chain«. The fact that Gutschmidt also includes the interior of the piano body in the coda may well have been in Walther's spirit; In any case, Michaela Grammer reports that her mother had the feeling while listening that Erwin Walther himself was playing the piano. The second episode of catenaries, noted on graph paper in 1972, leaves the cast open. There are no more notes, just black dots, lines, blobs of varying density. Peter Bruns set up the graphics for solo cello, incorporating numerous playing techniques that have been developed over the past century. The result is a suggestive piece that, in terms of its effect, does not need to hide behind the great cello works of the post-war avant-garde. Bruns' realization for this instrument is so compelling that one can hardly imagine that the score could in principle have become a template for an orchestral or even didgeridoo piece, for example. The floating soundse (1968), the title already indicates a direction of interpretation. The piece is sketched on two staves throughout, but without clefs and heads. Instead, there are fleeting lines of varying lengths and shading. Walther leaves numerous fundamental decisions to the performers: Which instruments should be used? Is each staff assigned to exactly one instrument? Does the lower system represent the low tones and the upper the high - or does each system cover the entire tonal space? Peter Bruns and Frank Gutschmidt have opted for a duo version in which the systems are divided flexibly between piano and cello. The result is reminiscent of the New York School around Feldman, Brown and Cage. rotations (1969) is one of Walther's most open audiograms. If one did not know that it is a score, one would take the two sheets for a graphic work of art. You can see circles and circle fragments that overlap and on the second page condense into a rotating whirlpool of downright catastrophic blackness. Ib Hausmann, Peter Bruns and Frank Gutschmidt conceived the template as an »action score«, which is not concerned with categories of pitches or time sequences, but rather with optical fields of action that stimulate collective improvisations of different density and energy states. They recorded the piece twice for this CD, in order to make it possible to hear at least the beginning of the range of possible realizations of the same graphic. Ultimately, however, this production can only convey a first impression of the richness of an artistic creativity that is still largely unexplored. One can be found in Walther's estate, for example non-opera (1969) with graphics and word instructions, utopian projects such as music for a city (1976–78), where the whole of Amberg was to be made to sound, or also Kaspar is dead (1989), a cycle of 15 colored graphics: Walther wanted them projected onto the wall while a reciter reads the text of the same name by Hans Arp; the music should then only be created in the head of the listener. Even if all of this is still waiting to be discovered, it can already be said that HE Erwin Walther made substantial contributions to 20th-century music graphics – not in New York, not in Paris, not in Donaueschingen, but in the freedom of his garden chair in the Upper Palatinate Amberg. Thorsten Preuss |
program:
Nine pieces for clarinet and piano (1963) 32: 04
[01] I 03:20
[02] II 03:13
[03] III 03:54
[04] IV 01:34
[05] V 03:54
[06] VI 03:23
[07] VII 06:11
[08] VIII 03:56
[09] IX 05:39
[10] rotations (dev.) 05:08
Version A (1969)
Graphic score (black & white)
Version for clarinet, cello and piano
[11] catenaries (1972) 06: 53
Graphic score in 14 sheets (black & white)
Version for solo cello
[12] Floating sounds (1968) 04: 52
Graphic score in 2 sheets (black & white)
Version for cello and piano
[13] Katenaria (audiogram) (1972) 16: 28
Colored graphic score in 28 sheets for solo piano
[14] rotations (dev.) 06:15
Version B (1969)
Graphic score (black & white)
Version for clarinet, cello and piano
total time 74:41
Ib Hausmann clarinet
Peter Bruns cello
Frank Gutschmidt piano
Press:
HE Erwin Walther (1920-95) led a double life. Born in Amberg, Germany, he returned there after the war and, by his own choice, flourished as a local, if not national, celebrity, churning out a continuous supply of utility music—oratorios, cantatas, and choir settings for the church; music for theatre, films, and television; an assortment of concerti, chamber works, and solo piano pieces. But at the same time, he was following a completely different aesthetic impulse, creating graphic scores—visual art or other types of non-notational information to be interpreted with musical responses—on the extreme edge of the avant-garde. He apparently designed over 300 such “audiograms,” as he called them, and although only a very small sample can be seen on the website devoted to him (www.erwin-walther.de), it's obvious they offer a variety of challenges to the adventurous performer. Which is not to suggest that Walther was in any way an innovator; though he is said to have formed an interest in the relationship between visual art and music as early as 1938 while still a student, his catalog of works indicate that it wasn't until the mid-'60s that he began to produce these pieces with a deliberate, conceptual regularity. By this time, of course, thanks to Earle Brown and the others in the so-called New York School, along with a host of experimentally-minded Europeans such as Roman Haubenstock-Ramati, graphic scores had already been introduced and adopted as a possible , if still radical, option for those seeking to explore and expand the nature of composition. Today, graphic scores are common place. What makes this present release of special interest, then, is the breadth and style of his contributions to the genre of unconventional notation, and the fact that his work existed in obscurity until now.
Although obvious, it's still worth pointing out that the less specific musical instruction a composer gives to the performer(s), the more the performer must supply, from simple tempo determination or phrasing adjustments all the way to choosing the notes themselves and accounting for their rhythmic and harmonic identity. But it also needs to be said that there is a distinction to be made between realization of a graphic score and improvisation on the part of the performer. Improvisation, when involving more than one performer, typically requires a sense of spontaneous invention based upon a reaction to what the other participants are playing, with their interaction creating the compositional context. Realization of graphic material, no matter how “unmusical” it may be, focuses the performer's responsibility on achieving a musical representation of the material at hand, either through inspiration or predetermined strategies that relate sounds or techniques to details in the “score.” In Walther's case, his “audiograms” drawings, sketches, and constructions were intended to give the performer(s) the broadest sense of interpretive (but not total) freedom, even as some of the works contain visual references to staves, notes, or implicit musical relationships. This means, of course, that the performers will bring their individual ideas about technique, rhythm, harmony, form, and mood in response to Walther's visual stimulation. He was quoted as saying “None of my graphic instructions specify a particular form of realization. My personal sonic ideas recede when the works are performed by others.”
Fortunately, the instrumentalists who have taken on this challenge are experienced New Music practitioners, and use their experiences to place Walther's “audiograms” in a musical context that is at once familiar and unpredictable. Katenaria (1972), performed by pianist Gutschmidt, is given a 16-minute reading that at various times may suggest Xenakis or Ligeti, beginning with a flood of nervous linear energy, interrupted by spurts and flashes of clusters, slicing the line into angular segments , rumbling in the instrument's lower register, and eventually pummeling out fistfuls of notes. Cellist Bruns interprets Katenarien (1972) as an acrobatic display of percussive attacks, pizzicato, string timbres, and textural contrasts. For Schwebende Klänge (1968), cellist and pianist agree on close-knit pitches within a loose harmonic framework, starting out reserved and gradually growing more animated before receding. The two separate versions of Rotationen (draft) add clarinetist Hausmann, and the three instruments search for common ground amid shifting colors, contrasting clarinet flurries, cello glisses, and inside-the-piano slivers.
If that were the extent of this disc, we'd have a fine, imaginatively-performed, thought-provoking example of graphic scores from a previously unknown source. But Hausmann and Gutschmidt have included one of Walther's conventionally notated chamber works as well, the substantial and charming Nine Pieces for Clarinet and Piano (1963), which reveals the composer's versatility and skill from a more traditional perspective. Again, there's nothing innovative here; each of the pieces has multiple episodes, the harmonic language is resolutely tonal. The first piece begins and ends in a dark, claustrophobic mood, with a Bavarian dance, reminiscent of Bartok's use of Hungarian and Romanian folk tunes, in between. Number five is jazzy, but from a Gershwinesque, rather than broadly improvisational, point of view. Number seven has a Middle Eastern melodic flavor and ends in a dervish dance. And number nine is a cakewalk, a la Golliwog. All told, it's an attractive work, well worth the attention of clarinet recitalists in search of unusual fare, here played with panache by Hausmann and Gutschmidt. And it adds to the curiosity factor of this release. I'd like to see many more of Walther's “audiograms,” and hear what other interpreters might do with them, but a few more of his conventional scores wouldn't be a bad idea either.
kind long
03/13
21.02.2013
Avant-garde artist from the Upper Palatinate
Music by the Amberg composer HE Erwin Walther, who died in 1995, is experiencing a small renaissance: his daughter presented two new CDs in her hometown
By Michael Scheiner, MZ
On the mountain. "He was grumpy, straight-forward, but for us also an outstanding pedagogue!" At the presentation of two CDs in the Amberg City Theater, Mayor Michael Cerny chatted a little out of the box. When he was still at school, he himself experienced the composer HE Erwin Walther, whose music was the subject of the performance on stage. As a music teacher who “was a little bit different”. "Notations?" asked Cerny mischievously, to add, "...we also learned them." He was addressing a very important element of the musical-artistic work of Amberger, who died in 1995: graphic notation. "We also drew a lot of music," Cerny reported, "and made music afterwards."
With this unusual method, Walther enabled his students to experience a different style. A style that music lovers and listeners sometimes still feel uncomfortable with today. Drawn scores, which do without notes and lie on a musician's music stand like a picture or a drawing, experienced their heyday in the 50s and 60s as a special form of contemporary, modern music. Walther was stylistically and artistically very versatile. In half a century he created an unusually wide-ranging oeuvre of songs, chamber music, orchestral and choral works, film music and stage works, including several hundred graphic works. These "fields of action" called "audiograms" were intended to "establish a relationship between graphics and acoustics", as he himself once noted.
Serious, cheerful, enigmatic
Four pieces from this rich estate have now been recorded – one twice – alongside nine conventionally notated compositions for clarinet and piano. Produced by the Bavarian Radio's Franken studio in Nuremberg's Meistersingerhalle, they were released under the title "Chamber Music" on Neos Music, a renowned Munich label for new music. Interpreters are the clarinettist Ib Hausmann, Peter Bruns on the cello and the pianist Frank Gutschmidt. The latter also contributed to the second album "Vocal Music", which was also recorded by BR in Nuremberg in February a year ago.
It contains 31 songs divided into five smaller and larger cycles, ranging in length from five minutes to sometimes as little as half a minute. Like the instrumental pieces, the sometimes serious, sometimes humorously cheerful and surreally enigmatic songs are stylistically motley. Walther confidently used stylistic forms from late Romanticism to Impressionism and twelve-tone music to the most advanced means of expression of the avant-garde of the time, used folk music elements such as the Zwiefacher, and jazz where it seemed appropriate. He wrote his songs about poems and texts by Ingeborg Bachmann, Federico Garcia Lorca, Wilhelm Busch and Erich Kästner, the Regensburg musicologist Thomas Emmerig and many other authors. All this makes Walther's work - and with it the carefully edited and extremely appealingly designed sound carriers in excellent interpretation - extremely exciting and varied to this day. There is hard to digest next to cheerful, an airy piece next to highly demanding vocal parts. Soprano Yvonne Friedl, tenor Joachim Vogt and baritone Wolfram Teßmer, who were also present at the presentation, confidently mastered these pitch jumps and heights, which sometimes seem almost unsingable.
The daughter keeps the work alive
The art historian Michaela Grammer, daughter of the composer, played a large part in the fact that Walther's music is published and played today. In the Amberg City Theater she enthusiastically told how, after the death of her father, she and her mother viewed and sorted “baskets of reviews, sketches, scores and extracts from the archive”. A monograph (volume 1998) of the Bavarian Association of Musicians about HE Erwin Walther was published as the first documentation in 36. A little later, numerous scores and now the two recommended CDs followed in the Stuttgart Ikuro Verlag.