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PRECISE, COMPLEX AND VOLATILE - IN DIFFERENT COMBINATIONS Just a few years ago, the three works documented here would hardly have been performed by a university ensemble, even though the youngest of them is twenty years old. There are at least two reasons for this: Contemporary music has not been a natural part of the university repertoire for very long. This requires specialized ensembles, an adequate infrastructure (e.g. in the field of electronic music), professional event technology and lecturers with extensive experience in this field. We consider ourselves lucky to have this at the Bern University of the Arts. On the other hand, one can state that the level of playing technique is already extremely high among young music students and forms the basis for programs such as this one. What you hear today at universities in Germany and abroad during entrance exams would have appeared a while ago more as a diploma program after a long study... We want to document here the passion and naturalness with which students and lecturers take on current music in the university landscape . The three works that are collected were rehearsed within a few months in Bern at the Hochschule der Künste, in the case of Brian Ferneyhoughs La Chute d'Icare However, it was not students who formed the accompanying orchestra, but the Nouvel Ensemble Contemporain from Neuchâtel (Switzerland) made themselves available to accompany the student Shuyue Zhao, who had chosen the piece for her soloist diploma. The other two works by John Cage and James Wood, on the other hand, took place in the same program and were part of a regular program by the ensemble VERTIGO at the Bern University of the Arts. The works of Cage and Ferneyhough were developed in a traditional rehearsal process right from the start. This means that the relationship between the score and the realization of the instrumental technique on classical instruments leads step by step to an interpretation. With James Wood, on the other hand, a difficulty first arose that we will encounter more and more frequently in the 21st century: the historical performance practice of contemporary music with electronics. In particular, the two synthesizers from the 1980s can hardly be found today, not to mention the difficulties of programming them and integrating them into an ensemble. Two keyboard setups were used, each consisting of a Yamaha KX 88 master keyboard, a Yamaha TX802 synthesizer module and a Yamaha TX16W sampler. So both musicians played a synthesizer and a sampler on the keyboard at the same time. The synthesizer sounds are partly microtonally detuned, for which the composer wrote a detailed manual. In general, Wood has exhausted the specific possibilities of these devices so much that the work can almost only be performed with these rare original instruments. The realization was only possible thanks to the support of the Swiss Museum for Electronic Musical Instruments (SMEM), where the instruments come from. The same applies to the drum part. The wooden drums have a thin wooden plate instead of a skin, are rather reserved in response and sound development and are hardly ever used as a solo instrument. Drummer Brian Archinal spared no effort to give these instruments a proper place in Wood's work. Ensemble, solo percussion and electronic sounds: The brilliantly set contrasts of these three sound sources, the high tempo of dense events and the sensitivity for the juxtaposition of many timbres make up the great attraction of this composition, which is extremely difficult to study, and we are delighted that we are starting with the present one recording one of the very few performances of this work. So while Wood's piece already presents major hurdles in terms of instrumentation, Ferneyhough's and Cage's difficulties lie elsewhere. Just the technical demands in the clarinet part of La Chute d'Icare are horrendous. Listen to the first few seconds, in which the clarinet performs wild up and down movements, which can be seen visually on the score as quasi wing beats. Ferneyhough had the oil painting by Pieter Bruegel the Elder in mind when composing: Landscape with the Fall of Icarus (1555–68), an opulent picture in which the central motif, namely the fall of Icarus, is barely visible. This episode, in turn, is a well-known, albeit small, story from the metamorphoses Ovid's. Ferneyhough's scores are usually associated with the term "complex music" - this somewhat simplistic attribution (or prejudice) could refer to the fact that many notes per page are in unpredictable relationships to one another. Ferneyhough rightly responds to this statement by pointing out that every music has its own kind of complexity, and he is less concerned with the absolute precision or exactness of the reproduction (there are devices for that today) than with the fidelity of the reproduction definitely superordinate, also spiritual sense (cf.: Brian Ferneyhough, Collected Writings, 1996). To his play, which was originally called Little Serenade of Disappearance (Little Serenade of Disappearance), says Ferneyhough: »The original motivation for this one Little Serenade of Disappearance comes from the famous painting Landscape with the Fall of Icarus by Bruegel. Aside from the bright images of rural fertility, what struck me most was the poignant discrepancy between the title and the utterly inconsistent role played by the event being described and depicted. As in many other images of the period, the latter serves as a pretext for a veritable whirlpool of images and references that take on a life of their own within it.” At Cage's work Ryoanji again, things are quite different, because it demands a completely unusual attitude from the musicians towards classical parameters such as precision, response or interaction with the conductor. The so-called "Korean unison" prescribed for the ensemble means that the players can choose the starting point of their notes themselves within a short time frame. They are not all exactly on the pulse, but individually shifted. The special appeal of this composition lies in the unpredictable manner (and also uncomposable manner, if one wanted to be precise) of such diffuse and flowing accents. The conductor only beats quarter notes. Among other things, Cage writes in the score: “The conductor's function will be to keep the beat in the air, so to speak, not to bring it down to earth. These tempo deviations should be micro-rhythmic. […] Each player may make any instrumental sound or aggregate of sounds. Having made a choice, he will repeat his sounds faithfully throughout a single rehearsal or performance as though he had become a percussion instrument.” So we have extremely stable and very volatile elements in front of us at the same time. And the fact that the soloist - in the present case on the flute - is instructed to interpret in a quasi non-soloistic way contributes to the effect that Ryoanji can not only be understood as "program music" based on Japanese rock gardens, but also as an impressive alternative to conventional Western playing styles. What all three compositions gathered here have in common is that they were created on the basis of visual works: Cage's are outlines of existing stones, Ferneyhough's are Pieter Bruegel the Elder (although there are doubts about this authorship), and Wood refers to Paul Klee's engraving Two men, assuming each other to be in a higher position, meet (1903; cf. also Wood's text on his work below). This approach is entirely in line with the priorities of the Bern University of the Arts, which has been promoting and enabling interdisciplinary projects of all kinds for many years. Therefore, we would also like to take this opportunity to thank the institutions involved that made the recordings possible: the Nouvel Ensemble Contemporain, the Zentrum Paul Klee, the Yehudi Menuhin Forum Bern and the Swiss Museum for Electronic Musical Instruments in Fribourg. Peter Kraut James Wood: Two men meet, each presuming the other to be from a distant planet (1995) JAMES WOOD: »When I first thought about a concerto for percussion, I was immediately aware of the ›culture war‹ inherent in that idea. While the percussion would embody a historical, almost archaic musical tradition, the modern 'hi-tech' orchestra should represent progress, the sophisticated world of 'high art'. The eloquent and elaborate rhythmic language of the drummer should - so the first thought - inhabit a completely different world than the music of the orchestra, which is rich in melodies, harmonies and colours. It would have been easy to rely on this Kulturkampf as the only idea for the work, but I was determined to find a way to combine these two opposing forces, to integrate them into a cohesive musical work. This challenge occupied me for years before I even had the opportunity to write the concerto. When the opportunity finally arose, I suddenly remembered Paul Klee's early and highly ironic engraving with the title Two men, assuming each other to be in a higher position, meet. The engraving depicts two emaciated figures bowing low to each other and looking at each other suspiciously. By turning the title into Two men meet, each presuming the other to be from a distant planet Klee's satire is continued - each of my two men feels superior to the other, but at the same time threatened by him; yet they wish to find a common language in which to communicate. I finally realized that the solution to the 'integration problem' lay in the instruments themselves. I had to make sure that each 'player' had an equal sheet of paper on hand - the instrumentation of drums and ensemble had to fit well together in terms of their dynamic possibilities and allow for all expressive possibilities in the areas of rhythm, melody, harmony and timbre. So for the percussion I decided to use three sets of instruments: 13 wooden drums, 37 cowbells (covering a range of about two octaves, including some quarter tones) and four 'microxyls' (microtonal xylophones). The heavy, sonorous sounds of the wooden drums match the powerful brass section (seven woodwinds and five brass), while the more subtle harmonies, melodies, microtone trills and timbres of eight strings, harp, vibraphone and two electronic keyboards pair well with the cowbells and microxyls . The work is in one movement and takes the form of a dramatic dialogue between percussion and ensemble. In this dialogue, however, there are clearly distinguishable phases or sections that are almost 'classical'. In the rhetorical exchange of greetings in the opening, the drummer makes himself and the culture he represents clear, using his voice to articulate a sort of 'rhythmic solfeggio' reminiscent of ancient drumming languages. After that, the main sections could be described as follows: 'Exposition', 'Scherzo', 'Reconciliation' (an extended series of hesitant 'questions' from the percussionist and 'answers' from individual soloists from the ensemble), 'Recapitulation', 'Dance' and 'Coda'.« Two men meet... was commissioned by the BBC for the 1995 Promenade Concerts and was premiered by Steven Schick and the Critical Band on 11 September 1995 at the Royal Albert Hall (London), conducted by the composer. BRIAN ARCHINAL: »James Wood is a ›Renaissance Man‹. Not only because of his historical perspective (he was a major influence on the practice of modern percussion) and his imaginative application of that historical perspective in modern musical vocabulary, but also because of his skills as a carpenter. The percussion soloist plays a set composed of three different families of instruments, two of which are wooden, the third is a set of tuned cowbells. These instruments and their mounting hardware were designed and built by James. The stands and frames for the cowbells were constructed from misused percussion instruments. The effort involved in building them should not be underestimated: he needed at least four months just for the drums, which despite their different depths and diameters all lie perfectly on one level - a challenge for every carpenter. The first group of instruments are 13 wooden drums, some of which are covered with a fine fabric, giving them their round, deep and warm character. It's not easy to cut perfectly round circles out of wood to use as drum skins. The frames of the drums were also meticulously crafted from several layers of bent wood, which requires not only high carpentry skills but also some patience. The tuning of the drums results from their size and the thickness of the wooden skin. Musically speaking, the melodies or 'speech' patterns played by the drummer are developed in part from the micro-tuning of the drums and the micro-rhythmic variations. James has taken the opportunity to even make his own mallets. A special challenge of the piece is to choose the right mallets. It's not just about finding a good sound on every instrument. The challenge is that the character of the drum music has to match that of the instrumental ensemble. My favorite instrument, the microxyl - or microtonal xylophone as James calls it - is a type of xylophone with almost 160 bars per octave. It is not struck like a normal xylophone, but 'rubbed'. The drummer rubs along the bars, resulting in a series of slow glissandi and the impression of an endless musical line. Sometimes these glissandi are doubled by the synthesizers or the ensemble, transporting various formal and dramaturgical ideas. The playing techniques are similar to the movements that a drummer would otherwise make on mallets, but still seem strange. This principle runs through the entire piece for the drummer. The drum part acts as a kind of communication between the ensemble and the soloist. The drums are in a specific non-Western mood, and it is precisely this microtonal mood that is the soloist's language. The rhythmic difficulties also have to do with these smallest variations. It's as if James were looking at a rhythmic structure through a magnifying glass to highlight a few tiny details. It is like an exploration of rhythmic lines, sometimes with three voices moving simultaneously. The cowbells are also tuned to different quarter tones — notes between the pitches of the western scale — to evoke the same impressions, albeit with a more brilliant sound.”
John Cage: Ryoanji (1983-1985) In 1983, John Cage began an ongoing series of compositions entitled Ryonaji, based on the rock garden in Kyoto, Japan. This garden is a collection of 15 stones arranged on raked white sand. In the summer of 1983, Cage began a series of drawings based on the outlines of these 15 stones, entitled Where R=Ryoanji. At the same time, oboist James Ostryniec asked Cage to write a composition for him, resulting in a series of pieces entitled Royanji led. Four more pieces were added between 1983 and 1985: for voice, flute, double bass and trombone [...] These solo parts (in any combination or as a solo piece) are always accompanied by a percussion part or an ensemble of 20 musicians. Each series consists of eight »songs«, except for the voice version, which has nine. A »song« finds space on two pages, each with two rectangular staves. In each of these systems, Cage documented traces of the perimeters of the given stones. These lines result in glissandi within a given tonal space. In some places the lines overlap, making them unplayable. In these cases, pre-produced recordings can be used, which then form a duo or trio with the soloist. The percussion part is a single complex of two unspecific wood and metal sounds played in unison. The metric division is set to 12, 13, 14 or 15. The twenty members of the ensemble each choose a single specific note to use throughout the piece. The sounds are meant to be played in "Korean unison" - that is, the entries are not precisely matched, but only approximately. The ensemble parts consist (similar to the drum part) of a sequence of quarter notes, which (different for each instrument) should be played shortly before or after the beat, or more or less on the beat. The soloist represents the stones of the garden, while the accompaniment stands for the raked sand. Dedicatees: Joelle Léandre (double bass and ensemble), Robert Aitkin (flute), James Fulkerson (trombone), Isabelle Ganz (voice), Michael Pugliese (percussion) Source: johncage.org (accessed on 27.8.2018/XNUMX/XNUMX) Brian Ferneyhough: La Chute d'Icare (1988) The original motivation for this Little Serenade of Disappearance comes from the famous painting Landscape with the Fall of Icarus by Bruegel. Aside from the bright images of rural fertility, what struck me most was the poignant discrepancy between the title and the utterly inconsistent role played by the event depicted. As in many other images of the period, the latter serves as a pretext for a veritable whirlpool of images and references that take on a life of their own within. As such, this piece seeks less to be a heroically tragic reflection on the underlying myth and more a transcription of the strange feel of the "it was already," which Bruegel masterfully portrays, with a world serenely going about its business and the two of them forgetting tiny legs pathetically waving out of the water, while the only sign of an apocalyptic event is a pair of feathers that perish disconsolately in the wake of their one-time owner. Two aspects of this situation are clearly reflected in the composition without prescribing any illustrative functions. (1) The musical material of the opening explodes and is already fully formed, leaving its processes of creation behind as a fictional autobiography. (2) A gradual erosion of this clearly delineated, repetitive substance leads to a series of tableaux that only become recognizable in the gaps in the increasingly worn out original material. La Chute d'Icare for obbligato clarinet and small ensemble was commissioned by the Gulbenkian Foundation in Lisbon and was premiered at the Strasbourg Festival in 1988 by Armand Angster and the Het Nieuw Ensemble, Amsterdam. Brian Ferneyhough (Source: Edition Peters) program: James Wood (* 1953) Brian Archinal, percussion John Cage (1912-1992) Livia Schönbachler, flute Brian Ferneyhough (* 1943) Shuyue Zhao, clarinet Total playing time: 46:37 Press:
Under the heading "CREATIV" Cécile Olshausen from SRF 2 Kultur wrote in the "Kulturtipp" issue 05/19: With their top education in the field of contemporary music, the Swiss music academies contribute to the formation of many young ensembles with creative concepts. These recordings with compositions from the 80s and 90s are a listening experience. The Ensemble Vertigo (students (see also www.kultur-tipp.ch) |
