Klaus Huber: …à l'âme de descendre de sa monture et aller sur ses pieds de soie… / Metanoia

CLAUS HUBER

…à l'âme de descendre de sa monture et aller sur ses pieds de soie…
Chamber concerto for solo cello, solo baryton, alto, accordion and percussion (2002/2004)

»Our view of the world is shifted.
We all squint. The eye squints. The ear squints.
And our thinking is distracted by an overpowering magnet.
Growth, growth above all. The totalitarian market.«
Klaus Huber, April 29, 2002

In my contribution to the Festschrift 75 years of Donaueschingen Music Days I wrote: »Sociologists analyze: well over sixty percent of the music-cultural reproduction of today's societies happens in a virtual, indirect, digitized and constantly further manipulated way. Absolute belief in the quantification of all values, including human values, is an essential prerequisite for this. Statistics is the undisputed ruler that finally makes everything - almost everything - disappear into the jaws of consumption, with considerable profits for all too few... Paradoxically, the 'disappearance of reality', which in the multimedia age is increasingly being exchanged for virtual realities, is by no means leading to the simultaneously eagerly propagated ›super-individual‹ freedom, but straight to the ever more powerful unfolding potential for manipulation. Conclusion: The reification of man and thus inevitably also of his art is progressing inexorably.« (see also: Klaus Huber, plowed time, writings and conversations, music texts, Cologne 1999)

The deeper we delve into the potential of music as art, the clearer it becomes that music has no existence without transcendence. The question arises even more drastically than in other art forms: what is "outside", i.e. materializable, what is "inside", i.e. something that can be experienced without being material. In its deepest roots, however, it is always something like a real representation of the world in the medium of its temporality. [...]

In the twelve years of my involvement with Arabic music and especially its classical music theory, the confrontation with Sufism accompanied my path. In doing so, I came across an ode by the epochal universal scholar Ibn Siná-Avicenna, in which he draws mystical images of the path and destiny of the human soul and discusses them philosophically. Consider that Avicenna, the early Enlightener around the turn of the first millennium, found no contradiction in singing about the Sufi experience of wholeness in an ode describing the existential path of the human soul.

Ernst Bloch was one of the first to take up Avicenna's questions again in a text from 1952, in which he also analyzes the importance that Avicenna's and Averroë's philosophy had for the development of Western thought: Avicenna and the Aristotelian Left. (Edition Suhrkamp, ​​1963)

If I now think that we Western artists must – not only in our aesthetics but with our entire existence – oppose the wave of reification that is dominating a broad spectrum of the present, the question arises: How do we offer a rationally anchored, not entirely ineffective aesthetic resistance?

In his Frankfurt speech at the presentation of the Theodor W. Adorno Prize to him (2001), Jacques Derrida made an astonishing revaluation of dream thinking. Derrida demonstrates a high level of rationality in dreams, which is able to surpass that of waking consciousness. And that on the basis of a chain of thoughts that none other than Walter Benjamin dreamed up and carefully reformulated. Isn't it time to recognize man's inner, holistic existence, that is, his soul, as a reality that is just as rationally related to the world as a whole as are all external realities? Derrida has taken a first step here.

I come back to Avicenna's ode, which from then on would not let me go. She took me from the original concept of a cello concerto to the work, which premiered in Donaueschingen in 2002. I had already expanded the solo cast, always in the vicinity of Avicenna's ode, but now the present interrupted me.

In April 2002 I read a previously unpublished poem by the Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish, which he wrote in January 2002 in the besieged Ramallah. His poetry touched me so deeply that it took me away from Avicenna's ode, which has remained the conceptual background of my composition, into the present.
For me it is as amazing as it is affirmative when Darwish - whether consciously or unconsciously - in a central stanza of his poem ("The soul must dismount from its mount and walk on its silken feet") unmistakably reaches Avicenna's mystical depth - a thousand years later.

Responding to the present as I cannot do otherwise, I hope to make a modest contribution with my work against the progressive reification of man (including his soul...), to save humanity in a time that has dedicated itself to other goals. And this in full awareness of an extremely brutalized present, not only in Palestine.

Klaus Huber

The work is a recomposition/reduction of The soul must dismount from the mount (UA Donaueschingen 2002), or reduction of …à l'âme de marcher sur ses pieds de soie… (2004)

Metanoia for organ solo (1995)

The recording of Metanoia was produced by Süddeutscher Rundfunk in 1997 in the Neresheim monastery church with Hans-Peter Schulz on the important historical organ by Johann Nepomuk Holzhey and presented as a tape version at the 1st International Week for New Organ Music in Trossingen. The premiere took place a year later, in 1998: at the same place with the same performers.

The title of the piece refers to a central concept of Christian tradition as handed down in the New Testament: »μετανοεῖτε!«, i. H. »Turn around!« or »Repent!« – this is understood as a call for a radical reorientation of one's entire life. The utopian radical change appears as the goal of a constant effort that cannot be avoided, because change always lies before or behind man, but never in his possession.

This background determines the structure and tonal form of Klaus Huber's work. He wrote: "Metanoia is not a result of reflection, but 'strikes perpendicularly, like lightning'". The flash of the fold in and out is already shown graphically in a sketch as an angel's fall, which divides the composition into two completely different halves of unequal size: on the one hand, the first part, which, in undulating movements and turbulence, brings about a compression and intensification of the Tone or sound material is intended to achieve, on the other part a part that Klaus Huber himself characterizes with the term »monotony«. The lightning itself, the transition cannot be heard, because the ending circling around the central tone A flat develops from the reverberation of the loud ending of part 1.

Also in Klaus Huber's composition …à l'âme de descendre de sa monture et aller sur ses pieds de soie… there is the central tone A-flat, for the composer the tone of love (his father discovered this assignment in a doctoral thesis on Heinrich Schütz). The micro-intervals: third-tone too high, third-tone too low and tempered A-flat, which sound in different combinations at the same time, result in so-called »battements«: vibrations.

Also in Metanoia will be the influence arising from the composer's preoccupation with
Arabic music, audible: in the second part, Klaus Huber prescribes microtonal changes in pitch - a special challenge for the organ, whose structure and construction actually do not allow this. The unequally floating tuning of the historic organ by J.N. Holzhey serves the composition in this respect in an ideal way.

For …à l'âme de descendre de sa monture et aller sur ses pieds de soie… specially tuned micro-interval reeds must be built into the accordion.

Teresa Carrasco