Mark Andre: …22,13…

... 22,13 ...
a musical theater passion

Sound architecture of the apocalypse

Apocalypses, we think, take us by surprise loudly and brutally, the unleashed elements roll, burn, whirl everything down, and people scream out in sheer fear.

Mark Andre's Apocalypse contradicts this image. It happens mostly quietly, with many zones of stillness. The few loud moments stand out all the more abruptly. The quiet knows many degrees of intensity, not only in the dynamics, but above all in the tension that builds up between the tones and sounds. As in many chamber music works, the dark instrumental colors also dominate in his »music theater passion«: the string family is represented by cellos and double basses, the woodwinds by bassoons and bass clarinets, and the brass by trombones.

Only the human voices have their origin in the pitch. Due to their overtone spectra, the deep instruments are particularly well suited for live electronic transformation in real time. For this transposition of the instrumental sounds into the sound and performance space, Mark Andre developed a special software together with the Freiburg experimental studio.

He fades in Bible texts, right at the beginning, then from the middle in increasing numbers; they come from the Apocalypse and the Gospel of John, they are mostly whispered. During performances, they come from loudspeakers, and although the live, electronically processed sounds are also played through them, they seem like radiation from another world in relation to the four groups of instrumentalists and singers. The voices, in particular, articulate vowels in many different ways, the A and the O. What the words contain, they transform and focus. This applies equally to the sound level and the meaning level of language.

Ciphers, signs, parables

Also the title of this passion, ... 22,13 ..., refers to a passage from the Bible. In their last book, in the last, the 22nd chapter, verse 13 says: "I am the alpha and the omega, the first and the last, the beginning and the end." This is followed by eight verses, then the Holy Scriptures close of Christians with the vision of the transformation of our time world into a world without time. Verse 13 reveals the code of the transformation, the abolition of time by the one who speaks: Christ. Mark Andre based the large structure of his work on the rule of three of eternity. It consists of three parts, they are overwritten: ...the O..., ...the last..., ...the end.... The titles address in metaphysical categories what we are moving towards, not the origins from which we come.

In the Revelation of John of Patmos, the "I am" verse concentrates what begins the eighth chapter of Scripture: "And when the Lamb (Christ) opened the seventh seal..." - the last lock on a secret book , containing the history of the world. The final part behind the last seal creates visions of horror and catastrophes in expressive and symbolic images, in which the end of time is announced.

The seventh seal Ingmar Bergman called the film in which the crusader Block returns to his Swedish homeland during a plague epidemic and plays chess with death for his life. Mark Andre has known the film since his youth, it fascinated him from the start. The decision to have a number of Bible texts spoken in Swedish for the insertions is reminiscent of Bergman. Another reminder of Bergman is the fact that Andre chose a game of chess as the time grid for his composition.

In 1996, then world champion Garry Kasparov played six times against an IBM computer and won. In May 1997 he competed in revenge against the evolved version of Deep Blue. After one win, one defeat and three draws, he spectacularly lost the decisive sixth game by resigning after move 19. The event triggered fierce discussions about communication and power relations between humans and machines.

Mark Andre addresses the key moments experience in this match. In the first part ...the O... the music reconstructs and reflects exactly the course of the "Endgame", the sixth game. The distance between the moves, the silent, although not motionless phases of thought, which on Kasparov's side get longer and longer towards the end of the comparison, on the side of "Deep Blues" they get shorter, tighter, almost like pauses in the beat, determine the musical sequence: the individual impulses , which sometimes reverberate, the rapid figures that overlap, alternate and at one point downright chase one another, the silence whose border often acts as a secret magnet of events and engulfs the audible.

The second game of the 1997 tournament – ​​Kasparov's first defeat – determines the timing of the second and, to a certain extent, the third scene. All four groups in the room are musically involved in this part from the beginning. Here the passion is reflected in the double sense of the word: as suffering and as passion. Music and text structures penetrate each other more and more.

Apocalypse as Structure and Present

The time pattern of the chess games is overlaid and replaced in the third part by the building principle of the apocalypse. Its author presented his thoughts in steps of seven; a new series of seven then arises from the last one in each case. In …the end… Andre fades in text passages about the seven angels of the apocalypse. After the last sequence, the music stops. A montage, which the composer called »Phantomzug«, sounds from the loudspeakers. The word contains multiple meanings. In form, this moment corresponds to the move with which the »Phantom Deep Blue« seals Kasparov's defeat (or, transferred to Bergman's film, the »Phantom Death« seals the end of Ritter Block). A »phantom train« stands for a horrific event in the Holocaust. On June 30, 1944, the last 1942 prisoners were deported from the Le Vernet camp in France, where mostly Jews had been interned since 400. They were first taken to Bordeaux and there crammed onto a train bound for Dachau. On August 28, the "phantom train" arrived in Bavaria with 291 prisoners. For 57 apocalyptic days, the prisoners traveled in cattle cars in the scorching summer heat. Here Mark Andre's music comes very close to the apocalypse of our story. For moments it takes on almost realistic features - in sounds that resemble the squeaking and screeching of braking trains. They appear as a culmination of the harder hits and eruptions that accumulate in the third part of ...22,13.... After that, however, all that remains of lines and sounds are schemes, impressions of "asthmatic" breathing, scraping noises over the strings. Even in the live electronic processing, there is nothing more than a shadowy and dead realm of tones, oppressively pale music. With artistic consistency and metaphysical reflection, Mark Andre penetrates into the danger zones of modern human existence. In connection with his musical theater passion, he spoke of a "near-death experiment".

Habakkuk Trotter