infotext:
ABOUT THE LONGING OF THE DRUMS The exotic regions beyond the traditional borders of the musical fertile land, which percussion has played since Edgard Varèses Ionization for thirteen percussionists (1929–1931) of New Music that once opened have long since been developed and cleared. Anyone who, like Varèse, Cage, Stockhausen, Xenakis, Nono, Kagel, Riedl, Berio and many others, also composes for percussion is faced with a huge and global range. Nicolaus A. Huber speaks in his contribution for the compendium The technique of playing the drums: mallets, exciters and applications (Kassel 2018, p. 20) of a »luxury world of drums«. Instead of using his hands full, he makes a clear selection for each piece, which has a decisive effect on the sound, character, progression and form. With reduced instruments - for example in ClashMusic for a pair of cymbals (1988) – he aims for maximum technical, rhythmic and tonal differentiation. The programmatic title of his the same is not the same for small drum (1978) emphasizes the non-identity of apparently identical events, which in reality differ by minute differences. Accuracy and diversity also characterize Huber's most recent works for percussion. Beforehand, he personally explored the playing and sound possibilities of all the instruments used and marked them exactly in the scores with information on manufacturers or dealers and article numbers. He precisely notes playing styles with different mallets, left or right hand, fingertip, fingernail, snapping fingers, changing touch points and - illustrated by small graphics - certain directions of movement, rubbing or scratching processes. The oldest piece of this new series – Barong des Meduses for three percussionists (2005) – is still quite diverse. Some instruments also lie on top of each other and are struck or bowed against each other. The percussionists also whisper and whistle. At the end they put the instruments and mallets in cardboard and plastic bags as if they wanted to carry them away. The treatment of the diverse range of instruments as a superordinate meta-instrument finds a counterpart in the figure of the »Barong« from the Balinese dance game, where two men under a lion costume create a precisely coordinated whole of movement. finger capriccio for two drummers (2007), on the other hand, focuses primarily on two pairs of bongos, which the players, each with two hands and two central ways of playing (fingertip and fingernail), create in different ways through differentiated dynamics, graded access angles, changing positions on the skins and notated fingerings combine and shade rhythmically and tonally. Instead of "thundering around in the instrument park" Huber aims - according to his work commentary - rather an "instrumental diet", which only in the last section changes from the short impulses of the little pitch-specific skin instruments to the long fading clear pitches of metal instruments. Percussion instruments are not commonly associated with longing, for which violin, cello, piano, or horn are commonly available. But Huber wrote his »Longing Cycle« for percussion of all things. The titles of the three pieces Pothos, Himeros and eros fragments – Huber had learned ancient Greek as a high school student – come from Greek mythology and name personifications of different types of longing, whose relationship Plato in dialogue Cratylus explains: »Póthos« stands for the desire for something absent and in this respect also means mourning, »Hímeros« and »Eros«, on the other hand, mean the desire for something present, whereby Hímeros arises from the human being himself, while Eros, on the other hand, is triggered by external objects. The connecting element of the cycle is the reciprocal tonal penetration of instruments that are related in terms of material but are acoustically different, as if they were longing for their own transformation and tonal fusion with one another. At the beginning of Pothos for a percussion soloist (2010), extreme values mark the coordinates that will apply from then on: noisy cymbal hits contrast with the clear pitches of a glockenspiel, long endings with dryly muted accents and fortissimo actions with pianissimo sounds. Bells that sometimes linger for minutes are superimposed by short beats on drums and wood, so that the sounds mix, change color and emerge differently again and again. In addition, instruments are stacked or struck, rubbed, bowed, so that their sound characteristics amalgamate. Wild drum orgies, pulsating or dancing rhythms are also highly modified in detail. The arched arrangement of the four groups of metal, fur, wood and again metal instruments is walked through by the soloist from left to right and back again during the performance, so that the overall acoustic progression is also visually accessible. Added to this is the visibility of the sound generation with either powerful, sweeping gestures or gentle touching and stroking the instruments with bare fingers, the different energetics and tactility of which are audibly inscribed in the results as an individual “human timbre” – Huber’s term – even if the visual dimension is as in should be missing when playing a CD. At the beginning of Himeros for harp, percussion, loudspeakers and CD playback (2011), bells, crotales and triangles serve as continuations of harp sounds, in which the strings are not just plucked, but also struck with hands, fingers and objects. Both instrumentalists should "understand their playing like a dancer" in order to evoke different and similar degrees of tension, weight and color. Since the harp is tuned somewhat higher than the glockenspiel and crotales, there are microtonal harmonies and beats between the rhythmically closely interlocked parts. The harp sounds are more enveloped than continued by the cymbals. Loudspeaker feeds, which disturb the instrumental music and at the same time are incorporated into it, ensure further penetration. Right at the beginning there is a tinny sound of a chair being moved. Later, a long sine tone (1081 Hertz, a quarter-tone raised c3) with clattering Korean para cymbals, before this frequency slides back into the noisy instrumental events, rich in overtones, via repetitions of the harp at the same pitch. The contrast between electronically generated tone and instrumental sound marks a turning point from which the percussion instruments break away from their previous anamorphosis to the sounds of the harp. The final point is set by muffled hits with played drones and hissing noise. Ultimately, tonal polarities also determine eros fragments for a drummer (2012). With mallets, fingers and a bass bow, 18 singing bowls are stimulated to produce different overtone spectra, which are superimposed to form iridescent mixtures. This is contrasted by the brief jingling of the toy piano and, as an extreme pole, the dry noise of a click frog. As in all the pieces of the »Longing Cycle«, the impression is created that the various instruments long for one another over the constricting one principio individuationis away one after the other and one sound is attracted to the next. Huber follows the longings of percussive sounds, just as Schönberg did with the »instincts of sounds«, ultimately allowing the listener to experience their own longings. Rainer Nonnenmann program:
|
