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CONTINUUM AND IMPACT There are two compositions in this edition, two from different times, thirteen years apart. As unimportant as this distance may seem, it begs the question of an inner continuum in Nikolaus Brass's work. Because since about 2000, what one would like to describe as "personal style" has been consolidated in his composing, in order to be able to capture with this rather helpless phrase what is significantly unique, what is different from all other announcements as the unbreakable and at the same time impenetrable skin, who is tense about the work and the producer. Rough investigations into the handwritten and beautifully written scores by Nikolaus Brass during this working period between 2000 and 2013 revealed two stereotypes in the »early late work«: the principle of repetition and a glisteningly floating, both condensing and thinning sound fog , behind which often deep black, often glowing lights and rarely only ornamental junk shines through. Interpreted musically, they are actually sounding identities, clamped through and pressed in between repeat signs, which require several groups of bars to be played or sung not only twice, but several times. And it's not just these larger sections that revolve around themselves, parts of them too, two- and three-bar groups are stamped with varying degrees of succession. Repeated in the repeating. In the requiem milieu of fallacies of hope these redundancies are used sparingly and as a final effect. They nail time to the wall. Continuity and dramatic succession peter out into the »whitest white«, like the typical finale of films with hard-to-digest fare, which concretely use the metaphor of Rose Auslander when the camera pans into the cold nothingness of the sky, silencing the viewer's eyes bring to. The poem The whitest The score of bars 1988 to 281 is inscribed for the Jewish poetess who died in 358, without the lyrical text being expressed in words over four times eight voices of the chorus. Also the text excerpts from the third volume of the documentation published by Suhrkamp-Verlag in 1981 The Aesthetics of Resistance by Peter Weiss remain an ad libitum dramatization. As text projections, they are a foil of criminal acts and fascist despotism: the extermination of the »Red Chapel« resistance movement and their executions in Plötzensee. Isolation, inner turmoil, grief and screams, which struggle for wording in the text modules, neither intensify the compositional intention nor increase the desolate exhalation of the choral groups distributed in the room with their pleading ligatures and clattering, noisy concretizations of knocks, signals of fear and hopelessness in the net of "pitfalls". At most, the projection texts put the musical in an understandable situation of horror. However, the connotation of the music is so overwhelming that additional dramatization tends to weaken the compositional quality. At the very end of the Requiem, in the concluding »Epitaph for L.«, the high female voices from the four choral groups call out the fatalistic »Down I fall down« to one another in descending microtonal chromaticism. It is the voice of the anti-fascist Libertas Schulze-Boysen, who was murdered on December 22, 1942. So once in a while a text speaks out of the score. In English. As if the German language was no longer usable as a result of the fact that Hitler's furies had destroyed the concept. In the midst of this swan song, the salvos from afar rattle, staged onomatopoeically by the clapping hands of the tenors and basses. Subtle: men as executors instrumentalized by the composer. Here, at the latest, the Requiem becomes music theatre. Completely different and almost inflationary in the orchestral composition similar sounds Signs of repetition set up like baffles at the edges of what is always the same: The uneventfulness pushes past the time sluggishly, viscously, but the repetitions of the identical are not able to tire because the periodicity of the individual events and the rhythmic network are unstable and fool the ear into believing it there would be no continuous continuum of the same stations lined up one after the other. Added to this is a relentlessly slow tempo that numbs the »drive of pattern«. And the composition, built up of twelve semitone steps, is orchestrated so devotedly that the sluggish style becomes a beacon. One could think of glowing apathy, but many times, as I wander along with the sounds that seem to go on forever, renewed oxymora push themselves into my writing hand. Because something else is opening up: the ambivalence between the beauty of crystalline mixtures and their caustic penetrance, always bouncing off the repetition gates, only to have to start again, Sisyphus-like, from the beginning. The organization of the sounds obeys simple layers. An oscillating interval in the range of a minor, major second or a tritone often underpins the composition's atmosphere. The scepter of serenity swings in this pendulum. The chords built on this are constantly transformed with the colors of the orchestra. No sound alienations, always the pure intonation, but brought to a very peculiar gelatinous liquefaction in daring mixtures, through the bubbles of which one can hear both dense and permeable soundscapes. This glassy liquid of the sound constitutes the very own intonation of Nikolaus Brass's music, a tone that transcends through transparency into inaccessibility that has no language. This intonation has often been compared to that of Morton Feldman's music. Yes, looking very superficially at the scores, one can find pattern-like, rhythmically varied modules that show similarities. But the chord structure, instrumentation and dramaturgy of the process are completely different. Feldman's music focuses on the logical references of rhythmic variants and on mutating intervallic layers whose range is rarely crossed... like in Samuel Beckett's Orgy of Waiting, Vladimir and Tarragon only move to the edge of the unspoken tree shadow along the country road can. Brass, on the other hand, abandons the stasis obsessions he has often exposed, perhaps better: the motionless movements, in order to reach other aggregates by means of tempo, sound compression and dynamic swelling. And in these sometimes completely surprising, jerky transitions, those impacts occur that often scratch the membranes with a knife. Opposite Feldman, Brass is a playwright. If with Feldman time is suspended, it simply disappears from the listener's consciousness, then Nikolaus Brass's music, without attitude, always announces what has not yet happened. His music stretches the listener into a continuum that provokes greedy expectations. Almost always, after endlessly sneaking ahead and having to remain in one place, she suddenly becomes tumultuous. The tempo increases through repetitive compressions of ever smaller note values. All in similar sounds pushes towards a climax. Where previously mixtures were shuffled around to allow abrupt changes in sound to occur, towards the end of the score all instruments are simultaneously activated, individualized and swept into the turbulence of an endless fall. Maelstrom-like. From here at the latest, Brass' music tells its secret story. However, without an alphabet of terms and meanings. Their language is borrowed from the sensory system. There, as a listener, one is thrown back on oneself. So one can be torn between recognizing a calculated compositional approach and being captured by miraculously opiate injections of pretty stuff. "Continuum" as a continuation into the unknown and "impact" against the walls of sound as a sudden authorial intervention in the constructed regularity help to endure this hopeless infatuation. Hans Peter Jahn program: 01] similar sounds Music for orchestra (1999/2000) 28:33 Radio Symphony Orchestra Stuttgart of the SWR [02] fallacies of hope – german requiem (revised version 2013) 22:34 SWR Vocal Ensemble Stuttgart Total playing time: 51:17
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