infotext:
ROBIN HOFFMAN Who is actually attracting whom here? Is it the hunter luring the black grouse in front of the gun? Or has the huntsman, when he fetches the bird from behind the bush with his little whistle, just followed the great call of nature? – All the arts of self-proclaimed Pied Pipers fade at the sound of them. Now a lively black grouse biotope in the concert hall. Admittedly, the animals did not land too safely. Slightly disheveled, broken down into all its components and reassembled - more of a biotope of the undead, black grouse zombies, wolpertingers. But the critters are doing quite well. You don't need much to feel comfortable among like-minded people - a little noise color is enough. The pitches that you want to cheer them on, laid like cuckoo eggs in a made nest, are not a real crisis, just a little everyday excitement. This is then also mastered confidently - no problem for black grouse. Robin Hoffman
DIETER MACK chamber music IV is another piece in a series of chamber music compositions in which I explore the relationships between idiomatically individual and collective playing. While chamber music III a focus on individual ›musical expressions‹ of an instrument or a player, form in the chamber music IV various instrumental combinations (mixture-like mixtures) various 'individual' groups. This takes place within a relatively strict formal framework. After an introduction that anticipates the following sections in a fragmentary and compressed manner, eight episodes follow, each with an individual character and tone. All sections are characterized by a) a central tone of their own, b) a certain way of interacting with the respective group-forming main instruments, and c) various comments by other instruments or groups. Here the comparison with a large house suggests itself, which at the same time provides the 'secured' framework and the viewer/listener wanders through various experiential spaces, almost all of which tend to decay with a latent morbidity. The final section can be characterized as a sharp 'negating' comment from the outside - the falling away of the stable walls of the house - in the face of the preceding 'secured' but ultimately expressively fragile episodes (which form the core of the work). The voice, which is not based on any text, is treated in this piece as an ensemble instrument and not as a solo instrument, but its specific intensity makes a significant contribution to the work's expression. Postscript: On the day the rough version of the work was completed, December 26, 2004, the tsunami disaster in Southeast Asia happened, which, for obvious biographical reasons, hit me particularly hard. That's why I want this work to be understood as a memorial to the victims of the catastrophe, even if it was composed before then. Dieter Mack
MARK ANDRE The title refers directly to a chapter from the Book of Revelation in Martin Luther's translation: »And when the Lamb opened the seventh seal, there was silence in heaven for about half an hour.« I wanted to represent this silence in music. »I am the be-all and end-all, the first and the last, the beginning and the end«. These verses combine ›beginning‹ and ›end‹, to which I add finiteness and infinity. …AS… is, on the one hand, a musical architecture of silence and the tactile, formed by the dialogue between parameters and compositional categories that are opposed from the outset; on the other hand, affect and concept are linked. In deep connection to Wolfgang Stryi. Mark André
CLAUS HUBER »Our view of the world is shifted. Klaus Huber, April 29.4.2002, XNUMX In my contribution to the commemorative publication ›75 years of Donaueschinger Musiktage‹ I wrote: »Sociologists analyze: Far more than XNUMX 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.« 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 1952 text, in which he also analyzed the importance of Avicenna's and Averroë's philosophy 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 amazing 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 led 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, however, it is just as amazing as it is confirming 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 in a way that I cannot help it, 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 that in the full awareness of an extremely brutalized present, not only in Palestine. An other world est possible. Mahmoud Darwish is a role model for me in this respect, as well as my counterpart as the whole other. On this Darwish: Poetry is just that. It's that little creature that doesn't have the strength you think it has. Their strength lies in their extreme fragility. Poetry can be of a very unusual potency, but its power comes from recognizing human fragility. For my part, I have weaponized my own fragility to brave the storms of history. [...] Despair brings the poet closer to God, brings him back to the genesis of writing, to the first word. It gives the lie to the destructive power of the victor, for the language of hopelessness is stronger than that of hope. The word Troy has not yet been spoken, and poetry is the beginning of the word. [...] (Mahmoud Darwish, Palestine as a metaphor, Conversations on Literature and Politics, Palmyra-Verlag, Heidelberg 1998) 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) |
program:
Robin Hoffman (* 1970) [01] 11:54 p.m Locken (2006) for black grouse septet Hanna Petermann • Andrea Nagy • Kristof Kerremans World Premiere Dieter Mack (* 1954) [02] 16:47 p.m chamber music IV (2004) for 17 players Ensemble Modern Mark André (* 1964) [03] 14:45 p.m …AS… (2001) Trio for bass clarinet, cello and piano International Ensemble Modern Academy (IEMA) Klaus Huber (* 1924) [04] 30:32 p.m …à l'âme de descendre de sa monture et aller sur ses pieds de soie… (2004) Rohan of Saram, cello • Max Engel, baryton total time: 74:00 |
Press:
Lure to Darmstadt Interpretation: The International Summer Courses for New Music, which take place every two years in Darmstadt, attract not only high-class composition and interpretation courses with everything that has status and reputation in the contemporary scene, but also some unusual concerts. What remains of it, each listener must first decide for themselves. However, a small gleaning is also discographically recorded, this year for the first time on the young label Neos. Four works by Robin Hoffmann, Dieter Mack, Mark André and Klaus Huber offer a musical review of the 43rd Summer Course 2006. Paul Huebner |
