Toshio Hosokawa, Klaus Huber, Steve Reich, Mauricio Sotelo, Anton Webern: Salzburg Biennale - Festival for New Music 2009

Salzburg Biennial Festival for New Music 2009

Maurice Sotelo
Cripta. Musica para Luigi Nono (2004–2005 / 2008)

A year before his death, Luigi Nono (deceased May 8, 1990) had inspired his pupil Sotelo, the Andalusian sing jojo to study. After Nono's death, it turned out that he had planned to use words from Federico García Lorca dark love sonnets to set to music. Building on these pillars, Sotelo wrote the first version in 2004-05 Cripta sonora para Luigi Nono, “a kind of spectral architecture in slow transformation”, in which “not only the sounds and performers […] wandered through the imaginary territories”, but also “the viewer himself, who moved and pursued the unknown”.

The second version for Salzburg presented here, on the other hand, is reduced to a »frontal sound source«. Sotelo: »Based on this new acoustic-spatial situation, I ultimately developed a completely new work with a formally altered structure. I changed the sound material with the resulting new arcs of tension. It was also necessary to change the instrumentation, and I even changed the texts used.” Sotelo dedicated this impressive work, with its interplay of instrumental ensemble, choir and flamenco singing, to his colleague Beat Furrer, who conducted the premiere.

Flamenco · Two pieces out Puro y hondo

Flamenco is in the melting pot of Islamic Andalusia from Moorish, Jewish and pre-Islamic influences as well as the richly amalgamated music of the gypsies (gypsies) emerged as a unique musical expression of human existence. To this day, it fascinates with its rough, undomesticated beauty. You differentiate sing jojo with its tragic, passionately desperate, melancholic content, and the lighter, turned to the brighter sides of life cante chico.

Typical of the one represented here sing jojo is the smoky color and explosive presence of the singing voice, which is counterpointed by virtuoso guitar playing, castanets and animating hand clapping. The music is rhythmically demanding, incorporating the melismas and microintervals inherited from the Arabic tradition, alternating between arioso and recitative structures as well as dramatic declamation, and within the given structure challenges the improvisational skills of the musicians.

Steve Reich
City Life for amplified ensemble and tape (1995)
Music for 18 musicians (1973-1976)

In both of Steve Reich's works, it is the alienated, hypnotic atmosphere combined with the driving rhythmic pull that takes the listener on an imaginary journey. These trips are very different in nature.

City Life is an emphatic, sometimes almost oppressive portrait of the metropolis New York. In a somnambulistic way, combining noises, voices and sounds, an acoustic film is created that takes us into a hectic, wild world that opens up behind the scenes of civilized appearances. Scraps of speech of all kinds are mixed with the noise of the big city (car horns and doors, sirens, alarm systems, ship's horns, etc.). Melted into the sound of the ensemble and at the same time co-determining the form, a symphony of modern, mosaic-like, pulsating attitude to life is created.

Music for 18 musicians quickly became one of Reich's most successful works at the end of the 1970s, a classic of minimal music whose particular appeal lies in the constant maintenance of the gray area between statically unchanging and dynamically changing. Here, for the first time, Reich consistently extends the principle of shifting the accent from rhythm to harmony and melody. Above the rhythmic patterns of the pianos and melodic percussion instruments, the winds, strings and voices form freer patterns in a continuous rise and fall. Reich: "For me, this interplay of successive lengths of breath, beating like waves against the constant rhythm of the pianos and mallets, is something I haven't heard before."

Gamelan music from Bali

Gamelan is a unique music tradition that has probably formed in Indonesia since the construction of the first Buddhist temple in the 9th century and has developed into a high culture, comparable to Asian or Western music cultures. The word gamelan comes up gamel (act, handle) back. The Balinese tradition differs markedly from the Javanese in its explosive impulsiveness. In Bali, too, different styles have developed locally in everyday practice. The ensemble from Tunjuk plays both ritualistic Hindu music and pure concert music, both traditional and new works that, despite their complexity, are never notated. Its conductor I Madé Arnawa has studied both local and western contemporary music and rehearsed a correspondingly diverse repertoire.

The range of gamelan orchestras is 4-5 octaves, with the core melodies in the lower registers played around by the metallophones. Kettle gongs, flutes and drums are added. through the interlockingtechnique (the musicians mutually fill in the pauses between the beats), extremely fast rhythmic sequences are possible. The whole ensemble functions like a single organism. The melody and the resulting harmony exert an additional irrational attraction on the Western listener due to the completely different interval mood.

Toshio Hosokawa
Silent Flowers for string quartet (1998)
In Ajimano (out Somon Kai, 2001)

Silent Flowers, Hosokawa's third work for string quartet, has its starting point in the symbol of the flower, which is artistic in a IkebanaArranged a flower arrangement, living a mummy-like afterlife until her utter death. From the music of No-Theaters originated the custom of abrupt sound breaks associated with hard noises followed by a pause. The vertical incisions in the horizontal flow of time are symbols of the transience of earthly life.

In Ajimano refers to the koto music of the Edo period. The text is from the somonka-Love poems (poems of mutual acceptance) from the collection Manyoshu (around 760):

In Ajimano / my beloved is staying. / Will he return?
Until then, alas, / how long must I wait?

Hosokawa says of the musical progression: »Like walking down a narrow path through a Japanese garden, a new landscape unfolds with every step. […] Every single tone carries an individual landscape within it.«

Anton Webern
Six Bagatelles for String Quartet Op. 9 .
Five movements for string quartet op. 5 (1909)

The Six Bagatelles for String Quartet were not created contiguously. In 1911 Webern wrote the numbers 2 to 5, which he called his »II. String Quartet«. In 1913 he composed a third, three-movement quartet, the middle movement of which also featured vocals (to Webern's words: Pain, always look up...) was provided. But then he took out this movement and used the outer movements as framework movements for his »II. Quartetts«, which he later wrote in Six Bagatelles for String Quartet Op. 9 renamed. As short and completely new as the 11 movements of these two works are, they undoubtedly belong to the most important and influential works of the genre in the 20th century.

Webern had his Five Movements for String Quartet completed in June 1909 at the age of 25 and initially described it as »String Quartet op. 3«. They mark his final departure into the compressed abstraction of a constructive expressionism that left behind the chromatically elaborate major-minor tonality of post-Romanticism. First performed on February 8, 1910 in Vienna, the work caused a fight at the IGNM festival in Salzburg in 1922.

Helmut Lachenmann
temA for flute, voice and cello (1968)

In temA Lachenmann - a novelty at the end of the XNUMXs - allows breathing to help determine the process as a central, form-forming function, and uses a wide spectrum of instrumental noises, some of which have a very naturalistic effect. The musical process thrives on the interplay of the listener's expectations, which should just about remain recognizable in the alienation and are constantly spun into the unexpected.

Traditional Japanese music for koto
Yatsuhashi Kengyô Rokudan (danmoto)

The koto, the »lying dragon«, is a curved board zither whose 13 strings are tuned with movable bridges and plucked with three picks. The left hand adds further nuance to the sound. The koto music, one of the three main genres of the Edo epoch (17th century - 1868), ruled by the Tokugawa shogunate, almost always uses the instrument to accompany songs. After the Buddhist priest Kenjun (1547-1636) composed the first songs with koto in northern Kyushu and thus the Tsukushi goto-style, it was the blind koto player Yatsuhashi Kengyô (1614–85; kengyô = master of the blind) from Kyoto who, based on this tradition, introduced the new kumi utastyle (suite of chants) that introduced a different mood and consequently a different mode. In addition to his songs, Yatsuhashi also composed a few koto solo pieces (Danmoto), under which Rokudan the most famous is. It is a suite in six 'steps' of 52 metric units each (the first step has three additional introductory units), in which the melodic development experiences a gradual increase in richness, to settle at the end.

Traditional Japanese music for shakuhachi
Smell (empty sky)
Tsuru no sugomori (Nesting Cranes)

The shakuhachi is a bamboo flute with five finger holes, on which the skilled player can produce all the tones of the chromatic scale. It has a wide range of expression and is today the most well-known traditional Japanese musical instrument in the world. The name refers to its length of 1,8 Japanese feet (= 54,5 cm; shaku = foot, hachi = eight). Originally from China, it was introduced to Japan during the Nara period (7th-10th centuries), then disappeared for a long time, finally becoming one of the main instruments of Japanese music in the Edo period from the 17th century , whose tradition goes back to the monks of the Buddhist Fuke community. It was above all Kinko Kurosawa (1710-1771), a former samurai, who cultivated the meditative Fuke style, which is still valid today.

Smell is one of the three oldest honkyokus (main pieces) of the Fuke school; it was conceived as early as the 13th century by the Zen master Kyochiku in a dream in which he experienced enlightenment. The music symbolizes emptiness, liberation from the clutches of the world, in a solemn and an ornamental section symbolizing calm and the joy of being detached.

Tsuru no sugomori, a key part of the shakuhachi repertoire, has survived in ten versions. The music is naturalistic, without putting human feelings in the foreground: nest building, egg laying, incubation, rearing, fledging, dying - a large arc of life, represented with all available means of sound and noise, and at the same time a piece of music as if from nature self-composed.

Klaus Huber
The earth revolves on the horns of a bull
Assemblage for four Arab and two European musicians and tape (1992–1994)
on texts by Mahmud Doulatabadi

“The earth moves on the horns of an ox. What is heard during this movement is the sound of the crushing balance and at the same time the longing for it.« This quote from the Persian writer Mahmud Doulatabadi, which Klaus Huber came across in March 1992, not only inspired him to the present composition, but actually solved his to this day an ongoing engagement with the oriental music culture.

The earth revolves on the horns of a bull, as the work's title is in the final version, consists of 11 »sequences« of 200 seconds each and an epilogue. The culmination phase is designed according to the proportions of the golden ratio. The four Arab musicians (Sufi singers, ney, kanun and drums) improvise in sections based on fixed rhythms and given scales. In no other work did Huber leave such scope for the performers. The meticulous melodic ramifications, based on strict modes, are used as a connecting element of Islamic and Christian culture, as are selected passages from the Koran whose messages correspond to those of the Bible. The guitar, which is derived from the Arabic lute, is a link to the viola of the West - with playback from a 1993-track tape created in 94-6 in SWR's EXPERIMENTALSUDIO.

Ecce homines for string quintet (1998)

About his string quintet Ecce homines says Klaus Huber: »Ecce homines I see it as a labyrinthine continuation of my second string quartet …from time to time… (1984/85) and the string trio The poet's plough (1989). […] In the second string quartet, my work with quarter-tone interval structures, which I had begun in the mid-XNUMXs, reached a culmination point; the trio was the first artistic product of my exploration of third-tone. In the string quintet I not only bring these two worlds into direct mutual contact, but also trigger a gentle confrontation of their immanent consequences. This process of confrontation and penetration could be paraphrased as follows: Interdipendence I (Introduzione) - Catharsis I - Interdipendence II - Catharsis II (Cumulazione) - Interdipendence III - Epidipendenza. Interdipendence I, II and  III are third-tone, Catharsis I and  II bring in different ways confrontations between third-tone and ›Arabic‹ three-quarter-tone, and in epidipendenza new symmetrical sound shapes develop from mean-tone beats.«

Christopher Schlüren