infotext:
Music as sound speech York Höller's breakthrough came in 1967 with the premiere of Topic by the orchestra of the Cologne Music Academy in the large broadcasting hall of the WDR in Cologne. A representative of the Schott publishing house then signed the young composer, and at the instigation of the music editor Otto Tomek, the WDR Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Michael Gielen, played the revised version of the piece in 1970 at the Warsaw Autumn, the Darmstadt Summer Courses and again in Cologne. Through these subsequent performances, Höller found important interpreters in Pierre Boulez, Daniel Barenboim and Hans Zender. In addition, he was invited by Karlheinz Stockhausen, head of the studio for electronic music at WDR, to realize his first and only pure tape composition, Horizon. Topic (1967) is Höller's first of many other orchestral works and is still under the influence of his studies with Bernd Alois Zimmermann and the impressive premiere of his main work The Soldiers at the Cologne Opera in 1965. The nine sections are different in character, dynamics, tempo and instrumentation sometimes extremely different and form a superordinate unit precisely in their contrast. The sovereign talent of the then 23-year-old in dealing with the large symphonic apparatus and in creating dramatic arcs of tension is unmistakable. Zimmermann is reminiscent of fanfare attacks on the trumpets and a certain stylistic openness with occasional echoes of baroque and jazz music. At the same time, despite all the unruly wildness, sometimes escalating to catastrophic levels, it is a very well-planned music. The English title of the work means something like topic or object of discussion and emphasizes the central ideas that determine Höller's entire oeuvre: clear construction, expressive speech, poetic content and the idea of music as sound speech. Instead of unilaterally rejecting the serial post-war avant-garde like other composers of his generation, Höller found an individual combination of structural thinking with spontaneous invention and "effective auditory impression" taking into account perception-psychological findings. He was always inspired by non-musical impressions, by spatial, pictorial, literary, philosophical or scientific ideas that open up wide spaces of association and experience for the listener. From an early stage, Höller orientated himself towards the ideal of music as a living organism, all of whose components are contained in every cell as well as in the structure of the whole, like in a genetic code. Similarly, in his 4-channel tape composition Horizon (1971/72) he wanted to create a stylistically uniform, process-like unfolding and, above all, »own, very personal world of sound« without a prefabricated formal plan and using relatively limited, purely electronically generated and transformed material. With the intersection of the finite and the infinite, the title of the work describes the intended combination of mathematical construction with musical expression and the form of the piece as an »imaginary circle that represents closedness and openness at the same time«. The subtitle Electronic Music in the Form of an Essay on Logarithmic Feelings, on the other hand, alludes to the »Essay on Feelings« that the main character Ulrich intends to write in Robert Musil's novel The Man Without Qualities. He also mentions the psychophysical fact that the human sensory organs' ability to differentiate works according to logarithmic gradations, which also determine the timing of the piece. At the end of the 1970s, Höller dealt with Wagner's music dramas as well as with the psychoanalytic writings of Carl Gustav Jung and the Dialectics of Enlightenment written jointly by Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno. This exploration gave him the insight that music has mimetic powers and can help express the nature of the subject. In the ensemble work Mythos (1979/80, rev. 1995) he did not aim at a specific mythological tradition, but at the original meaning of the term in general as speech or story. In fact, Höller calls his piece "sound poem", which describes the double character of his music well: on the one hand, it is a rationally constructed structure with a great richness of sound and direct, spontaneous, impulsive expression; on the other hand, it is music that has been shaped linguistically in micro and macro form, meter, verses and stanzas. Mythos became groundbreaking for Höller insofar as he created "archetypal experiences" and "primal experiences" here for the first time using profiled musical-language gestures, symphonic design characters and instrumental topoi, which, however, are only encountered here in a very stylized form: "The work is partly based on familiar poetic images and expressive characters, such as E.g.: Of wind, water and the nymph Syrinx, horn call and echo, threatening gestures, culminating in a kind of Marche Funèbre, silver colored nocturne, Dionysian round dance, night black hymn etc.« Höller used a continuum between instrumental and taped electronic ones Sounds that partly contrast, partly merge seamlessly or imperceptibly merge into one another. The constructive germ cell for the harmonic, rhythmic and grand formal structures is a sound form which Höller has based on almost all of his compositions since his string quartet Antiphon (1976). In this case it is a 34-note melody, beginning and ending on the same note E flat and going through all 17 chromatic notes in two differently phrased XNUMX-note halves. The result is dense, chromatically colored chord complexes beyond tonal structures or clusters. In Black Peninsula (1982) Höller draws a large tableau of oceanic-atmospheric soundscapes with dark shades of color. He orientates himself on the rhythmic structures of language, expressive gestures and poetic images of the poem Die Nacht (1911) by the expressionist poet Georg Heym. Above a cluster-like pedal point of electronics and low strings lies the poem, whispered by a woman's voice and modified to the point of incomprehensibility, complete with ghostly female choirs and unreal bell sounds as if from distant islands. The language material of the text is consistently musicalized into a "sound poem" and only becomes comprehensible towards the end. In a letter to Höller, Karlheinz Stockhausen, the work's dedicatee, was impressed by the "rich color scheme" and "wide-ranging chronology". Rainer Nonnenmann |
program:
[01] Topic (1967) for large orchestra Dedicated to Bernd Alois Zimmermann 12:56
WDR Symphony Orchestra Cologne · Michael Gielen, conductor
[02] horizon (1971/1972) quadrophonic electronic music 10:39
Dedicated to Ursula and Cuno Theobald
Studio for Electronic Music of the WDR
Peter Eötvos and Volker Müller, realization
[03] Myth (1979/1980, rev. 1995) Dedicated to Hans Zender 22:52
for 13 instruments, percussion and 4-channel tape
music factory · Zsolt Nagy, conductor
WDR Electronic Music Studio · Volker Müller, sound direction
[04] Black Peninsulas (1982) Dedicated to Karlheinz Stockhausen 20:53
for large orchestra, vocal and electronic sounds on 4-channel tape
Text by Georg Heym
WDR Symphony Orchestra Cologne WDR Radio Choir Cologne
Diego Masson, conductor
WDR Electronic Music Studio · Volker Müller, sound direction
Marie-Louise Gilles, speaker (tape)
total time 67:57
* World Premiere Recordings
Press:
Composed Genetic Engineering: Composer Portrait York Höller
Christian Vitalis, December 01.12.2010, XNUMX
Interpretation:
Sound quality:
repertoire value:
Booklets:
York Höller, born in Leverkusen in 1944 and teaching at the Cologne Music Academy, belongs to the ranks of the most important German composers of our time. However, 'New Music' is not particularly popular with the public, and it is the fate of many compositions to be premiered only once and then forgotten.
That doesn't seem to be different here either, because on the one hand the record market offers next to nothing on the subject of York Höller, and the production of the NEOS label that is being discussed here with four compositions is not about new productions, but 'merely' about the new edition of pre-existing material – no coincidence that the recordings are usually as old as the pieces themselves and they are obviously the only recordings (classified here as 'first recordings' for advertising purposes).
After a record with the pieces 'Spheres' and 'The Eternal Day', the label's second production is now available, which is dedicated to the Cologne composer and contains four compositions. The loving design is immediately noticeable. The texts, which are available in three languages, are easy to read and clearly laid out; There is a sample score for each work - a luxury that has become quite rare today. This is always very insightful and interesting, especially in new music. In this case, the illustrations complement Rainer Nonnenmann's somewhat brief text, which is clearly written but could have been expanded a little further.
The four works
While the first record presents works with live electronics, now there are compositions with tape. Specifically, these are: the pure tape composition 'Horizon' (1971/72), 'Mythos' for 13 instruments, percussion and tape (1979/80, rev. 1995) and 'Schwarze Peninsulan' for orchestra and tape. The exception is 'Topic' for large orchestra (1967) without any electronic components - with this work the young composer became famous overnight; The piece still reveals the influence of the teacher Bernd Alois Zimmermann.
With a strictly planned construction, Höller succeeds in creating music that immediately captivates the listener. 'Horizon' is Höller's only pure tape composition. Mixtures of various electronically generated sounds can be heard, which were probably fashionable at the beginning of the 1970s; Unfortunately, to today's ear, some things here will seem unintentionally strange. Incidentally, in this piece it is logarithms that give it its structure.
Höller later developed his own theory of composition, which can be explained more biologically: every composition is based on a nucleus from which the entire work grows organically; one could describe this nucleus as the 'genetic code' of the composition. This idea is not new, but the nature of this nucleus and the consistency with which it permeates the composition is certainly new.
'Myth' is considered a typical representative of composing based on this theory. Finally, in 'Black Peninsulas' the textual element is added: the composer based the work on a poem by Georg Heym, which is heard in a recitation. This is included on the tape and is distorted beyond recognition at the beginning, then heard unadulterated towards the end.
None other than Karlheinz Stockhausen admired the 'rich color design' of this work. And indeed: Similar to 'Topic', the other pieces also prove that a strict composition theory and an immediately appealing emotional content in music do not have to be mutually exclusive. On the other hand: It is precisely because York Höller succeeds in this that he must be counted among the greats.
Great names did great things
There are some important names among the performers in this production, and so it is not surprising that the level of playing technique and interpretation is consistently high to the highest. 'Topic' was recorded in 1970 by the WDR Symphony Orchestra Cologne under Michael Gielen. 'Horizont' was created - like the tapes of the other pieces - in the WDR's Electronic Music Studio; It was realized by Peter Eötvös and Volker Müller; The latter also pulled the electronic strings in 'Mythos' and 'Peninsulas'.
The instrumental part in 'Mythos' was masterfully produced in 1997 by the musikFabrik under Zsolt Nagy, and in the 'Black Peninsulas' you can once again experience the WDR Symphony Orchestra Cologne, along with voices from the local radio choir and the recitation by Marie-Louise Gilles from the tape. The overall direction of the recording, which was made in 1982, was Diego Masson.
The sound isn't dusty either
In terms of sound technology, the four recordings did not collect any noteworthy dust and are still satisfactory today. But I'm asked if it wouldn't have been an option to prepare the material accordingly and put it on a SACD - then things could have been almost perfect. Surely one could have done justice to the tape composition, which is explicitly described as 'quadrophon', in this way.
In the other two pieces with tape, however, one should have primarily considered the intentions of the composer; the two pieces thrive on the fact that tape and live music keep merging with each other - so surround sound with clearly separated channels would probably have a counterproductive effect.