Naked in the Wind
A brazen theft at an autobahn rest stop near Solingen likely came within a hair’s breadth of dramatically delaying the discovery of a musical genius. The broken-into vehicle in question belonged to the Hungarian composer György Ligeti, on his way home to Hamburg from a trip to Paris. His trunk contained, among other things, the haul from a shopping spree in the music department at Fnac: LPs of gamelan and Yiddish music, new recordings of Olivier Messiaen, and two random finds, records from a composer whose name had lately been in circulation among those in the know: Conlon Nancarrow. The name had not yet penetrated criminal circles, at any rate: This obscure cargo was the only thing the thieves left behind. The injured party was soon at peace with the music-loving car burglars, for they had left him his most valuable discovery. “If Johann Sebastian Bach had grown up with blues, boogie-woogie and Latin American music instead of Protestant chorales, he would have composed like Nancarrow,” Ligeti enthusiastically wrote to his friends, and in the streets of Mexico City, news of the growing clamor in faraway Germany for performances of Nancarrow’s music reached the astonished maverick’s ears with increasing frequency. Ligeti-and many others as well-were fascinated by Nancarrow’s contrapuntal art, which, due to its intricacy, he had been unable for decades to entrust to flesh-and-blood performers. Instead, he punched his musical ideas directly into the paper rolls that purred in the innards of his trusty reproduction devices: two 1927 Ampico player pianos he had acquired in the USA in the late 1940s. The hammers of the two pianos were prepared with metal shoes and leather straps, creating for the listener a sound that was more percussive, and also a little more like honky-tonk. As if played by a ghostly hand, the player piano eerily demonstrates to humans how unfit they are for realizing complicated “rhythmic dissonances,” how easily machines surpass them in tempo and precision. Because the mechanisms inside these music machines also reveal musical construction and perforation to be one and the same, this music comes to embody a poetics of the punch clock. The same cultural technology that is used to regulate admissions by the concert-hall ticket taker, or bank and factory operations by the bookkeeper, shakes up the bourgeois understanding of music and makes the binary logic of capitalism-growing rankly around a hole-swing. Nancarrow’s Study No. 3 is also known as the Boogie-Woogie Suite, and the five pieces he assembled under its heading are, as we now know, in part older compositions that were still written to be played by “real” performers. Under the Mexican sun, Nancarrow’s musical automata propelled his thinking into utopian spheres. Since then, however, a great many of these pieces have been reworked for ensembles-and that tells a different story about performance, the public and porous ideas.
Doing without performers is, as a rule, the most effective way of leveraging down the cost of a concert. (After all, there’s already plenty of music around; it’s not expensive; you just have to play it!) And so it was that the Society for Private Musical Performances, founded by Arnold Schoenberg with his friends and students in 1918, spent many an evening presenting musical adaptations that reduced grandiose orchestral arrangements to the more living-room-friendly size of a chamber ensemble: “downsampled” versions facilitating data interchange sixty years before the invention of the MP3. The Schoenberg circle’s flight into the private sphere was a defiant and defensive move against a music industry in which new music had little chance of being properly appreciated. Behind the society’s closed doors, a series of adaptations ranging from Debussy to Mahler to Johann Strauss was heard-with no advance notice, that being one of the strict bylaws drafted by Schoenberg together with Alban Berg. As it states in Section 6 of these “Rules of the Order”: “The performances themselves are removed from the corrupting influence of the public. Members shall not be encouraged to pass judgment here. On the contrary, it is desirable to unlearn the habit of premature evaluation in order to achieve the primary goal: simply to take note. Public evaluation distracts from this goal, which is why a) the performances are not public in any way. Guests [...] are banned. Discussing the performances in newspapers is forbidden, as is any promotion of pieces or personnel. b) During the performances all expressions of approval, disapproval or gratitude are banned. The only success to be had here by the author is the one that ought to be most important to him: being able to make himself understood.” Reading this manifesto today, one gets the impression that Schoenberg has since expanded his Society for Private Musical Performances to include the entire republic of Germany: The “corrupting” public usually stays away from new music performances quite of its own accord; a critique that would take public evaluation of these works as its premise no longer exists. Unfortunately, Schoenberg made a miscalculation with regard to the economies of attention. After three years, the society ended its performances due to lack of funds. In addition to insufficient revenue came the economic imponderables of inflation. But even before that, Schoenberg had had to watch as his former student Erwin Stein, who had increasingly taken the helm, sought to bring the society’s evenings more into line with the public concert circuit. Unlike the society, of course, Schoenberg himself definitely did not withhold judgment. On the first page of his Berlin diary from 1912, we read about a concert he had attended the previous evening: “Up to now I hadn’t liked any of Busoni’s compositions. But yesterday I liked Berceuse. Directly moving piece. Truly deeply felt. I really haven’t been fair to that one. Yet another!” Thus, Schoenberg’s own difficulties with musical evaluation played a role as well in his elevation of the repeated playing of pieces to a principle within his circle. Listening over and over, which is also the basic prerequisite for a pop song’s becoming a pop song: This experience stood at the beginning of his aesthetic education program. Erwin Stein created the “(more) easy performing” version of Berceuse élégiaque (long attributed to Schoenberg himself). The subtitle of the piece, “The man’s lullaby at the coffin of his mother,” gives away the biographical background, first entrusted to the keyboard of Busoni’s piano. Later he expanded the piece into an “orchestral poem for sixfold string quartet with sordini, three flutes, oboe, three clarinets, four horns, gong, harp and celesta,” in which he was able for the first time-in his own estimation-”to find a sound of my own, and to dissolve the form in feeling.” Busoni’s contemporary Hugo Leichtentritt heard in the piece a “symphony of sighs.”
The path taken by Busoni’s exceptionally personal experience, from a diary-style coming-to-terms at the piano to a public hearing in the concert hall, exposes the true substance of the paradoxical expression “private performance.” Gustav Mahler was a master of this performance art among composers at the dawn of the twentieth century, who always justified their musical exaltations by using their hearts as their inkwells. Through Mahler one can study the ambivalent relationship with the masses that began to develop around 1900: Beethoven’s “O ye millions, I embrace ye,” which also provides the motto for classical-music enterprises seeking to expand, is constantly falling apart with Mahler. The whole machine is roaring away, leaving only the lonely flute giving voice to a simple folk song. The masses, it is clear, are threatening, and furthermore-in a well-established topos in crowd psychology ever since Gustave Le Bon-the masses are stupid, an idea that has since been taken up anew, even by erstwhile theorists of the “hive mind,” and which expresses the cultural critic’s suspicion of music that is a hit with the masses. Take for example American minimal music, which, though still capable of embodying the cliché of music that is “new” in the sense of “advanced,” has simultaneously achieved maximum family-friendliness. And yet minimal music began with a critical impulse that was directed not merely against the modern, but against the very concept of time in Western music, its place being taken by the dimension of space. Along with Indian and Japanese influences in the case of La Monte Young, the emergence of minimal music also involved the Berlin Ringbahn, in which Tony Conrad spent his nights in the early 1950s to save money. And, of course, a technological phenomenon, the implications of which were to give Steve Reich a start under his headphones. He was experimenting with two Wollensak tape recorders, trying to piece together two loops, when little by little the sound patterns in his left and right headphones began to drift. The left-hand tape recorder was a little faster than the right-hand one, and the resulting phase shift created a counterpoint like nothing he had ever heard before, much less could have written. The result was his tape piece It’s Gonna Rain, in which the threat of things slipping out of sync was-in 1965, in the context of the Cold War-more than just musical: “You’re literally hearing the world come apart.” In Piano Phase, in 1967, he transferred this discovery to instrumental music as well. His ninety-minute composition Drumming is built on a basic rhythmic model of twelve eighths; over the course of four sections it varies only in terms of pitch, timbre and the replacement of rests by beats and beats by rests. Fordism in practice, with hallucinatory value added. While any associations with a sculpture studio are warranted by the incessantly repeated beats, the sculptural nature of this minimalistic music is never clearer than in Reich’s 1968 piece Pendulum Music. It too can be traced back to interactions with a Wollensak tape deck, which Reich twirled through the air on its cable like a lasso, Wild West-style. When the built-in microphone passed the loudspeaker, it made a noise. The potential of this feedback was, once again, immediately clear to Reich, who at the time was searching for a performance idea together with William Wylie and Bruce Nauman. Pendulum Music had its first performance at the Whitney Museum in 1969, with multiple microphones all hanging from cables of equal length and gradually swinging into a drone. They do so all by themselves-the piece is a process that ends with and in exhaustion. (In this, one can discern the definitive difference from György Ligeti’s Poème Symphonique, with its hundred hectically ticking metronomes-in a way a related piece-in which the lone expiring metronome speaks rather of perseverance, the defiant tenacity of the individual.) The only shock is that no visible exertion precedes this exhaustion. This is the real provocation in Steve Reich’s aesthetic of reduction.
If minimal music represents the reconciliation of repetition and advanced compositional technique, then the music of Goodiepal is Nordic folklore’s revenge on techno. Hiding behind the pseudonym “Goodiepal” is the former Danish pig farmer Kristian Vester, who has also been appearing lately as Gaeoudjiparl Van Den Dobbelsteen. (Mainpal Inv., an earlier alias, is mentioned here in the interest of completeness.) During the Dane’s performances, vigorous grunting noises call attention to his previous line of work with obscene clarity, punctuating the pleasant whistling with which he accompanies his obscure onstage activities. Viewers of Goodiepal’s performances are usually left in a mixture of amusement and enlightenment-in other words, perplexity -that is also attributable to the artist’s unusual appearance, with his magnificent full beard and Viking build. While his hands do suggest a capacity for manual labor, it is by no means the kind of labor required to build sensitive mechanical objects or poetic music boxes. These, however, are among Professor Van Den Dobbelsteen’s “surgical instruments” when he gives a lecture. Planetary models, wind-up birds and similar, less easily identifiable implements are moved about the table in front of him in an arcane pattern. This is one side of Goodiepal’s unpredictable appearances. Another side is the attack launched against the economies of the music industry in the work of this former sound designer for companies such as Nokia and Lego. Whatever materializes from the elusive identities of the Goodiepal persona-”mort aux vaches” on more than a hundred vinyl discs-is sold in absurdly limited editions. The diversion that might once have awaited the consumer of music becomes a principle of identity, the mass-produced record a unique object. This rigid, scarcity-creating way of dealing with “products,” an approach akin to the rules of the art market, is contrasted with an uncontrolled profligacy: Everyone can acquire their digital Goodies for free, given enough bandwidth.
In the oeuvre of Olivier Messiaen, the twittering is sometimes formidable. He never went out into nature without one of his numerous notebooks, in which he notated the songs of birds from all over the world, later to layer them in his compositions into cascades in canon. He was one of the first to thoroughly and systematically organize his music not only by pitch, but by its other parameters as well. Among the iridescently shimmering colors of his crystalline works there slumber questions of faith, to which Messiaen preferred to give himself over, as the titular organist at L’Église de la Sainte-Trinité in Paris’s ninth arrondissement, in improvisations at the organ console. Making music was for him a way of practicing his faith. The only tendencies that could be called trashy in his oeuvre lie in his penchant for the mawkish wailing of an instrument from the electronic Stone Age, the ondes Martenot, causing his music-shot through with Indian rhythms and color associations-to run repeatedly through its tonal range in wild glissandi. Messiaen was a maximalist. And so at the same time, as a musical innovator, he wanted to bring a new love into the world. “And not this despair, these uninhabited planets, but rather love that is really written with a capital L, love in all its manifestations: of nature, of the woman, of the child, and above all divine love. And not brutality, lust and bloodshed without mind or heart, but rather mercy, piety, purity and the perfect joy of the spirit, full of charity and hope.” During World War II, he himself gave moving testimony to this love, and hope to thousands of fellow prisoners, at a Nazi prison camp in Görlitz. With the aid of a few musician friends-among them the cellist Etienne Pasquier, the clarinetist Henri Akoka and the violinist Jean Le Boulaire-and under the adverse conditions of captivity, he devoted himself to the themes that defined his life. “When some of the more resourceful of us managed finally, by some miracle, to get hold of some food, I can still see these comrades of Messiaen bringing him a spoonful of soup or a quarter of a litre of water-treasures beyond price, which he accepted with the unemotional gentleness of some Hindu anchorite. Despite his hunger, despite his thirst, he seemed far away, he appeared to be thinking of something else: of something very pure and brilliant, something which moved very slowly in the distance, something which unceasingly absorbed his gaze, full of life and love. [...] There was a story that he had retreated dragging a pram that contained a cargo of miniature scores.” He refused to part with his pocket scores at the camp, as he himself related: “When I first arrived at the camp [...] I was stripped of my clothes, like all the prisoners. But naked as I was, I clung fiercely to a little kit-bag containing all my treasures, that is to say, a little library of miniature scores which served as my consolation when I suffered, as the Germans themselves did, from hunger and cold.” In the Görlitz prison camp, where the Geneva Conventions were observed and the camp authorities made cultural life possible with theatrical and musical performances, Messiaen and his friends managed to get hold of a cello and manuscript paper, and later a piano as well. Messiaen wrote his Quatuor pour la fin du Temps, which he and his friends rehearsed in the washrooms and performed for their fellow prisoners-reportedly with a clarinet whose valves were partially melted, a cello with just three strings and a piano “the keys of which seemed to stick at random.” The audience was “the most diverse mixture of all classes in society-farmworkers, labourers, intellectuals, career soldiers, doctors and priests. Never have I been listened to with such attention and such understanding.” Five thousand people supposedly attended the piece’s premiere. In spite of the inauspicious circumstances-”while working on the third movement of the great quartet, called ‘Abîme des oiseaux,’ he was surrounded by the terrible din of hammering and clanking,” reported Messiaen’s fellow internee Charles Jourdanet in 2001 in the newspaper Nice-Matin -the Quatuor introduced various characteristics that would continue to develop throughout the rest of Messiaen’s oeuvre. For the first time, the synesthete notated colors in his score along with the names of birds. The lack of food supposedly triggered this (hallucinatory) color vision in him: “I saw the rainbow of the Angel, and strange whirling colors.” The title of this eight-movement quartet’s seventh movement points to the philosophical problems of time that would subsequently preoccupy Messiaen. In this movement, “Tangle of rainbows for the Angel who announces the end of time,” the ensemble unleashes its full sonority for the first time. The other movements feature various instruments in solos and duos. From the “Abyss of birds” issues nothing but the voice of the clarinet.
Even if we can be relatively certain by now that the cellist played the premiere on four strings, not three, Messiaen’s own account of the event casts the circumstances in a certain light. Under prison-camp conditions, even a beat-up cello is so improbably miraculous that everything else sounds utterly incredible. The same is true of the confrontation with non-European musical cultures when it takes place on our home grounds. As a rule, musical globalization proceeds along unilateral lines. Technological reproduction devices have made the music of foreign cultures infinitely accessible to our music-production apparatus-be it in Stockhausen’s Telemusik or a remix by Deep Forest. Meanwhile, what about export? The performance of composed music in a concert setting transfers a European cultural model onto foreign cultures. Scholarship and exchange programs, but perhaps most of all the colonial domination of Western civilizations, have indeed successfully spread the product of secularization and social self-criticism-in plain English: art-in other cultures. However, that does not mean that art and music in the European sense are socially established. Artists from foreign cultural spheres frequently provide Western audiences with a welcome irritation when they appropriate the representational modes of modern art in hybrid fashion. Neither these amalgamations on the part of non-European artists nor the extensive use of exotic musical specialties in Western music can belie the fact that, apart from economic ties, “globalization” is still utterly nonexistent. And that’s how things will remain for the time being, at least as long as we only hear this music at festivals and in concert halls, or as long as those composing it fail to consider the options for production on location. Having grown up in the Philippines, the Germany-based composer Alan Hilario is sensitive to the fine distinctions. Hilario’s karaoke exotique remix is a piece for “up to six instruments,” and any configuration whatsoever of the ideal ensemble of flute, clarinet, piano, violin, viola and cello-even its reduction to a single instrument-is permitted in performance. This compositional decision embraces the possibility of failure. It is impossible to predict whether reductions resulting from economic or infrastructural strictures will result in convincing versions in performance. “‘Absence’ or ‘deficiency,’” says Hilario, “thus becomes the theme” of his composition. “Addressing obvious social problems with the help of music [...] unfortunately fails to achieve the desired effect,” he writes. “The combination of political action with the aspiration to write experimental music is stalled at a low level of effectiveness-a dilemma and a failing that one simply [...] must accept as [...] a necessity.” Perhaps it would be beneficial to perform the thought experiment suggested by his new composition and put on a concert featuring just the part of the second violin in a Beethoven symphony. But karaoke exotique remix could also serve as a goad to the debate about global musical culture, insofar as it is based on a musical practice that is global in its reach and beloved in the Philippines, but which is revealed on closer inspection to be an analog of the West’s hegemonic relationship with foreign cultures. Thus the piano, which Hilario has included in his ensemble, is the only instrument that is required for performances of karaoke exotique remix. If the pianist is missing-as Hilario has anticipated-then the instrument is to be played by the remaining musicians. When many musicians gather around the instrument, it makes for an occasionally acrobatic spectacle. When many musicians are absent, the piano stands there as a symbol of inflexible musical thinking.
Also spreading globalization to Berlin is Thomas Meadowcroft. The Australian brings with him memories of the fauna of his homeland, such as the butcherbird, which flits through his piece Acre Blocks. In fact, the sounds of reality find their way into Meadowcroft’s music quite often, whether in the form of canned laughter, sports commentary or instrumental transformations of lawnmower noise. Naturally, anyone who deals so intensively with the possibilities for sound production will eventually arrive at the point of questioning the existence of the sound producer itself. His new piece, created in response to a commission from Audio Poverty, deals with the seemingly exceptional, absurd products of four hundred years of instrument-building. Fiddles, trumpets, clarinets, etc. are anachronistic relics today merely because they do not require electricity. Contrast these with toy instruments, overwhelming in abundance and form, created to satisfy the demands of commodity, consumption and waste-in short, the production of excess. In Greed and Shortage Meadowcroft plumbs the dialectic of these two divergent worlds of sound. For him they embody the interplay of the two titular forces, which in his view define our society. On the day demand for power exceeds supply (if not sooner), the hour of the acoustic instrument will have come again. In the postelectronic age, Viola, Horn & Co. will once again be our solace. Even in the dark. Well, one can still dream.
In terms of size, the gap between toy instruments and acoustic ones is comparable to the distance between ars subtilior and Arte Povera in the work of Salvatore Sciarrino. Sciarrino was originally a painter, before he taught himself composition. In his compositions for the voice, in particular, he has developed a style that, with its profuse ornamentation and expressive sighing figures in the extreme pianissimo range, has provoked talk of a new ars subtilior. By the end of the fourteenth century, ars subtilior was threatening to congeal into mannerism-it was, in its way, a manifestation of decay. That links it to Arte Povera, a twentieth-century (Italian) art movement that took decay, the temporal nucleus of art in the process of disrobing, as its theme. Its impetus was a critique of consumption, its artistic face that of pop art. It presented only that which is, making no attempt to work against the process of decay with polished surfaces. To date, Arte Povera has rarely found explicit resonance in music-which may have to do with its relationship to music. “As an art form closely linked to institutions, music remained an object of criticism for [Arte Povera]. Giulio Paolini’s mute music stands, Pier Paolo Calzolari’s lead recorder on a bed of ice and the unplayable double-necked lute built for Alighiero e Boetti all level the tools of cultural criticism at music. Nor does Pistoletto’s Orchestra of Rags (Orchestra di stracci, 1968), with its chest of old clothes and its simmering kettles, cast the art of music in a positive light.” With his Omaggio a Burri, Salvatore Sciarrino is an exception. Alberto Burri tended to fall back on found materials in his works from the 1950s “because I wanted to prove that they were still good for something.” In similar fashion, Sciarrino has repeatedly helped himself to the larder of music history like a true cannibal. “We seek the empirical solutions composers have found while composing [...] those are the great models that we eat and then have to excrete again because they have become such a part of us.” Yet Sciarrino’s “poor music” is an homage to Burri above all because it forgoes any type of development. He creates tonal transitions between the violin, the alto flute and the bass clarinet, which the three instruments assimilate to themselves like the pieces of a pattern on faded, threadbare cloth. Through its “impoverishment” his music becomes permeable by an environment from which it barely stands out, and which emerges more and more clearly the more closely one listens at the cracks of this meager material. Astonishingly, this music then reveals in turn its great purity.
For the idea that music can be an old building, the world has Enno Poppe to thank. But he doesn’t seem to care much for ground-up renovations: Coal-burning stoves put out heat too, and cold showers build toughness. And so old acquaintances such as “the melody,” “the song” and the historical technology of the ring modulator are restored to favor in his music: The old building has substance. Since 1998 the trained composer and conductor has led Berlin’s ensemble mosaik, with which he champions the music of young, lesser-known composers. A fondness for lo-fi sounds lends wings to Poppe’s own compositions, in which virtual Hammond organs face off against winds and strings in a microtonal competition for the smallest interval. He loves exaggeration, but he knows what really matters: Arbeit Nahrung Wohnung [Work Nourishment Lodging], to quote the title of his second opera collaboration with the writer Marcel Beyer, in which he tells the story of Robinson Crusoe. Backwards. In the process, he unmasks the adventure story as a fairy tale of early capitalism. His music occasionally sounds “as though it had been subjected to an electric shock.” That still doesn’t completely explain how he became the most sought-after living German composer under 40, but that is indeed how things stand for the tall man from Hemer in the Sauerland. His piece for virtual Hammond organ can also be understood as a piece about the alienation between a pianist and his instrument: Everything he has acquired over decades at the keyboard of a piano, including his intuitive knowledge, must be thrown overboard; the keyboard merely serves as a trigger module now for the highly compressed tonal ranges of his artificial “toaster.” The austere image presented by the score reveals nothing else about the sound pattern the pianist ultimately produces. The attempt to reconcile the two manifests the same futility with which the citizen of the newly dawned recessional modern era continues to search for a connection between his actions and a nontransparent world, between his subjective phantasm and its real effects. The missing link of evolutionary history lies precisely here. By now no doubt you just want to know what Enno Poppe calls this piece. But it’s obvious: He named it Arbeit.