MSM CPP Survey EC 11. 4 Religious Types?

The Contemplative

Wandelweiser (*1992) Artist community / ethos: Antoine Beuger, , Daniel Brandes, Johnny Chang, Jürg Frey, Mark Hannesson, Eva-Maria Houben, Carlo Inderhees, Marcus Kaiser, , Anastassis Philippakopoulos, , Burkhard Schlothauer, Sam Sfirri, Craig Shepard, Tomas Stiegler, , Stefan Thut, Viola Torros, Manfred Werder, Alfred Zimmerlin

“Why do we like what we like? This is usually the most difficult point to explain. Why would a schooled musician like myself, someone who grew up listening to and studying Jimi Hendrix and avant-rock, free jazz, and classical music suddenly decide that music with very little sound was the most exciting thing in the world? Basically every member of has a version of this story. I’ve spent a lot of time pondering what it was that was so fascinating and inspiring about this piece (and the other pieces from this direction that I was beginning to hear). I have come to the conclusion that, while it’s possible to trace the moments that might have set the stage for such a reaction, the reaction itself is inexplicable. It is, at its root, not logical. It doesn’t follow from anything like a step-by-step process. You make a decision in a moment, and suddenly you’ve turned down one fork in the road. Terrifying and reassuring; strange and familiar; exciting and normal: all at once.

“There’s no reason to love this music. One just does (or one doesn’t). Aesthetics and history come after the fact. Essays (like this one) will not make you like it better and will not ultimately defend its continued existence. The last thing I would want to do is to normalize something I continue to find strange.” — Michael Pisaro, Wandelweiser.

“It was often my impression that Cage, Feldman, Wolff, Lucier and the others had had a greater impact on the late 20th century musical life in central Europe than they had had in the US. The musical situation in the States, at least in classical and jazz music, had been flooded with more conciliatory voices: the minimalism of Glass and Reich, then the neo- Romantic attitudes struck by the majority of academic ; in jazz this tendency was symbolized by Wynton Marsalis… My friend, the musicologist Volker Straebel has called this period “the death of the American avant-garde” – and this was precisely what it felt like. So Europe in general, and Germany in particular, with its large resources for culture (even helping marginal enterprises like Wandelweiser) was more fertile ground.”

Jürg Frey — Extended Circular Music (2011-2014) MSM CPP Survey EC

Michael Pisaro – Silent Cloud (2013)

Toshimaru Nakamura’s no input mixing board

The Ecstatic

Fausto Romitelli (1963-2004)

Professor Bad Trip (1998-2000)

“Listening to Fausto’s music explains the kind of person he was: bold, cultured, and with a strong imagination. He was an extraordinary reader, thinking it was valuable for a contemporary to know in detail the good and bad habits of his time, and taking risks by showing those habits in his own scores. For us, his works such as Professor Bad Trip or An Index of Metals are flags, road signs that show us in which direction we have to carry on with our music.” Giovanni Verrando, composer and friend.

“Romitelli, who was born in 1963, was a curious character on the European new music scene. He somewhat followed in Esa-Pekka Salonen’s footsteps, studying in Milan with Franco Donatoni, then moving on to Boulez’s new music center, IRCAM, in Paris.

Only Romitelli did this five years after Salonen, and by then Donatoni had become musically radicalized and bit wacko. Meanwhile, IRCAM had turned into a hotbed of spectralism, using the science of acoustics and the music research facility’s computers to cook up intoxicating harmonic resonances.

Throw into the mix a professor Timothy Leary leaning toward drugs, mysticism, the Tibetan Book of the Dead, the music of the Jim Morrison and the more current club culture, and Romitelli briefly became the rocker of the moderns.

And like many of his hipster idols, Romitelli died too early, at 41 (after a long battle with cancer), to complete his vision.

Structured as three “lessons,” “Professor Bad Trip” is Romitelli’s magnum opus but is only now becoming known in America…” LA TImes MSM CPP Survey EC The Mystic

Sofia Gubaidulina (*1931)

"I am a religious Russian Orthodox person and I understand religion in the literal meaning of the word, as re-ligio, that is to say the restoration of connections, the restoration of the legato of life. There is no more serious task for music than this.” quoted in Michael Kurtz, Sofia Gubaidulina: a biography, translated Christoph K. Lohmann (Bloomington/ Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2007)

“Music naturally blended with religion, and sound, straightaway, became sacred for me.”

“An instrument is a living being. When a finger touches a string or a bow touches a bridge, a transformation occurs; a spiritual force is transformed into sound.”

Sieben Worte (Seven Words) for cello, bayan and strings (1982)

The Sensualist?

Morton Feldman (1926-1987)

Piano and String Quartet (1985)