Swiss Chamber Soloists

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COLLECTION BBVA FOUNDATION ‐ NEOS

Donaueschinger Musiktage 2007 Vol. 3 Mark Andre ∙ Helmut Oehring ∙ Enno Poppe

CD CONTENT:

MARK ANDRE: …AUF… III for orchestra and live electronics (2005–2007)

The triptych …auf… consists of orchestral works that can be performed and listened to autonomously, although they were conceived as a through‐composed unity.Whereas the pitch classes in …auf… III were organised according to algorithms, it is the formation of distinct families of sound and sonic spaces that impart an important structural influence on the work. A dialectic relationship emerges between these two organisational, i.e. formal, constraints. In order that inner worlds of sound can be generated, the algorithmic system is immediately broken up and strongly fragmented.

Three groups of musical material are subject to this fragmentation: non‐harmonic, harmonic and noise‐like sounds. It is possible to perceive clearly and directly these three families of sound in terms of their archetypical form. The composition describes an arc; it is a journey through these families of sound. In order to engender new sonic spaces – ones which otherwise would not have come about as a result of pitch class organisation and other parameters alone – they were interpolated and incorporated into each other. The disposition of the percussionists around the audience and the consistent development of a typology of impulses and responses render the music transparent. Pertinent here is the development of an entire sonic mass, which no longer takes place just on stage without the use of electronics as was the case with …auf… I and II.

The electronics serve to develop neighbouring spaces, which are neither acoustic nor electronic. Here, the technique of “convolution” is used, allowing sonic impulses, or “signals” to be clothed in additional sound decay as concomitant responses, or “answers” ones which may also be traced back to acoustic (as opposed to synthetically produced) material. All these transformations, which are live and computed in real time, harness the impulses of the orchestra in its various sonic forms and “fold” these signatures into other rejoining sonic forms. Each impulse is subjected to a kind of projection into a new sonic space.

This incorporation that takes place by a folding of material represents a type of sonic, spatial and morphological (intermediate) condition and change of musical region. Harmonic, non‐harmonic and noise‐like sounds are interpolated into the orchestral signals and entities of sonic decay – the answers as it were. These folds may also be perceived at an existential level. Taking prime position here is the sense of alteration and of farewell to sonic textures, to families of sound and their inner sonic spaces as well as their beginning and their end.

1 May I reserve especial gratitude to the members of the EXPERIMENTALSTUDIO des SWR, who enabled the development of a highly particular and new species of live electronic transformation. Following my piece …hoc… for violoncello and electronics …auf… III marks a premiere of my work with this innovatory technique. In German, the preposition “auf” refers to the threshold, and hence the inner form of a transition. Some examples would be: “aufgeben” (to renounce, lit. give up), “aufhören” (to stop, lit. break off), and “aufleben” (to revive, lit. come alive). My piece deals with the threshold between spaces and families of sounds, a threshold that also has an existential and metaphysical level. The metaphysical model for this compositional work was the resurrection of Christ, which (for any of those who do believe) describes the most powerful and wondrous transition ever between differing states.

Mark Andre Translation: Graham Lack

KEILSCHRIFT for orchestra (2005/2006)

Everything looks the same when viewed from afar. The idea behind a piece that is based on the same sempiternal five notes occuring in the same sempiternal order. Colour and expression emerge out of a stringent adherence to form. Minimalism it is not however, perhaps even the opposite. Close up, everything looks quite different. Translation: Graham Lack

HELMUT OEHRING:

GOYA I – YO LO VI for orchestra (2006)

Based freely on the etching no. 44 from the cycle Los desastres de la guerra (The Horrors of War) by Francisco Goya – with the use of a number of Beethoven quotations.

“This war by the artist Goya is much more than the guerrilla war of the Spanish and the war of invasion by the French, it is the destruction of humans by humans par excellence. The etchings that make up Los desastres de la guerra series, which was completed between 1810 and 1816 in great haste but with deliberation, and with a sense of directness yet one of distance, is Goya’s most personal intervention in the iniquitous struggle; it is both and effigy and emblem, both reflection and a picture puzzle; it is the identification of nature and humanity as the very incarnation of human nature; it is the identification of history and art as the incarnation of society. It is the chronology of real events as a chronology of unreal incidents; it is reality and dream in one. The artist misses nothing; he embellishes nothing; he conceals nothing; he reveals everything. It is expression in the widest possible sense, not banished to just a single image, one which then becomes static, timeless and classical; on the contrary, the artistic event is timeless in exactly the opposite sense – it carries on continually, it remains still not for a single second, but for an infinite series of moments that pass by at breakneck speed. It is Dante’s Inferno, this time not as a glimpse removed from the here and now, but as this life itself; it is not divine punishment, but human goings on. It is the paraphrase of human suffering.”

Konrad Farner, 1972

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A single moment taken from this heady mix of moments cast up by one Francisco Goya – this is what Helmut Oehring takes as the point of departure for his own new series of musical snapshots. Goya’s etching no. 44, Yo lo vi (That is what I saw) acts as a foil for four compositions – orchestral music, an oratorio, a string quartet and an opera. Four different “films in music” are extracted from Goya’s negative: a scene from Spain during the Napoleonic wars, with fugitives, including a woman and her child – the civilian casualties of the war. Within the picture and the title too Goya asks us to consider just how things are viewed: the view of those who lived through these terrible events, the view of someone who – be it in an artistic sense or whatever – reports on these scenes, and the view of an observer who, by this very report, is caused to remember exactly that which took place and what actually happened.

With GOYA I for orchestra, composed in the summer of 2006, Helmut Oehring gazes not only on Francisco Goya, but also on Ludwig van Beethoven. Both figures, the painter and the composer, were tormented from the 1790s onwards by deafness, and became increasingly isolated within their respective societies at whose artistic centres they stood. They both held similar divisive views, and enthused about the ideals of the French Revolution, embodied and betrayed in the person of Napoleon Bonaparte himself; they were both intimately bound up with the people in their struggle against the revolutionary French messages of a “free world”. And both ended up caught between two fronts. They both searched for new structures, societal as well as aesthetic ones. In their art, they both quoted political content, painting and composing concrete moments in time, nay, infinite ones: Goya not only in Los desastres de la guerra, and Beethoven not only in the Eroica …

Stefanie Wördemann Translation: Graham Lack

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