Мир современной музыки. Хрестоматия для чтения на английском языке. Учебно-методические материалы для студентов музыкальных вузов и факультетов

electronics". They scarcely realize they are paying the soundprojectionist, and to an even greater extent the composer, a great compliment for their skilful integration of electronics in what is happening. "However if we were to close down all the regulators, people would very quickly notice that the whole structure was falling apart, there was. No more space and the colours were missing".

Performing "Prometeo" is an expensive business every time it happens. For each new place of performance a new spatial concept must be developed, worked out by the sound-projectionist in advance and incorporated in diverse plans. This responsiveness to the acoustic characteristics of a specific space is a special feature of "Prometeo", distinguishing it from most works for the concert hall. Space is thus not treated as mere "storehouse" into which music can be inserted without differentiation. Instead it is integrated into the music like an instrument with a voice of its own. The premiere was at the deconsecrated church of San Lorenzo at Venice in 1984, and the second performance a year later in the very different area of a storage hall in Milan. In both cases a wooden construction by architect Renzo Piano was integrated into the location, making it possible to place the musicians on three different levels around the auditorium. This shiplike construction could be dismantled and transported, but moving it around turned out to be too expensive so this was renounced from the third performance onwards. However its different levels still constitute a kind of model for the spatial concept at any location for performance.

Nono responded to each place of performance and always deployed his score differently. "We usually spent two weeks with Nono in that space. He worked on the sound like a sculptor and suddenly things were to his liking. Simply phenomenal" - remembers Andre Richard. So his first task is also to test out the available space. That begins about half a year before the performance. "I photograph the space, I sing and shout, and I go there with the musicians. I basically meditate for several days with this space". Then the concept must be devised and plans drawn up: procedures for the electronics, making clear what will sound out from which loudspeaker and when;plans for the visual links between the two conductors as demanded by the work; plans for the placing of musicians - and so on.

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The actual rehearsal time before the performance then takes up another week - only a week (since no promoter can afford any more today) with intensive on the spot work to ensure that everything is finally alright.

Years of close co-operation with the composer and intimate knowledge of his work today enable Richard to take decisions about performances of "Prometeo" founded on what the composer wanted. Yet the liberties which Richard takes with the score are limited. Nono sometimes dropped entire sections of his work in response to specific spaces. "Suddenly the strings had vanished, but he reintroduced them elsewhere. That is something" - stresses Richard - "I wouldn't allow myself to do because I am not the originator of this piece". Respect for the composer and his work takes precedence. That is also the crux of performance practice with regard to "Prometeo". After all, how docs one remain faithful to a work which has no binding form? There are still musicians who, like Andre Richard, worked closely with Nono. But even if they pass on experience and knowledge orally or in writing, Nono's work also changes with each new interpreter. Decisions have to be taken even though no-one can say any longer with complete assurance that Nono would have done just the same. But perhaps that is just as Nono would have wished since he once said: "I am much more interested in the process of discovery than in the outcome of any process".

Elisabeth Schwina/Neue Zürcher Zeititng

Composer György Ligeti - a Meeting

"My Wish Is To Continue Making Art Without Compromises"

Only two things are to be found among people everywhere: laughter and tears. György Ligeti sinks back into the huge sofa in the library of Berlin's Wissenschaftskolleg (College of Advanced Studies). As a Fellow of the College he is spending a special kind of sabbatical here together with colleagues from a wide range of spheres of scholarship. This place's intention of making interdisciplinary encounters possible suits Ligeti well. When the 79-year-old composer talks about the continuing rise of World Music and Crossovers mischief blazes out of his eyes which have remained young. He offers

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incisive analysis of the impossibility of making a synthesis of various cultures.

During the eighties he discovered African music south of the Sahara, and its complex rhythmic configurations stimulated him to refine his own music with its micro-polyphonic structures even more radically. All the same he would never speak of fusion when reporting on his dealings with non-European music. Perhaps because even today he still feels himself to be an emigrant. Born in Siebenbürgen, he belonged to a minority in several respects: as a Jew speaking Hungarian in an area where Romanian culture predominated. He became a musician because the Nazis restricted openings for Jewish students. He was not allowed to study physics. "The fact that I'm alive is pure chance". His father and brother were murdered in the BergenBelsen and Mauthausen concentration camps, but his mother survived

Auschwitz. In 1956 György Ligeti fled from Budapest; first to Vienna and then later he started all over again in Cologne - as a freelancer in West German Radio's electronic studio.

Two dictatorships, Nazi and Communist, have lastingly shaped him. What remains is hatred of all repressive social systems and distrust of prescribed aesthetic categories. Unlike John Cage or Karlheinz Stockhausen he does not believe he has to reinvent music and its traditions, and he rejects the dogma of "Serialism". What will remain binding for Ligeti, the architect of sound, makes itself known already in his first piece in a personal style ("Visions", 1956): great static masses of sound and chromatically filled spaces that only change gradually. Later the principle of contrasts becomes important: here sound as cloud formations, arising imperceptibly, and there turmoil and solid blocks

This new beginning is to be found in the "Speech Compositions" of the sixties, and fascination with the mechanical led him in 1968 to the experiment of "Continuum", a piece for harpsichord. What seems to the ear a single tonal mass in fact consists of nothing but individual sounds sixteen per second. "We see a staircase but when this is looked at more closely it consists of steps".

György Ligeti reflects for a moment and looks out into the well-cared for park around the villa housing the Wissenschaftskolleg in the

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equally well-cared for quarter close to Berlin's Grunewald. He waits for the next question

At present you 're working on two large-scale projects: on the second volume of your Etudes for piano and on your second opera "Alice in Wonderland". In the Etudes you are experimenting with the simultaneity of various speeds - a phenomenon you discovered in African music. These Etudes are as sensuous sonically as they are difficult to play.

Ever since Chopin, Debussy, and Rachmaninov, Etudes have moved beyond the tradition of finger exercises. I'm thinking of Godowsky's versions of Chopin's Etudes which also involve incredible innovations in terms of compositional technique. That also influenced me a great deal. I've not yet come to the end of the Piano Etudes. No, I still have many ideas. But there is also another completely different plan. For decades now I've been thinking of writing a completely different kind of music-theatre. This "Alice in Wonderland" is not opera but has to be performed in an opera house. God only knows whether I'll manage to do that in this lifetime. It's a piece of music-theatre but not in the operatic tradition.

Finally, there's a third project. I had to write two additional movements for the "Hamburgisches Konzert" horn concerto, a slow and a fast movement. I wasn't satisfied with the formal aspect. When is good form? I can't say. When I look at paintings and am enthusiastic about the great masters - Vermeer for instance, - what gives rise to the particular magic of Vermeer's pictures of women? Difficult to say. Or Cezanne. There is a mystery difficult to put into words because this is a visual fantasy. It's like that in music too. One can't find words for it. I can't say what is involved in good form. However I am sure that some of Beethoven's symphonies, the seventh and eighth for instance embody absolutely good form, while the ninth embodies absolutely bad form. Subjectively, I must perfect any piece I write to the point where it stands up to my strict and schoolmasterly red pencil.

That is obviously a very important part of your compositional processes. You did that with the Piano Concerto and later also revised your Violin Concerto. Was that because of bad form?

Not only. The first movement of the Violin Concerto went completely wrong. I was very ham-handed at that time. I threw it

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away and wrote three new movements. I hope it's better balanced now. Then specific compositional ideas involving Scordatura were not ideal. Scordatura means that the string instruments are not tuned in fifths. The overtones and harmonics are then influenced by that. It was the same with the Piano Concerto. There were three movements and that became five. Both are very mixed pieces. Perhaps there exists something akin to a hidden feeling for form, a red lamp that lights up.

When someone looks at your music, there are two directions. One leaves behind conventions such as the corset of progressions of tones and semitones, operating instead with microtonality. On the other hand, the Western musical tradition is very much present. Let's take two of your works: the "Hamburg Concerto" (2001) and the Violin Concerto (1990).

As with the Piano Etudes the title "Concerto" points towards a great tradition. Pieces are concertos to the extent that there is a solo instrument, treated with virtuosity, and other instruments. I am basically an adherent of tradition. I don't believe that music has to be reinvented, starting completely anew. Three composers have done that: Cage, Stockhausen, and Xenakis. For them what happened previously does not count. No, there exists a continuity of history. But I'm also not traditional to the extent that I would return to functional tonality. Many people do that - the entire American neo-tonal trend, in Russia too. Everywhere you find this neo-tonal kitsch. That is alien to me. I want original music, but not from point-zero. Instead I integrate myself in European tradition with awareness of non-European musical traditions.

After an arid period opera has once again gained in importance for many younger composers. There's a lot of ambitious new music-theatre - by Adrian a Holszky, Beat Furrer, Olga Neuwirth, and Matthias Pintscher. What do you think of this new attention?

I don't know whether opera is in. There exist such institutions as the opera house, symphony orchestra, and string quartet, which are historically shaped institutions with people who follow this pursuit. That is like a language which entails specific customs. I have experienced what a huge discrepancy exists between what C.P. Snow called "the two cultures": the discrepancy between scholars in the

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humanities and natural scientists. They don't have any shared language. Philosophers would like to have a coherent holistic system and develop great linguistic structures. The extreme case was Heidegger. The natural scientists see specific questions in nature and carry out experiments arranged to be repeatable. People in the humanities can't do that because they cannot experiment, unless it is the case that historical experiments have been repeated: the French Revolution with the Jacobin putsch, the Russian Revolution with Lenin's putsch, and the Iranian Revolution with seizure of power by the Mullahs and Ayatollahs. "There are specific structures which repeat themselves.

But that is too little, that is not an experimental science. In the arts too certain forms of discourse have developed. A concrete example. People in Europe sought for a long time to invent perspective. Brunelleschi, Masaccio, Mantegna, and then Piranesi brought perspective to the highest level. One of the basic research tasks for painters and draughtsmen was: how can I depict space threedimensionally on a two-dimensional area? Then suddenly that was resolved. With Monet already, and Cezanne, and then came Mondrian. Among avantgarde painters it was not fitting to paint in perspective. However I expect a revival of perspective. As a graphic artist, Maurits Escher produced some wonderful works in perspective. As I see it, first there is consensus among the various sciences and arts, and then comes a change. Historian Thomas Kuhn has called that a paradigm change. Those are just fashionable terms. I think that with that I've said everything I think about opera.

Having made his point he leans back for a moment, and then almost immediately puts down his coffee cup again. György Ligeti likes talking, talking fast, as fast as his conceptual universe is constantly expanding. One is inclined to assume that the links with physics and the visual arts are part of his mother tongue, and music is the self-evident centre of his universe. The soil for this was prepared by a home where interests were equally diverse. His mother, an eye specialist, was not only interested in optical phenomena for medical reasons. Or there is the burcium, the Romanian alpine horn, which he first heard at the age of three when on holiday. In 1950 he could have become a state composer when there were plans to make him director

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of the Institute of Folklore in Budapest. Things turned out differently. He became (and remained) an emigrant.

Like his music, György Ligeti has a sense of humour. His laughter grows out of pain, receiving expression in sarcastic exaggeration, regarding the centre from the periphery. He loves Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton, and the Marx Brothers - without renouncing Jasper Johns or Roy Lichtenstein. His oeuvre is also characterized by stylistic discontinuities. He has long moved on from the position of his first opera "Le Grand Macabre", from the fusion of a great variety of musical particles, and from what he calls "synthetic folklore". And also from the system of tempered tuning.

"I still have many ideas" - he declares mischievously when asked for more concrete information about his "Alice in Wonderland" opera project. He believes that talking about music still being created is uninteresting for everyone except the composer himself. When pressed further, he responds: "What I am doing in 'Alice in Wonderland' today cannot be put into words because I don't know this in advance". On the other hand, Ligeti has passionate memories of one of the most wonderful Hungarian writers, Frigyes Karinthy, who translated Lewis Carroll's book. He too was a great and profoundly sarcastic humourist. The ambivalent mixture of magical and moral world in "Alice" attracts Ligeti up to the present day and he is fascinated by such fundamental forms in the consciousness of European children. "A child sees very realistically that both society and history are full of violence".

Here too it becomes clear how very much György Ligeti is a part of the European critical tradition, and how alert he has remained to politics. This thinker and doubter creates contemporary music in the true sense of the word. It affirms the Now. On the one hand it reflects the ecstatic in the form of scarcely heard speeds, and on the other its inexorably massed sounds are apocalyptic. It is laughter and tears.

Corinne Holtz/Neite Zürcher

Grand Seigneur of the European Avantgarde

In January last year when Lutoslawski was eighty, he was celebrated by the music world everywhere as the great living classic

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of new music and the doyen of European musical modernism. Witold Lutoslawski had particularly many admirers in Germany, and he experienced important triumphs in German concert halls with his symphonic works and chamber music. Commissions from German symphony orchestras brought about some of his most important creations, and for Anne Sophie Mutter, the German violinist, he wrote works with which this celebrated artist created a sensation on concert platforms across the world. Even as an eighty year-old, Lutoslawski himself conducted much-applauded performances of his most important pieces with such prominent orchestras as the Munich Philharmonic. These Munich concerts were his last public appearance. In February, two weeks after his 81st birthday, Witold Lutoslawski died at his home city of Warsaw.

As a composer Lutoslawski exerted an initial impact as a mediator between the great tradition of Polish national music exemplified by Szymanowski and the more recent Polish avant-garde of the post-war period. "After the war he was one of the founders of the Polish Composers Association, and in summer 1948 he made his debut abroad when his Symphonic Variations were performed at Paris. The following year his First Symphony brought a break-through, gaining the recognition of at least the general musical public in Poland. The piece itself was damned by the cultural authorities as being "formalistic" and withdrawn from further performances in Poland.

In 1954 the Concerto for Orchestra, which later became the most frequently performed of his works, marked the declared conclusion of Lutoslawski's first creative period, still strongly influenced by the modern classics (Bartok, etc), but also already showed signs of surprising developments to come.

Convinced by and enthusiastic about innovations introduced by younger composers, from the late fifties Lutoslawski devoted himself to serial technique and then also to forms of aleatoric composition. Nevertheless, this is an "organised aleatory" or "aleatoric counterpoint" founded on what was by then a wellestablished compositional style with the indeterminacies of improvised detail remaining precisely planned.

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Such strictly through-composed "Aleatory alongside the quarter tone passages and other progressive manipulations of sound made the masterpieces of his mature period - the symphonies and concerti (for cello, oboe and harp, violin, and piano), and choral works (to poems by Michaux, etc) - well-rounded, complete works, which orchestras all over the world liked playing and the general public celebrated as significant events within contemporary music. The tension between the old and the new, and the congruence of formal precision and expressiveness, made these works into sound signals of a present day where the great traditions of Western music seemed to be carried forward.

Ultimately it was not just younger composers in his Polish homeland who revered Lutoslawski as a father-figure. This was mainly an outcome of his eminent capacity for integration, linking the most diverse aesthetic viewpoints within musical practice. Probably the most prominent example of that is the celebrated "Warsaw Autumn" enterprise, the festival that Lutoslawski, Kazimierz Serocki, and Tadeusz Baird established in 1956 with the Western musical avantgarde represented right from the start in astonishing abundance at a time when other Eastern Bloc states long remained closed to such developments. Here Lutoslawski's knowledge of the ways of the world, his progressive artistic liberalism, and the unwavering integrity of political behaviour founded on European dimensions received full expression. The fact that he remained in the background, tranquil and reserved, without the ambitions of a figurehead, did not, however, prevent him being viewed and listened to as also an authority on moral and political issues within the Polish artistic and cultural scene. During the final decades the international music world viewed him as the grand seigneur of new music, according him heartfelt acclaim and bestowing the highest international music prizes and numerous honorary doctorates. He obviously felt happy and satisfied that his endeavours and creations were widely and befittingly recognized and honoured. Death brought his composition to an end, but nothing has changed with regard to the ongoing existence of his works.

Hans G. Schürmann

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Stranger In The World

Franz Schubert Born at Vienna 200 Years Ago

The last Classic; an early Romantic; even a forerunner of the Moderns - that is all true. And since that is so it no longer says much. Assignment of Franz Schubert to a place in musical history takes us to spheres where there is great lack of facts (almost a vacuum), where much is possible but little proven. The overall situation regarding sources is bad. Very few authenticated statements and documents have been handed down from biographer to biographer across decades (and recently from one CD booklet to the next). Unrestrained fantasy proliferates around this musical "hero".

Inverted commas have to be employed because during his lifetime and in his world there was nothing heroic about Schubert. Striking characteristics: none. That is a shortcoming for the present day which still secretly clings to the past's cult of genius, strengthened by the omnipresence of the mass media. No volcanic hot-tempered figure like Beethoven; no venomously determined, scheming missionizer like Wagner. The Schubert anniversary has little to offer in the way of sensational aspects. Merely a small, corpulent, and short-sighted human being who just about made a living from musicmaking - inclusive of all secondary activities, particularly teaching. During his first years of adult life he had to struggle along as an assistant teacher at his father's school.

Later there was a circle of close and intimate friends, and it was fortunate Schubert had them. Both materially and spiritually he – who for long did not even own a piano - would scarcely have been able to survive without this group of "Schubertiades". Spaun, Schober, and others treasured his talent for sociability and they certainly also thought highly of his productivity - yet the terra incognita into which the musician penetrated ever more deeply from year to year simply remained obscure for them; and when they did have some idea of what was involved, as during the first performance of "Winterreise" in a private circle in autumn 1827, they reacted with helpless annoyance. The chances of acceptance by the general public were thus all the less. In the Vienna of the Restoration this Franz Schubert was at best one among many

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