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

That might perhaps have changed if an infection caused - or at least intensified - by syphilis (where he was a tragic precursor of many of those who shaped the 19th century) had not put an end to his creativity before its natural course was run. Nevertheless in 1828, the year he died, there was his first public concert and other encouraging signs of gradual penetration of public awareness. He was then 31 - an age at which, say, Anton Bruckner had not completed a single significant composition. Nevertheless the list of Schubert's works comprises 998 catalogued pieces plus a few uncatalogued fragments.

One must constantly bear in mind that Mozart and Mendelssohn, the two other composers who died young and are often mentioned together with Schubert, lived four and seven years longer. Such playing with numbers seems pedantic if not slightly macabre - but these differences become anything but marginal when one considers what Schubert composed in his final year alone: the E flat Mass, the Piano Trio in the same key, the String Quintet, the wideranging epic of the three last piano sonatas, and the cryptic Heine songs - all epoch-making works, not to mention many lesser compositions. It is simply inconceivable - but unfortunately only a matter of speculation - what just a few more years of life might have signified in such circumstances.

The geniuses in the history of music are always both completers of the lines of tradition handed down to them and revolutionaries leaving behind old conventions and pioneering the way into new territory. Only the mixture of those components differs in each case. With Schubert the forward-looking element clearly predominated. His oeuvre, still overwhelming in its abundance, exerted an influence down to Gustav Mahler and the Second Viennese School around Schoenberg that followed.

The most obvious quantum leap in his work, which has long attracted the greatest attention - "establishment" of the pianoaccompanied solo song as an autonomous art-form - is perhaps not even the most momentous. It is merely immediately graspable, relatively quickly accessible even to the casual listener, because Schubert's natural, so-to-speak spontaneously naive musicality often found direct expression in that form. He was also a gifted inventor of melodies - whether one first thinks of "Musensohn", "Ave Maria", or

21

"Lindenbaum", the wonderfully catchy phrases of his piano impromptus, or the lively sequences of Ländler and waltzes.

Schubert should not only be seen in that light because one then almost inevitably ends up with the kitschy image of the serene melancholic, merry on wine, and awkward disciple of the muses, abused and disregarded as he stumbled through middle-class drawing rooms. The dialectical complement to that, his capacity for sharply critical reflection and the courage for rigorous breaks with tradition, was at least equally influential. The epic breadth of development of structure, the abrupt and sharply accentuated changes of mood, and above all the magical iridescence, ranging across the entire spectrum, of his harmonic transitions paved the way for musical Romanticism and onwards into our century.

None of that entails construction and prescribed purpose. Schubert's sounds are experienced - in moments of joyous conviviality as well as in those wan, dissonant tonal abysses where feelings of losing faith in all Utopias, and of chilly loneliness and being a stranger in the world, were expressed for the first time, and from that time onwards exerted an artistic influence on the Romantic century up to Expressionism. Where - as in the "Unfinished" - both hope and disillusionment collide, unresolved, there arise oppressively intense sounds, probably also referring to the composer's situation. The alienating isolation of the individual in the quietness of the statewilled political graveyard of Metternich's Austria was implemented by way of a coordinated system of minor repressions, spying, and favours furthering opportunism - all processes that affected Schubert's immediate circle of friends too. Such isolation also threatens, in different circumstances, in non-dictatorial social structures - for instance currently through the ever-greater depersonalization of all processes of communication.

So the composer's anti-heroism - not to be confused with petitbourgeois narrowness may perhaps be the very element that can speak most directly to us today: as an appeal for listening to one another and acting together against being apodictically right at all costs, which leaves no space for imagination let alone for Utopia. Schubert's life, restricted and burdened, can hardly be reconstructed from meager surviving scraps of biography - which, to be heretical, are not so-

22

significant either. What is important is his Utopia of human togetherness and the suffering (almost always forming part of his music) caused by difficulties on the way there. That is not, however, to be found in biographical data but instead in his music - an immense treasure that he left us without wanting to prove the world wrong, which is the very reason why he could do so.

Gerald Felber/General-Anzeiger Bonn

Young Composers 99

Three Prizes for 14 year-old Sinem Altan

Sometimes a feeling is enough. Then I get an idea and compose without a piano" - says 14 year-old Sinem Altan. That is a new experience since the impulse for pieces always came from her piano-playing ever since she started inventing music at the age of seven. In the "Young Composers" competition, once again organized by the Berlin Music Council, the Musical Rights Foundation, and the Berlin Senate, Sinem was not the only prizewinner. The youngest was just ten and the oldest twenty one and already studying composition. However, no-one else won three prizes: for a piano piece, a piano trio, and a trio for trumpet, trombone, and double bass. Three years ago this girl from Turkey came to Berlin together with her mother who looks after her highly-talented daughter. She had a Turkish state scholarship. When one hears Sinem's perfect and highly nuanced German, it is hardly possible to imagine that she arrived in this country without knowing a word of the language. She chose Berlin because of an institution which more than fulfils international criteria in offering to talented pupils both normal schooling and special musical training from conservatoire professors. Half of the eight Berlin prizewinners came from the Carl-Philipp-Emanuel Music Gymnasium.

When Sinem Altan talks about her music, she seems both thoughtful and precise. Was she excited before her pieces were presented in the theatre? No, or at least not with the two she played herself, but with the third - when she had to listen to her own music from the auditorium for the first time - she had a very strange feeling. This trio for trumpet, trombone, - and double bass is called "The Intestines" and is - as she calmly and seriously explains - the second

23

piece in a cycle of trios she is at present writing about the inner organs of the body. "The Heart" was the first and the last will be "The Nerves". She says that she wrote "The Intestines" for the competition rather than for herself, and it sounds almost like wise self-irony when Sinem explains that she therefore also used a twelve-tone row here and only "five or six tones" from the folk music of her homeland which otherwise determines her pieces. "I learnt from my Azerbaijani teacher in Turkey that it is important to maintain the music of my homeland within myself - and as she says that it seems as if the fourteen year-old suddenly sees both the past and the future in front of her.

M. Wakening/Berliner Tagesspiegel

Henze's "Requiem" Performed Complete for the First Time

In all the arts "consciousness of death" has given rise to the most impressive blossoms. Depictions of the Passion in image or sound take the greatest risks. In any death cult, whether sacred or profane, the artist constantly seeks to exceed the limits of his metier. Apocalyptic visions of the world and private experiences of death permeate one another. In all works within this highest zone of artistic ambition the creator has confessionally manifested his innermost being.

In Hans Werner Henze's "Requiem", now performed complete for the first time (in Cologne's Philharmonic), there is something of the vibrations of these last things. Enveloped in tonal rhetoric conscious of tradition, Henze's music proclaims the end of the millennium in its lean, cultivated way. Whether downfall threatens at the finis terrae seems unresolved. It is rather a hopeful and joyous Old Catholic idea of a life beyond that dawns, and the work ends with a Sanctus.

The sub-title is a free adaptation of Heinrich Schutz: "Nine sacred concerti for solo piano, concertante trumpet, and chamber orchestra". Thus a requiem beyond liturgical song even though we well know that instrumental music - with Bach, Berg, or Henze himself - can silently invoke the text. The subject is thus indicated in the titles of the individual movements: Introitus - Dies irae - Ave verum - Lux aeterna - Rex tremendae - Agnus Dei - Tuba mirum -

24

Lacri-mosa - Sanctus. Even though these nine movements were written over the course of several years and apart from the Tuba mirum now performed for the first time - previously individually premiered (in London and Tokyo, sometimes conducted by Henze himself), the overall work nevertheless constitutes more than an accumulation of small parts. At its heart is the 40 year-old "Marigny Music", a concerto for piano and instrumentalists, which remained a fragmentary homage - possibly to Webern's op. 24, the prototype of the serial music of those years - conceived for the Boulez concerts at the Theatre Marigny in Paris.

Henze formed from оld material the Introitus which was first played in 1990 at the Covent Garden memorial concert for Michael

Vyner, for year’s manager of the "London Sinfonietta". Verdi's

Requiem also came into being as the result of a joint tribute to Manzoni. Motifs extend to the eight other movements which move by way of meaningful contrasts towards the concluding highpoint in the final Sanctus Two distant trumpeters answer the excellent soloist (Hakan Hardenberger) from the side galleries as in Gabrieli's Venetian polyphony. The sounds begin to glow. They burn out. "As the Old Masters shape death", so death appears to Henze here: "transfigured in the twilight of an eternal youth". Nothing so petrified with terror as in Reimann's Requiem. Nothing directly political as in Penderecki's Polish Requiem. Just gentle and smiling. People talk a great deal today about the aestheticization of the living world. Henze aestheticizes the world of dying, the kingdom of the dead.

Heinz-Harald Lohlein/Süddeutsche Zeitung

The Eloquence of the Inexpressible

For her beauty arises when it is possible to look into inner darkness - said Chaya Czernowin in connection with "Pnima ins Innere", the music-theatre piece that was very successfully premiered at the Munich Biennale in May 2000. This is a very harsh beauty since it is not concerned with assurance and security but rather with intensity of emotional existence, which is not always easy to bear. The composer, born in Israel in 1957, belongs to a generation which knows the trauma of the Holocaust only from hearsay - or much more

25

from concealment. Everyday experience shows, and psychological studies confirm, that most survivors can only defend themselves against the terrible past by repression. Unprotected memory and looking into darkness overtax their strength. That is precisely the theme of Chaya Czernowin's three-act work, which is based on David Grossman's novel "See under: Love". A child very cautiously gets an old man trapped in his memories to start talking. The burden of remembrance is passed on to the next generation and thus perhaps made somewhat more bearable.

Anyone who saw director Klaus Guth's highly sensitive production in Munich and experienced the theatrical power contained in Chaya Czernowin's utterly "unoperatic" music will hear her concert works with different ears. The five pieces of chamber music, brought out as a portrait of the composer by the small American company of Mode Records, sound like reflections of the themes involved in the stage work even though they are completely autonomous, having been produced in a completely different context. Here too the inexpressible, which Czernowin attempted to reach in her music-theatre, seems to vibrate subliminally. That is mainly expressed in the music's tone. This is enormously expressive music using purely instrumental means to explore the extreme ranges of the human voice, from stammering to screaming and weeping. Such an eruptive power, which appears to come from deep within the body, is perhaps still known from the time of the protesting avant-garde: from the young Rihm's "Hespos", Dieter Schnebel's "Maulwerken", or Kagel's "Halleluja", but it takes on a new quality against the previously mentioned background of experience. Schnebel is among the no fewer than seven composers whom Chaya Czernowin calls her teachers. She is certainly closer to his depth psychology anchored concept of musical expression than to the constructivism of a Ferneyhough with whom she also studied.

This music's similarity to language is, on the one hand, based on its treatment of instruments which are not concerned with "beautiful sound" but instead produce largely raw tones, denatured and noise-like, hard-struck, and expressively twisted through microglissandi. On the other hand on the nature of the musical structure. This is dominated by multiply divided unison or, conversely, the bundling of polyphonic elements as a single, highly diversified stream

26

of sound. That is conceived as more heterophonic than polyphonic. Polyphony entails objectified regularities which affect the sounding together, whereas here there are proliferating sound processes that are unpredictable and often produce shocks. This is vividly implemented in "Afatsim" for ensemble. The title signifies "Gall", the tissue growths on plants deforming and distorting normal development. The nine instruments are combined as four groups, which as a multivoiced quartet conduct an excited discussion which sometimes assumes bizarre forms.

The multi-voiced split I in Chaya Czernowin's music is more than a structural principle. It possesses an archetypal quality. In her stage work she assigns her two silent characters to two textless vocalists placed among the instruments. The speaking subject thus takes on a complex identity. It changes between individual and collective, and its speech is continued in the most subtle ramifications of the instrumental sound. In her instrumental trio "The Crossing", inspired by a Kafka story about a hybrid joining cat and lamb, this splitting up is taken even further by way of an impenetrable network of formal relations. The fact that three such extremely different instruments (in character and origin) as the alto saxophone, double base, and the Japanese Sho are again used by the composer as an "assembled instrument" is characteristic of her music, which can be understood as expression of an inwardly highly tense, diffuse, and constantly endangered identity.

In this discursive concept of music, linearity formed by timbre and rhythms is more important than harmony. The latter then mostly seems like the chance outcome of linear developments and exerts little influence on form. The “Dam Sheon Hachol” string sextet, dating from 1992 and the earliest works on CD, is an exception. In the string quartet written for the Ardittis in 1995 the four musicians’ gestures give rise to a fragile extended form. Here too this is once again a labyrinth of sounds and gestures akin to mysterious speech, making this composer’s an adventure in listening.

Max Nyffeler/ Neue Zürcher Zeitung

27

Composer Wolfgang Rihm in Conversation

For most of his life he has been a "young composer", time and again surprising or shocking the music scene. Wolfgang Rihm, born in 1952 at Karlsruhe where he now lives and teaches as a professor, is viewed as his generation's most productive and seismographically turbulent German composer of serious music. His first successes came thirty years ago and Rihm's 250 or so compositions to date extend over all musical genres. He is also a skilful deployer of words in his texts. Rihm recently celebrated his fiftieth birthday and at present his works are widely performed in concerts and festivals.

SZ: How autonomous is the decision to get involved with a sound, a form, a title? You receive commissions but always continue to follow an inner stream.

Rihm: That's the autonomy, that's how things develop according to their own laws. At present I have a single artistic theme dominating my life. That's melos ... melody. There was a phase in the eighties when I focused on coordinated formulations of settings and on the bodies of shaped silence that developed in between. But during the past five or seven years these ... let's call them descriptions of sound have been made subordinate to (I don't want to say have given way to) greater involvement with the Melos. I believe deeply that my chief task as a composer who also works for the stage continues to involve supporting human beings in their capacity to sing. I cannot take refuge in so-called contemporary techniques. That is not possible for me. My composing has to-be founded on the basis of physical possibilities, on a human singer's vocal predisposition, on what makes that predisposition nourish.

SZ: What has changed over the years in composing for the voice - from such early operas as "Faust und Yorick " or "Jakob Lenz " to "The Conquest of Mexico " and the "Seraphin" project?

Rihm: To be honest, nothing has changed. There have only been transformations. Change would mean that my attitude to singers had become different, but that was always the main problem in composing for the stage - starting with the question: Why is he singing now?

28

SZ: Time and again you've composed series of works - what could be called open-ended music. How and when do you decide that a self-contained work or series of works is coming into existence?

Rihm : Sometimes there isn't any decision; sometimes it happens in the middle of composition. With the way I work I can plan and begin something as a self-sufficient work and then it becomes open-ended, or vice-versa. After all compositions are living beings, living structures, that from a specific stage of their taking shape start to speak to me as partners in dialogue, and perhaps even play games drawing me into conversation. So I am surrounded by this diversity of shaped structures which constantly increase in number.

SZ: The music composed in memory of your friend Luigi Nono is a special case. How many parts are there to date?

Rihm : Up to now there is a sequence of five pieces. One has always vanished into another with the number of performers slightly increasing. The first, "Cantus Firmus", was a five minute piece for 14 players that got by with only 5 notes: B-A-C-H plus Nono's note G - sol, sole. The next was "Ricercare" into which the first vanished and where it had to be sought - hence Ricercare. Further superimpositions and overpaintings then turned this into "Abgewandt II", which was next incorporated in "Umfassung" in terms of both the sounds and the number of players. After that additional parts for a solo pianist and for a piano positioned elsewhere resulted in what for the moment is the last version with the double title of "La lugubre gondola / Das Eismeer". New moments of intensified sound have given rise to more and more complex developments.

SZ: You employ the idea of "placing " a work in a larger compositional context.

Rihm: Yes, placement is a very important concept for me - but not just in the case of groups of works. Also in individual pieces and in individual musical moments. Where is something rightly placed? And what artistic operation is involved in changing placing? Figure and placement are terms from training in classical ballet. They involve alignment of the body in space. For example, this sometimes entails a chord, a harmonic constellation. If I put this in another context, something new and previously unsuspected comes into existence. I remember people's astonishment when in my early pieces noise and

29

tonal passages occurred alongside one another on an equal basis. In the visual arts the collision of stylistic spheres is taken for granted, but in music people were much more anxious and initially only accepted this in watered-down form as so-called "Polystilistik", and later in a presentably defused way.

SZ: Today there are no longer any established rules in music. What rules does Wolfgang Rihm follow?

Rihm: I leave it to scholars to discover that. I make pieces and the people who study them will discover what inner laws are involved. I don't treat my intuition as being simultaneously an object of research. I may pose very precise questions before taking any step while composing, but I have no intention of codifying the entangled ways of creativity.

SZ: Or to analyze them ...

Rihm: To analyze them, yes certainly. When analyzing what has been composed I leave it to the flow. I don't stop it from time to time - say at a place which I look at again and again, thinking that somehow it doesn't correspond with reality. Instead I remain in movement with my object. That is perhaps the difference between science and art. Art contains its own criticism of methods, as if in "real time".

SZ: How far are processes of retouching, editing, and changing involved in the coming into existence of a work? And how does a work take off for you - from an overall idea, from a developmental concept, or from a particular sound? With sketches, plans for rehearsal, and so on?

Rihm: Those are auxiliary aids which always miss out on what is happening. Let’s take the second viola concerto which I have just completed. In fact the word "completed" makes me very nervous. I'd rather say: to which I've now given a form. This contains moments where I had to work for a long time to integrate them in the structure, where the expenditure of time is out of all proportion to the duration of what you actually hear. It may be that days were devoted to achieving the present form of a single chord. Then there are whole pages which came easily. There are hundreds of possibilities. Sometimes my pen (lies over the paper; on other days things are so crossed out and reworked that "the writing" goes through to the other

30