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

SWR Symphony Orchestra under Sylvain Cambreling was outstanding here as throughout the festival.

In general this year demonstrated a "multimedia" tendency towards linking visuals and music. Quite a few composers took pictures as their starting-point, and some, like Chris Newman, work in both spheres. In his "The State Paintings with Anti-Abstract" this pupil of Kagel's hung the hall with painted canvases and had the

"Ensemble Recherché" present a grotesquerie of tonal composition.

This work formed from "anti-abstract" sounds sparked off excited debates about whether its audible dilettantism was intentional genius or resulted from the concept. In contrast Peter Ruzicka's "Remembrance - Traces for Clarinet and Orchestra" seemed professional but not very original. With its technical and expressive balance the work could not have been further from the "change of paradigm" and break-through to a "Second Modernism" invoked in the composer's programme notes.

Traditionally there is a curious relationship between programme notes and music at Donaueschingen. This year it was to be experienced in Mark Andre's "Model" for five orchestral groups, which supposedly owed its musical material to micro-physics data from the generation of "Quark-Antiquark Pairs in Electron-Positrons Collisions". The music was supposed to depict these very processes and make them sensuously perceptible - a not uncharacteristic wrong conclusion in New Music. Its "programme" considerably obstructed reception of this piece with its fascinating, mystically mysterious sound-worlds.

Overall this year offered few highpoints but was certainly productive. Just because it was not just hearing, but also thinking and being, that changed here. "Every moment is absolute, alive, and significant" - said John Cage in his "Lecture on Nothing". "Starlings rise up from a field, making a noise as they do so: unparalleled splendour.

Simone Mahrenholz/Die Welt

A Competition with a Past and a Future

Scarcely in any other country in the world do boys and girls aged up to 25 - 12, 848 of them last year 1992 - subject themselves to

61

a competition situation which brings nothing except confirmation that they can play a musical instrument well or very well. It may be that the older participants, aged around 20, are already thinking more specifically about pursuing music and music-making as a profession. In fact there is mention in the curriculum vitae of almost all established and internationally successful German artists of the younger and middle generations of their once having been prizewinners in the “Jugend musiziert”1 competition. Such people constitute the statistically slender (and lonely) tip of a broad-based pyramid, even though they, as exceptions, very much confirm the rules and intentions of this nationwide music competition held for 30 years now. The theme with endlessly many variations presented by the "Young Music-Makers" competition today in all of its enormously expanded organisational dimensions initially seemed a more or less unanimously agreed enterprise to its founders back in 1963. Certainly not uninfluenced by the great economic boom in the country but obviously more impressed by the dangers inevitably entailed for the general state of music in the spread of a music business concerned with the luxury market they advocated broad based musical activities with the specific objective of re-establishing the traditional status of individual music-making and acquisition of the ability to play an instrument. That was soon linked with general aspects of cultural policy and contemporary objectives in education of the young. A solid organisational basis was established with the establishment of new music schools throughout the country. Rapid success in this venture certainly also owed, just as much to the _______________

1 Jugend musiziert (germ.) - Youth makes music

аdditional motivation of teachers at these and other schools. Nevertheless, the idea of competition, associated with the

"Young Music-Makers" project right from the start, initially attracted sharp criticism. Even theoretically well-founded reference to the democratically accepted principle of the free market economy, inconceivable without competition, was not immediately able to dispel all the arguments of those who failed to see any ethical acceptability in competition - above all for children and young people - in the (at least in principle) economically value-free sphere

62

of art, and feared repercussions for broad-based musical education. Directing a child's instrumental training almost exclusively towards preparation for participation in a competition was said to entail falsifying the spiritual and more comprehensive purpose behind practical musical training, perhaps even furthering frustration, which in the case of failure in the competition could result in bringing about the opposite of what "Jugend musiziert" actually wanted to achieve.

The competition organisers - over the longer term the German Music Council in conjunction with the German Youth Music Association and other specialised bodies - did not take such criticism lightly. They could refer to the indisputable fact that in the realm of lay music-making in general new - i.e. higher - standards began to establish themselves. They countered the much lamented (among the musical public) fact that young German artists had no chance in the major international competitions with the certainly correct argument that leading talents in music (as in sport) can only develop out of the humus of broad-based education with its interwoven possibilities of testing and furthering talent. Organisationally, they provided for alleviation of possible disappointments by way of gradation of the competition on three levels (regional, Land, and national) and specific groupings. The more the competition developed, the more intensively it succeeded in allowing "Jugend musiziert" to be both a comparison of achievement and an encounter, a competition and a festival. The hardship requisite in any competition was modified by way of welldirected and skilful deployment of youthful forms and ways of behaviour, and frequently-recurring problems were viewed as a challenge and solved with human understanding.

In the thirty years of its existence the "Jugend musiziert" competition has also resulted in other achievements, which make even clearer its significance for cultural policy and its importance for music education and German musical life in general. As far as the so often invoked "forge of specialists" is concerned, "Jugend musiziert" has found its appropriate place in a finely-meshed network of musical and educational assistance measures. The many-sided "continuation measures", whereby prize-winning soloists or ensembles are guided through the musical landscape, direct the best among the talented into a career that most desire anyway, possibly taking them to the peak of

63

the "German Music Competition", also inaugurated by the German Music Council, which really satisfies international demands.

The competition's original purposes are perhaps even more crucially realised in its impact, past and present, on the general state of music in the Federal Republic. A sometimes spectacular influence has been exerted on public and private music teaching with subjectmatter rethought and changed styles of music-making tested. The impulse towards intensive involvement in contemporary new music has been particularly apparent and lasting. There may not be any obligatory piece in the works played in the various programme levels, but the choice has to contain at least one piece of 20th century music. Since that stipulation met with great readiness and even enthusiasm among young musicians, a special category for the best interpretation of contemporary music (i.e. composed after 1960) was added alongside the usual prizes in the federal competition, and received a great response.

Alongside expansion of the pedagogic repertoire, which also benefited historical stylistic epochs, "Jugend musiziert" soon had a clear-cut influence on the entire range of instrumental music-making, also promoting - by way of constant enlargement of competition categories - young people's interest in less familiar instruments. Statistics on numbers of participants provide a fairly accurate reflection of changes of interest. After an initial boom there was an obvious decline in the recorder or accordion. The piano was the main beneficiary, and even today it enjoys mounting popularity. The accompanying rising demands on qualified utilisation of this instrument hardly permit the conclusion that its vogue derives from sheer convenience.

With German reunification the "Young Music-Makers" competition once again experienced a great quantitative boost with the number of participants increasing by around a quarter during the past two years. In summer 1992 the thousand-mark was exceeded for the first time when young musicians gathered at Erlangen, Fürth, and Nuremberg to play for awards and prizes at the competition's highest level. The fact that so few problems developed and the naturalness of the way in which the venture established itself here as the first allGerman music competition are surely also to be viewed as a token of

64

the enterprise's functionality and model-character. Those characteristics are in the meantime confronted by another challenge in the form of Europe - as the outcome of the growing together of the peoples of the European Community into an economic area where reciprocal cultural relations will also gain a new quality. A European Union of Music Competitions for Young People was established years ago thanks to a German initiative, and since then has supported intensive co-operation and comprehensive exchanges of experience. Encounters between participants in national competitions have been initiated, and European concerts, seminars, and camps organised. That has led to an annual competition for the European Youth Music Prize where award-winners in "Jugend musiziert" have done well.

Top national or European achievements are certainly a good and encouraging advertisement for any kind of artistic competition, but the fact that "Jugend musiziert" has in addition not forgotten broadly-based work motivating young people towards music-making makes it a competitive enterprise where there are ultimately no real losers.

Hans-G. Schurmann

Vienna Festival:

Helmut Lachenmann's "Little Match Seller"

Fortunately there was sufficient money for a co-production of

Helmut Lachenmann's "Mädchen mit den Schwefelholzern" ("Little

Match Seller") at this year's Vienna Festival. After Achim Freyer's trail-blazing premiere at Hamburg in 1997 the Salzburg Festival backed out of Peter Mussbach's staging but then that appeared in Paris and Stuttgart two years ago. Now the Vienna Festival and the Neue Oper Wien1 (in existence for ten years without any permanent ensemble, and dedicated to opening up new worlds of sound and new spaces and places for performance) have commendably presented the first Austrian staging of Lachenmann's disturbingly border-crossing "Music in Images".

The circular, trendily fitted out gasometer in Vienna's Simmering district, otherwise used for discos, is more predestined for such an event than any opera house. Away from the spacious plush

65

surroundings and boxes of a classical theatre, Lachenmann's composition revealed astonishing sensuousness in the gasometer's open arena. Concentric circles of seats accommodate the audience, which is surrounded by the musicians, the producers and coordinators of sounds, and members of the chorus, distributed along the wall of the building. This sensuousness is a kind of fading echo of "Tristan" as the big bang of the inexpressible from the other end of an epoch.

The Neue Oper's director, Walter Kobera, presided over the mighty assemblage of sound with competence and a sure sense of direction, eliciting from the Lower Austria Orchestra and Vienna's Amadeus Ensemble all the fragments of instrumental sound, individual tones, and noises with which Lachenmann transposes metaphorical coldness into a "musical" image, thus letting Hans Christian Andersen's Little Match Seller freeze to death. Among these images are dreams of warmth, which flare up, for a despairingly brief moment, with the striking of a match - and the infinitely distant sequences of the sounds of normal life, reaching the girl from the open windows on New Years Eve, and the painfully warming illusion of meeting her beloved dead grandmother who "calls her home" to God.

Director Alfred Kirchner and designer Karl Kneidl constructed a catwalk-crossover across the seating at the public's

_______________

1 Neue Oper Wien

eye-level. Two large-scale images (with a table laid for a festive meal at one end and the houses bordering on a narrow street at the other) hinted at the story's actual setting but basically put more emphasis on its symbolic meaning and associations.

Through the choreography of her movements "The Girl" (Phillippa Galli) tells this story on the catwalk. With fear and trembling. With joy flaring up in her illusion of warmth when the matches really do catch fire. And there is also a Gudrun in a sheepskin. Where Lachenmann vaguely connects Gudrun Ensslin's misdirected radicalism with the image of social coldness, Kirchner seeks a theatrical connection. Therese Affolter's Gudrun, who is soon recognizable in a red pullover beneath the sheepskin, is not only present for quotation of her letters. Here, right from the start, she

66

becomes an alter-ego-explanation indicating a wider context, who has a character finally hangs herself and is united with the girl in death.

Deploying a space-sound installation that accords with the setting, Kirchner is also obviously dedicated to a theatrical search for meaning in his use of the two excellent sopranos, Elizabeth Keusch and Sarah Leonard. Even in the highly compressed linguistic artistry Walter Raffeiner demonstrates in his presentation of Leonardo da Vinci's text about the ambivalence of, on the one hand, delight in and, on the other, fear of knowledge, Kirchner endeavours to reveal the narrative structures of Lachenmann's composition. In the course of that endeavour he may perhaps not present these structures in the originally intended context, but it is a possible context in terms of music-theatre and finally convincing overall.

Joachim Lange/Frankfurter Rundschau

Women Musicians Festival

The woman stands alone on stage in a spotlight. She lifts her violin in such a way that it reflects the light into the hall like a mirror. First she plays a simple melody, then she sings without a microphone, and the public, used to amplification, is as quiet as a mouse. The intensive impact of Iva Bittova extends to the far end of the long room. At the bar a couple of listeners hold beer bottles in their hands without opening them - the hissing sound would disturb the music. This music does not remain calm. Sometimes the violin sounds rough, sometimes the voice screeches. The one accompanies the other; they quarrel and then come together again for a wild gallop through expansive Slav landscapes. Iva Bittova is Czech. Her father, Koloman Bitto, was one of the best-known traditional musicians in Eastern Europe, coming from a Slovakian gypsy family. She is a violinist, singer, actress, and composer, and in fact four women really-do seem to stand on stage, telling very old and completely new stories.

Such musical experiences touching all the senses rarely occur. However, there are places, where the probability is greater than elsewhere. It was not just chance that Iva Bittova appeared two years ago at the "As She Likes It" Festival of Women Musicians. This event has taken place over four November evenings at Berlin for the past four years now. It has gained a very special reputation for itself. Not a

67

year - and sometimes not even an evening - passes without a musical discovery. One reason is that performance opportunities are rare even for important women musicians, and all too often they are only known to a few initiates. However, the women organizers' readiness to take risks and the concept underlying the festival also play a part in banking on big names in the music business is one of the few criteria that does not count. Asked how they make their selection, AnnaBianca Krause, one of the four organizers, responds: "Because one of us likes something - a basically sensuous way of going about things". They do not specify any styles or musical directions. "Creative and individual" are the only all-embracing criteria. Almost all the women musicians who appear themselves compose and seek their own artistic ways. Freely improvised music, modern popular music, jazz, ironical cabaret-style entertainment, and sound-installations are juxtaposed in bold contrasts and stylistic leaps. One evening is headed "The Beat Goes Off and offers Rock that can be danced to - this year with Berlin bands Honeysuckle Roses and Echo Return, the Jamaican-Swiss Debbie Dee as the festival's first Hip-Hop group, and The Secret, a Bucharest Hard Rock band established in 1989 - said to be one of the two existing Romanian women's bands. The organizers particularly enjoy inviting a group like The Secret, even if it constitutes an exception to the rule that at least one of their numbers has heard these women musicians live, forming a vital personal impression of what they have to offer. However, they think it equally important to establish contact with performers from other countries. In that respect Romania is a blank space on the map.

There are also countries where personal contacts already exist but well-known musicians have to date been ignored. This year they include the Italian avantgarde Rock band Fastilio and, above all, Siri Austeen from Norway whose appearance Ms Krause is particularly looking forward to. During the Festival Siri Austeen will present the premiere of her audiovisual solo performance "Laridae Lunaire" where this painter and singer will set off on an experimental journey in sound concerned with the relationship between body and soul, humanity and nature, love and yearnings, and how all that is linked with everyday rituals, buzzing flies, mirrors, and the turning of the planets. Also playing a part is her self-constructed bass, a metal-

68

coated part from an air-conditioning unit. "You can never know what will happen at premieres" - says Krause.

Japanese Sounds in Leipzig and Dresden

"In the morning visiting Johann Sebastian Bach's grave in Leipzig's Thomaskirche, and in the evening a concert at the Gewandhaus. The music played there sounds like a Bach fantasy. Strings and wind fill out Bach's melodies with a gradual heightening. An obligatory major triad concludes a contrapuntal section, and even the gently tripping rhythm seems baroque in this context. But then the piece all of a sudden jumps out of its century. Scales that are completely unusual in Bach vehemently pull the music downwards; the rhythms end up in a minimal music pattern, becoming firmly established as an ostinato; the counterpoint breaks off, finally transforming the piece into a tranquil, unmoving expanse.

Tradition and modernism, conservation and renewal, flow together in "Doubles Resounded I" as if Bach had moved out of the old church into the new Gewandhaus, and as if the composer had wanted to establish a musical monument for Leipzig. However, the place of performance is deceptive with regard to supposed historical continuity, merely suggesting a connection that does not exist. The composer does not come from Leipzig, Germany, or even Europe, but from Japan. Fujieda Mamoru, born at Hiroshima in 1955, learned his craft in America rather than Europe - with Joji Yuasa in San Diego and with Morton Feldman. Many attentive listeners don't know whether they should be more amazed by the perfect amalgamation of western ways of composition in the East, or by the internationality of contemporary music per se. Unlike Japanese interpreters, who have long become a matter of course, Japanese composers (with just a few exceptions) are literally a blank page in this country.

Nonetheless, Mamoru only represents one aspect of the current Japanese composers' scene. The Japanese Cultural Institute in Cologne is very much interested in the existence of such a scene. Its task of furthering cultural exchanges in the form of regular exhibitions, series of lectures, film shows, language courses, scholarships, and organisational assistance was extended when the "Japanese Music Days" were first put on in 1988. This event, held

69

every other year, has in the meantime established itself. The concerts are by no means restricted to Cologne, and are now scheduled to reach the new federal Laender. For conductor and organiser Masayuki Honda, the general need to catch up is great. This need can be met with financial assistance from a Japanese sponsor. People generally understand "Japanese music" as entailing the country's traditional music, and Honda says that very few concert organizers are interested in contemporary works. So many of those who went to the Leipzig concert given by the "Ensemble Köln", which has made a name for itself since the most recent Music Days as specializing in Japanese composers, probably expected Asian rather than European instruments.

However, the European surface is deceptive. The intention in these concerts is also to reveal the Asian tradition beneath. After their American or European training, many Japanese composers of the younger generation obviously thought again of their own musical culture, and now attempt to link western notation and composition with Asian ideas about sound so as to develop an autonomous aesthetic. The most striking example of that development is composer Toshio Hokosawa. His music was the main focus in the Dresden concert at the "Centre for Contemporary Music" as part of a series devoted to "Music of Other Cultures": "In the Valley of Time" (1986) for string quartet and piano, and "Fragments II" (1989) for alto flute and string quartet. Despite the European instrumentation both pieces seemed Asian in character, concentrated on just a few notes, on a measured tempo, within which a sound is given the time to unfold chirpily, glassily, or impassively. The basic mood is maintained throughout the entire piece. Both contrasts and a western understanding of drama are avoided. The most minute deviations in pitch, little glissandi, prolonged reverberation, dissonant interactions, or insistence on insect like noises determine the microcosm of these pieces of music. The flute (Carin Levine) and piano (Kristi Becker) were integrated in the frequent flageolet sound of the strings. The piano only once breaks out of the "Valley of Time", but the grand gesture is restricted to run-ups. This music does not storm mountains.

Akira Nishimura, born at Osaka in 1958 and trained in Tokyo, is also oriented towards Asian musical culture, and is viewed as a

70