Мир современной музыки. Хрестоматия для чтения на английском языке. Учебно-методические материалы для студентов музыкальных вузов и факультетов
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Satoshi Minami commented on this process in highly ironic fashion in his "Two Intermezzi" for four players. The heartfelt melody shared by violin and guitar suddenly chokes on an avantgarde gnashing of teeth, whereupon the violin starts howling and the guitar is banged instead of plucked. The two instruments do not get back on the rails again. At the end the flute brings this grotesque escapade to a stop with a coachman-like "brrr". That is the comical impact our avantgarde has had in Japan. Now we get it back again - with an Asian smile.
Loire Thaler/Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeilung
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The Music of the Aka Pygmies at Berlin's
"Festival of the Continents"
The Mathematics of the Primaeval Forest
With what curiosity followers of the New Music scene thronged into Berlin's Philharmonie - as if a great composer were offering the premiere of a new masterpiece. But the music to be heard in the Kammermusiksaal is already a few thousand years old and has never been notated. Two hollow tree stumps and a big branch serve the musicians as instruments. But what they sing and drum reveals artistic and compositional qualities deriving from the collective unconsciousness of people still close to nature. The interlocking asymmetrical rhythms of the Aka pygmies are among the most complex imaginable in musical practice. "High mathematics" - says composer György Ligeti whom the organizers of Berlin's "Festival of the Continents" invited together with the pygmies for two concerts. The simple and the complex come together fascinatingly in this African singing.
Their lives are simplicity itself. They are at home as a nomadic people in the primaeval forest of the Central African Republic south of the Sahara, still largely isolated from Western civilization. They live from hunting and collecting honey. For them music is linked with everyday rituals. They sing songs of thanks to nature and invocations to spirits and gods. Knowledge of the correct sounds is passed on orally from generation to generation. In its general form pygmy music is simple, consisting of endlessly repeated rounds. But the detail is highly complex. Everyone in the tribal community takes part in music-making, and almost everyone sings something different - short sequences, interspersed by gaps, of sounds and yodel-like motifs which are constantly varied. Many strands occur simultaneously in bold metrical patterns - and yet they always remain interrelated. The singing thus combines to form an undulatingly evocative vocal music whose structure is indecipherable for the ear trained in Western music. Ligeti compares these pygmy choruses with the chaotically beautiful forms of fractal geometry where simple basic formulae can give rise to the most bizarre of structural blossomings. In his own pieces Ligeti has time and again set in motion a similarly
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crazy polymetric mechanism after having discovered Central African music at the start of the eighties. Neither are Conlon Nancarrow's wild pieces for player piano and some of Iannis Xenakis's inventions so far removed from pygmy rhythms. Also Steve Reich's minimal music seems like a meditative and simplified version of the pulsations of African motifs.
Of course such parallels do not lead very far. The cultural contexts of music production are much too radically divergent. But pygmy polyphony calls in question the Western art music tradition's concept of progress and the associated claim to superiority. Africans sung to the Pharoahs of Ancient Egypt what Ligeti does rhythmically in his balancing-act piano etudes.
Nevertheless the pygmies' excursion into the Western concert world also involves questionable aspects. In the discussion after the Berlin concert, where the African music was complemented by Ligeti etudes (wonderfully interpreted by Pierre-Laurent Aimard), people (unjustly) accused the organizers of following on from the 19th century cult of exotic displays and abusing the pygmies as an object for satisfaction of Western analytical ambitions. Above all because French ethnomusicologist Simha Arom, who has studied the music of the Aka pygmies for 30 years, had attempted - by way of terms from Western musical theory and brusquely demanded musical demonstrations to develop a theory of this music, which in no way interests the pygmies themselves.
However such attempts at explanation do not touch the real mystery of these vocalizations. Anyone who heard the pygmies in the second concert without any analytical observations, and took on board this beguiling unity of song, dance, trance, and ritual invocation will have heard something other than bewildering counterpoint and polyrhythmic layering, something that our music seems to have lost: a spiritual energy for which we lack any concept.
Сlaus Spahn/Die Zeit
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A German Symphony Orchestra Touring India
Concert tours with symphony orchestras are like moving house. Huge lorries arrive. Double basses and drums are loaded in bulky aluminium containers, and the precious orchestral, sheet music is packed away - Mozart, Beethoven, Bruckner, Brahms. At airports musicians block the departure lounges, and nervous stewardesses have to navigate their trays around cello cases. However everything finally returns to its accustomed place: the orchestra's leader, the strings, the wind, the sheet music, the conductor. When the baton is raised, the music sounds out as always.
Even in the most remote places in the world orchestras establish themselves in familiar surroundings and lovingly straighten the framed Beethoven and the beautiful Haydn grandfather clock, switch on the old Wagner standing-lamp which diffuses a comfortable light, and polish the massive inherited Brahms' mahogany. And why not 7 After all, musicians travel around, even to freezing multipurpose halls close to the equator suffering from noisy airconditioning, so as to show how beautiful the string theme in the first movement of Brahms' second symphony can sound.
And yet there is something unreal about such concert excursions to foreign parts since outside concert halls life is playing completely different music with never previously heard rhythms and crazy speeds. Anyone who does not block their ears to that will feel - somewhere between rehearsal, concert, and the next flight - an uncanny giddiness : as if what was thought sure starts to totter and familiar rituals lead into the void; as if the lines of notes had suddenly slipped and all musical indications had been reversed. The baton is raised and the music sounds out - but as always?
Eight double basses in big silver cases, looking like beheaded pyramids, slowly make their way on a half-open, rickety lorry through Calcutta's evening traffic It is immediately apparent that they come from elsewhere. That can be seen from the German label requesting "Please do not drop". Calcutta fell long ago. Something seems to be wrong with everything here: the croaky diesel motors of the little "Ambassador" taxis, the rusty trams much weakened by age, streetdealers' stands and the souls of human beings who when late evening comes lie down to sleep on filthy pavements. The musical instruments
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travel through a leaden smog arising out of smoke from wood-fires and car exhaust. Here - one thinks - no-one is waiting for Western art in foam-padded silver cases. Hooting, rushing, and self-preoccupied, Calcutta will not even notice when the double bass players unpack their instruments and tighten their bows so as to lose themselves in the beautiful dreams of Wagner's Tannhauser overture.
The Goethe Institute sent the Junge Deutsche Philharmonie to India as the guest of a German-Indian cultural festival, financed by India. This self-administering orchestra consists of a constantly changing band of 80 talented students from German conservatoires who come together for rehearsals and concerts. It had never been in India up to now. New Delhi, Bombay, Calcutta, and Madras are the stopping-points in this rapid trip through the country's mega-cities.
It happens now and again that a symphony orchestra from the West ends up in Bombay or the capital Delhi. In Bombay a big industrialist longing for European culture even had a luxurious cultural centre built for opera, concerts, and theatre, the National Centre of Performing Arts. However the German consul told us that the last symphony concert in Calcutta was back in 1969. The city has no hall meeting the requirements of Western concerts. Musicians appear in a kind of closed-down party congress hall in a sadly crumbling pleasure park, optimistically calling itself Science Centre.
No-one should maintain that Calcutta is a city without culture. The absence of expensive imports of high culture from Europe demonstrates nothing since India does after all have its own much older musical tradition. Calcutta has long been viewed as the country's intellectual centre. People were interested in the arts and literature, liven today anyone who enters a bookshop is surprised by the cosmopolitan range of what is on offer. The music section is better than the selection available in German university towns. Here Schoenberg's "Theory of Harmony" is to be found alongside a lexicon of Indian ragas, an analysis of Beethoven's Diabelli Variations next to a fat volume on ancient Sanskrit dramas, and Beatles song-texts cheek by jowl with a meditation on the sound of inner landscapes of the human spirit. Nevertheless the city seems to have been forgotten by the world. Calcutta has been left behind. Ever since the establishment of Bangladesh, Bengal's location on the periphery has been a problem.
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Economic globalization takes place elsewhere. Unlike boisterous, Hollywood-shrill, overheated Bombay, Calcutta seems to be standing still. On the evening we arrived a German student from the Potsdam film college was at the hotel bar. For nine months he has been making an expensive 35 mm documentary about Calcutta's main railway station. He spoke of being there almost every day and told stories typical of the city's myth as capital of misery: the station children struggling for survival, the corpse ignored amid crowds and then finally casually removed, and the foul sewer just beyond the tracks used by many Indians for relieving themselves. Just a few days ago he had shot his ultimate image there, summing up everything in a single scene - something for which a documentary-maker has to wait for a long, long time. An Indian, patiently fishing in this sludge so close to the station's seething masses, suddenly had a shining fish on his line, a surreal token of a survivor's unshakeable and stoic energy.
During their free morning before the concert the musicians were attracted to the temple of Kali as if guided from afar. This goddess is thirsty for blood. She tears off demons' heads. The temple of Kali is the religious heart of Calcutta. Anyone who approaches it senses a magical intensification of life. Market stalls crowd ever closer to a building scarcely higher than the surrounding houses. Colours dazzle in the displays of flower-dealers selling red and yellow garlands. People queue on one side of the temple, adorned with a frieze of demons' faces. On the other is a place of slaughter where a goat is sacrificed to Kali every day. Around midday the blood of the sacrificial animal is still fresh. On the smooth stone tiles are large dark-red pools of blood, slowly beginning to dry up in the sun. A Brahman asks us to take off shoes and socks so as to enter the temple. The ground is warm and stickily black from crushed flowers, street refuse, blood, and ash from joss sticks. Then comes the real encounter with the shrine. As if charged with a thousand volts pilgrims crowd in front of a narrow high doorway, which it is forbidden to enter. Orgiastic shouting, tugging, and gesticulating intensify; you are carried along in the crush and have just seconds to gaze at the three lurid yellow eyes on the egg-shaped black stone of Kali; and then you are on the edge of the crowd again, hardly knowing how that happened, confused by tumultuously kaleidoscopic impressions and
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possessed by the archaic power of the moment. Then in the evening there is Wagner, Beethoven, and Brahms in D major, Allegro non troppo. With remnants of goat's blood between the toes.
Two days previously at the Bombay concert a distinguished upper class audience flocked to the modern and comfortably upholstered concert hall: the best clothes, tasteful surroundings, assembled affluence. All of the small talk showed that self-assured dealings with prestigious Western culture is seen here as a demonstration of awareness of being part of an elite. One studied in England or America. One knows one another. Once the cultural centre's doors had been closed, there was little to show that you were not sitting in London's Barbican Centre or Munich's Philharmonic. The conductor was announced over the hall's loudspeaker system like a boxer before a heavyweight contest: "And now, Ladies and Gentlemen, one of the greatest conductors of our time - Rudoolf Baaarschaii!"
In Calcutta the atmosphere was much more open and free. The concert audience, sitting on the Science Centre's red metal chairs, did not even try to demonstrate their connoisseurship. Instead their faces revealed curiosity. Curiosity about an experience lying beyond their horizons. Perhaps chance or a secret yearning or desire for an exotic adventure drove them to this free concert without exactly knowing what awaited them.
Rajeev at any rate had never been to a symphony concert in his life? He turned up with his hair correctly parted and his oldfashioned checked shirt buttoned up to the top. He said that he came from a family of musicians. His father and forefathers were tablaplayers. Eight months ago he had decided to break away from the family tradition and to learn a non-Indian instrument as well. Since then he has been practicing the violin. The two hours of the concert were not enough to satisfy his longing for the Brahmsian opulence cajoled by Rudolf Barsehai from the orchestra, or for Beethoven's violin concerto played in Calcutta by Christian Tetzlaff with as much spirit and virtuosity as in the great European concert halls.
Indian musicians from Calcutta's Sangeet Research Academy also went to the concert. The following morning they are sitting together with the German music students and ask strange questions:
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What does the notation convey ? Are pitch, rhythm, and dynamics always laid down so precisely? Then why is a conductor needed ? And in that case what is left of artistic freedom for the individual musician? Their words are accompanied by doubts about whether always playing the same pieces in accordance with strictly determined notation is something worth striving for.
The Indian music they study is an improvised art, albeit based on equally strict rules. It is constantly changing and everything is in flux. For thousands of years it has only been taught orally, from generation to generation, and almost exclusively in the context of family traditions. The Sangeet Research Academy was established in Calcutta because the modern world is also eroding traditional family structures in India. Both music students and their teachers live on the campus. Each master has a maximum of four pupils. Training in Indian singing, for which this community is known, takes 15 to 20 years.
At each of the cities on this tour the Goethe Institute brought the Junge Deutsche Philharmonie together with Indian musicians. In New Delhi professor of singing Madhup Mudgal invited the Germans to his empty teaching room embellished only with a carpet and walls covered with black-and-white photographs of the most celebrated Indian instrumentalists. In warm Madras the orchestra sat crosslegged around Karaikkudi Subramiam, master of the South Indian vina. In Bombay the geniuses of Indian music had already assembled for a three-day symposium, forming a discussion group comparable to a European gathering bringing together Anne-Sophie Mutter, Maurizio Pollini, Claudio Abbado, Gunter Wand, and Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau.
The workshops are dominated by cautious approaches, expressions of respect, and careful introductions. The Indians demonstrate their instruments and provide the foreigners with a miniintroduction to the raga: scales up and down, plucked and sung - Sa, Re, Ga, Ma, Pa, Dha, Ni, Sa. With the corresponding micro-intervals these can be joined to create infinitely many and unmistakeable melodic universes. For their part the Germans attempt to explain what is involved in interpretation of a written score: the many subjective differences and the artistic satisfaction for individuals
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jointly shaping an orchestral composition into a whole. Vina master Subramaniam speaks about the high Indian art of suggestion where poetic play and concealment belong together, and where the melodic flow builds up to highly erotic tension and fulfillment is deliberately withheld.
Fragments of discussion, incomplete theorizing, often talking at cross purposes rather than making contact, and sometimes only academic routine - but also wonderful moments of self-reflection when what is supposedly profoundly characteristic suddenly seems very unfamiliar. And music constantly enters the ears. How austerely nasal, and yet how deeply serious and philosophical, the vina sounds. Tabla virtuosi can declaim even the fastest passages in their pieces with tongue-twisting precision without lifting a finger, because every blow, every sound, every colour on their instrument can be transposed into a vocal sound.
The silvery cascades of overtones produced by the tambura, the long-necked, plucked instrument accompanying almost all performances of Indian music, become a familiar sound. The idlis, the rice-cakes with mustard-seed and coconut chutney prepared for her guests by Mrs Sivaraman, are aromatically tempting. After a meeting in Bombay, her husband, a master of the South Indian Mridangam drum, spontaneously invited the orchestra's percussionists to his house so as to explain his instrument. The great hall of the Kalakshetra Dance School in Madras atmospherically reveals how music and life are fused in India. A high roof floats lightly above rows of casually arranged wicker chairs and the stage. The slatted wooden walls are open to light, air, birds, and sounds from the world outside as if the concert hall is only a shadowy spot beneath an open sky. After the Madras workshop is over, a delicate dance pupil does not want the German musicians to leave. She had recorded the previous evening's symphony concert and then listened to the cassette throughout the night. She is holding an exercise book full of unresolved questions.
What remains after such an orchestral tour? The German consul in Madras, who came to the concert in his official Mercedes flying the German flag, will not make new business connections in the booming IT sector just because of a splendid classical evening. The affluent of Bombay will wait for the next visiting symphony orchestra.
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But some musicians from the Junge Deutsche Philharmonie will feel something strange between their toes when they next play Brahms' second symphony.
Claus Spahn /Die Zeit
Post-reading activities
Give a short talk or write a composition characterizing modern performers. Whom do you like better?
Cello en Gros
The members of the Schleswig-Holstein Cello Orchestra can with good conscience assert that they are unique in the world. Where otherwise does there exist an orchestra of fifty musicians who all play this one instrument and also meet for regular rehearsals? But it isn't merely the attraction of this uniqueness that brings together half a hundred cellists for rehearsal periods in the North of Germany. A colourful bunch of reasons lies behind the gathering of this group of very different human beings.
The instrumentalists involved arc highly diverse, ranging from professional to school pupil, from adult amateurs to highly-talented youngsters - and that creates a special atmosphere. In addition the fifty cellists are convinced that their instrument is predestined to take over an entire orchestral score. Its great tonal range extends from the bass sounds characterizing the instrument to high violin tones, which, however, demand considerable technical skill.
The impulse for establishing this orchestra came from the Association of German Music Schools, which is educationally very much concerned with group music-making alongside teaching. In 1989 the Association called on member schools to send "ensembles of the same instrument" to the Music School Congress at Aachen. Cello teachers in Schleswig-Holstein thereupon took action and together with their pupils set up the Schleswig-Holstein Cello Orchestra. Its appearance at Aachen was a great success, and the Land association of music schools took over responsibility for the orchestra in 1990. Since
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