The man that developed electronic music in Switzerland like few others and always managed to surprise us with fresh ideas: Thomas Kessler.
It was announced today that the Swiss composer has passed away at the age of 86. An obituary by Thomas Meyer.
Thomas Meyer A rapper and a string quartet – rather unusual combination. In 2007, Californian slam poet Saul Williams appeared with the Arditti Quartet at the Tage für Neue Musik Zürich to perform the piece NGH-WHT. It was not his first time performing in a classical setting. Two years earlier, he had already recited his texts with an orchestra in Basel, in Said the shotgun to the head. Both pieces were written by Thomas Kessler.
In 2001, right after his retirement, the Swiss musician travelled to Toronto in search of an unusual sound. ‘I was looking for poetry, with rap, but not with an aggressive boom-boom rhythm, something more open or experimental. I searched for a long time, but suddenly I heard something; a poet speaking with a cello solo, which was fantastic. It had rhythm, pulse, but not the way commercial music sounds. I thought, I want to get to know this man.’ Shortly afterwards, he turned up at Saul Williams’ door, who rapped his latest book to him at their first meeting and said: ’Don’t you want to use this?’ and that’s how the collaboration came about.
Thomas Kessler’s NGH WHT for Speaker and String Quartet from 2006/07, interpreted here by the Mivos Quartet and Saul Williams at the Lucerne Festival, KKL Lucerne on August 17, 2019, produced by SRG/SSR.
This search for the unused and this curiosity characterised Thomas Kessler throughout his life. Born in Zurich in 1937, he had always worked independently in – and alongside – the avant-garde. In the 1960s, he founded his own studio in Berlin. Soon young rock musicians were coming in and out of his Electronic Beat studio, discovering new equipment and developing a new sound. So it is hardly surprising that Kessler later turned to rap.
From 1973 onwards, he set up the Electronic Studio at Basel’s Musik-Ackdemie and led it to international renown. But even there and then he was looking for unconventional solutions. One important aspect of his work was the live electronic pieces in which solo musicians took control of the sound themselves and the result was no longer dominated by a centrally controlled mixing console. What began in 1974 with the solo Piano Control culminated in the new millennium in a series of orchestral pieces called Utopia.
Thomas Kessler, Utopia II, for Orchestra and Electronics, 2010/11, Basel Sinfonietta, conducted by Jonathan Stockhammer, Stadtcasino Basel, March 30, 2014, produced by SRG/SSR.
“I wanted to create the ultimate live electronics piece, a utopia. I needed eighty sockets on stage, that’s all. Every orchestral musician comes with his or her own setup, a small case containing a synthesiser or laptop and plugs in the cables; there is a loudspeaker next to the chair and that’s it. Nobody in the hall mixes the sound; no loudspeakers around. The sound comes from the podium, from the musicians.” The orchestras really enjoyed creating this new type of mixed sound themselves, a sound, according to Kessler, “that had never been heard before”.
Thomas Kessler, Utopia III for Orchestra (in five groups) and multiple live electronics, Tonhalle Orchestra Zurich, conducted by Pierre-André Valade, Tonhalle Zurich, October 18, 2016, produced by SRG/SSR.
He was a laterally- and independently- thinking composer and yet it would be wrong limiting Thomas Kessler to a technology freak or a cross-genre innovator. All of this never became an end in itself, but always resulted in a refreshing, sensitively formulated and thoroughly captivating musical outcome. Thomas Meyer
Simone Keller brings music history’s hidden gems to light
Black, gay and provocative: Julius Eastman (1940-1990) shredded the surface of cultivated minimal music. With his confessional music, he burst into the bubble of New York’s white avant-garde. With the Kukuruz Quartet, Swiss pianist Simone Keller made a significant contribution to his rediscovery and is also committed to other “forgotten” piano music.
Corinne Holtz At the time Julius Eastman improvised for over an hour in Zurich’s Rämibühl auditorium, Simone Keller was three years old. The painter Dieter Hall had invited the unknown pianist, composer, singer and performer to make his Swiss debut back in 1983, before he himself would immerse himself in the buzzing metropolis for decades.
Eastman left a “disturbed” audience behind and presented his host with a sketch entitled fugue no 1, which the Kukuruz Quartet will analyse years later together with other transcripts, photos and recordings. The “Eastman passion” set in. It promoted arrangements and interpretations of pieces “that were not yet known even to insiders”, says Simone Keller.
These include Buddha (1983), which imposes 20 individual voices to be realised simultaneously by performers without specifying particular instruments or number of performers. The Kukuruz Quartet has opted for preparations that enable sound surfaces in pianissimo on the threshold of audibility.
Gay Guerrilla (1979) with its wild mix of jazz harmonies and Luther chorale, a reflection of Eastman’s questions about life, is completely different. “I struggled with God for a long time”, he said in an interview and he hoped to make peace with him one day. His pan-religious spirituality also found its way onto the stage. In 1984, for example, he performed the solo The Lord give it and the Lord take it away, a 15-minute prayer in deep earnest.
The Kukuruz Quartet performs Gay Guerilla by Julius Eastman in 2019 at Brown University, Providence, Rhode Island, USA.
Crossing boundaries, styles and conventions
Eastman transcends the boundaries of styles, genres and conventions and leaves behind music which can be defined as protest turned into sound. This is particularly true of the ‘Evil Nigger’ trilogy, the title of which caused African-American students to protest on the campus of Evanston’s Northwestern University (Illinois) in 1980. They demanded the “N”-word to be removed from the programme. Eastman addressed the audience before the concert and gave historical reasons for his linguistic racism. He used the offensive word to visualise the role of African Americans in US history. “The foundation of the country’s economic rise is built on the labour of African Americans, especially field niggers.” For 250 years, slaves had generated wealth for whites, while they – as black people – were generally being denied both ownership and education.
Eastman was punished by his own community for speaking his mind. Is there a mechanism at play that we encounter in the cancelling of unwanted opinions to the present day? “No,” says Simone Keller. “Eastman wanted to provoke and demonstrate why it is important to think about these titles and their explosive power.” It is true that in the course of “cultural change, we are becoming more sensitive” to traditional racism, including in language.
Run-down pianos make painful beauty audible…
The Kukuruz Quartet was the first to discover Eastman for Europe and initially played his music in clubs, bars and breweries – on four “run-down” pianos that have already survived many preparations and, with their “battered resonating bodies, offer enough resistance” to be able to show the “repetitive fury” with simultaneous painful “beauty”.
They thus did justice to music fuelled by drug excesses that resounded through the streets during the Black Lives Matter movement demonstrations and can now be heard in established concert halls. MaerzMusik in Berlin kicked things off in 2017, and the Lucerne Festival Forward recently followed.
We do not know what this visionary eclectic would say about the establishment’s recognition. He ended up spending the last years of his life in a homeless camp in Tompkins Square Park in New York and died forgotten in a Buffalo hospital in 1990.
“As a white musician, I also feel obliged to play music by people of a different skin colour,” says Simone Keller. During her studies, she only played music by white men, even in the 2000s, when a few white female composers had already been rediscovered, such as Clara Schumann, Fanny Mendelssohn and Lili Boulanger.
It’s high time to remember African-American female composers such as Irene Higginbotham and her most famous composition Good Morning Heartache (1945) and to make “inequality and power relations” visible, says Simone Keller, titling her latest CD and book ‘Hidden Heartache’.
Irene Higginbotham (1918-1988), Good Morning Heartache, interpreters Simone Keller, Klavier and Michael Flury, Posaune, 2024.
Unlike Julius Eastman, Julia Amanda Perry (1924-1979) belongs to the forgotten composers. The African-American pianist, composer and conductor celebrates her 100th birthday on March 25. After her basic training at Westminster Choir College Princeton, she studied in Europe with Luigi Dallapiccola and Nadia Boulanger, was a Guggenheim fellow in Florence and conducted famous orchestras such as the BBC Philharmonic and the Vienna Philharmonic between 1952 and 1957. Nevertheless, hardly any doors were opened to Perry back in the USA. With ‘Hidden Heartache’, Simone Keller points to the structures of this forgetting and sheds light on piano music by those excluded from music history. Corinne Holtz
On March 25, 2024, Julia Amanda Perry’s birthday, a book as well as a double CD with 100 minutes of piano music from the last 100 years will be released, including works by Julius Eastman, Julia Amanda Perry, OIga Diener, Jessie Cox and others, Intakt records. CD: Kukuruz Quartet, Julius Eastman, Piano interpretations, Intakt records 2018.
Celebrating the 100th birthday of composer Luigi Nono.
Luigi Nono (1924-1990) is considered a central figure of the musicalal avant-garde. A portrait by Florian Hauser on his 100th birthday, January 29, 2024.
Florian Hauser
They all turned up, every single one of them. Several thousand workers gathered during their break in order to hear what Luigi Nono has created on the basis of their sounds and noises. He had recorded the blaringly loud roars and hisses of the blast furnace of their steel factory and was now presenting his tape collage to them. Afterwards, the workers discussed it and began to ponder about their working conditions. ‘La fabbrica illuminata’ is the name of the piece that Luigi Nono dedicated to the steel workers in Genoa in the mid-1960s. A prime example of participation, one would say today. Ultra-modern, even to this day. That has always been Luigi Nono’s aim: he made music to create political awareness.
Luigi Nono was born into an educated Venetian middle-class household. When he was one year old, Benito Mussolini became the fascist dictator of Italy, which characterised Nono’s entire development, indeed his whole life. He wanted to fight against oppression, war and social injustice. The fact that he did is as a composer – he states – is only a coincidence, as he connected with the musical avant-garde after the Second World War.
It is a time of great change. A young generation of composers wanted to create a new musical world; the old expressions had had their day, clear structures were needed, as well as new compositional techniques and tools such as electronics.
Darmstadt in Germany became an important centre of the new emerging avant-garde.
Luigi Nono, Incontri für 24 Instrumente, UA 1955, in house-production SRG/SSR. In 1955 – Nono was already firmly involved in the Darmstadt Summer Courses – he wrote a musical love declaration to his future wife, Nuria, Arnold Schönberg’s daughter: ‘Incontri’ for 24 instruments, the encounter of independent musical structures. ‘Just as two independent beings, different from each other, meet and though their encounter cannot become unity, it is still a meeting, a togetherness, a symbiosis’. After the premiere in Darmstadt, Nuria Schönberg and Luigi Nono became engaged and married shortly afterwards.
Three composers become the central figures at Darmstadt’s so-called ‘International Summer Course for New Music’: the Frenchman Pierre Boulez, Karlheinz Stockhausen, from Germany and Luigi Nono.
What initially began as a wonderful and intense artistic friendship soon changed and differences became apparent. Nono did not wish to make “l’art pour l’art”, like his colleagues. He wanted to get out of the ivory tower, onto the street, to the people. And set, for example, farewell letters from resistance fighters sentenced to death to music….
“The human, the political cannot be separated from music”
“The human, the political cannot be separated from music”, Luigi Nono used to say. He tried ever more urgently to put his finger on social grievances, using all musical means at his disposal: wild orchestral impulses, sounds on the verge of silence, collages, electronics or music that spreads throughout the room.
“To awaken the ears, eyes, human thinking, intelligence, the greatest possible inwardness’” these are the words Nono used to describe his eternal goal in 1983, ‘”to bear witness as a musician and a human being”.
Luigi Nono, No hay caminos, hay que caminar, UA 1987, in house-production SRG/SSR: Nono had read the phrase ‘Caminantes, no hay caminos, hay que caminar’ (Wanderer, there is no path, you just have to walk) on the wall of a monastery in Toledo. This became his last orchestral work and the title could almost stand as a motto for Nono’s entire compositional work. No hay caminos, hay que caminar. The dynamics and tempo are extremely restrained, with dramatic cracks in the sound emerging only for brief moments. Nono uses only the note G, with quarter-tone increases and decreases, i.e. seven notes at quarter-tone intervals in all octave ranges. The differences between pitches and timbres disappear; it is a magical game that radically rethinks the relationships between parameters.
His life, just as his music and music-making, is exhausting… and Nono was ultimately broken by his own demands. ‘I proceeded to self-destruction,’ he would say at the end and when he died in his mid-60s, he had to realise that even music cannot trigger revolutions.
What could be considered his legacy? His uncompromising attitude. His motto. Ascolta! Listen up! Florian Hauser
Electronic composition, performance, sound art: Zurich-based composer, performer, media artist and flautist Lara Stanic is hard to categorise. In her concert performances, she combines media, instruments, objects and musicians’ bodies and refers to specific locations and contexts. In this interview, she gives an insight into the creation of her latest works for the Zurich Baroque Orchestra.
Gabrielle Weber I meet Lara Stanic for a cup of coffee at her kitchen table on a snowy Saturday morning at the beginning of January. We talk about her latest composition ‘Du matin au soir’: it was written in summer 2023 for the Zurich Baroque Orchestra and consists of eight sound interventions that were performed between individual symphony movements by Haydn. The concerts took place at different times of day in various Zurich locations: the botanical garden, an outdoor swimming pool and in St Peter’s Church.
Lara Stanic generally uses electronic media for her pieces and often also integrates context-related objects. The selection of specific media is a process, says Stanic. “I let myself be inspired by the context, the performers, the instruments and the way they can be played. This generates sounds in my head and I conceive ways of playing.”
In Sonnenstand, the sound intervention to Haydn’s symphony Der Mittag, the musicians ‘play’ with round portable mirrors that produce sound using smartphones. The idea came from a childhood memory. “As a child, I used portable mirrors to catch the sunlight at noon and create shadows and light reflections on a nearby wall,” says Stanic.
In Sonnenstand, the musicians also capture sunlight with mirrors, but this time turning it into music. Mobile phones are attached to the back of the mirrors. Built-in motion sensors, microphones and loudspeakers capture the movements of the mirrors and convert them into sounds. Stanic explains that this creates a hybrid form of two the media, mirror and smartphone.
Sonnenstand thus also reflects a basic theme characterising Stanic’s artistic work: In electronic music, she is often bothered by the clumsiness of large, almost threatening loudspeakers and mixing consoles. By using mobile devices, she searches for lightness and mobility. Stanic also often appears as performer of her own works. She first tests what she develops on herself. “I always was and still am my best guinea pig,” she says.
Stanic first studied the flute, then music and media art in Zurich and Bern. She continues to play and teach the flute and sees it as her musical home. “My training as a performer and teacher provided me with a foundation and knowledge of compositional thinking. I am equally interested in creating sounds on acoustic as well as electronic instruments.” Her first access to music was through radio and television during her childhood in former Yugoslavia. Even back then, she was fascinated by the amount of emotions sound waves could trigger. The connection between music and electronics was therefore obvious, she adds with a laugh: “Of course, I didn’t realise it being about sound waves at the time.”
Kafi is all about transformation, the sound and aroma of coffee being transformed into music. In addition, there is an electronic extension of classical instruments, as the violin bows of the concert masters are equipped with motion sensors. They use them to touch the coffee machine like magic wands, which are then swung through the air. This amplifies the sound of the bubbling, spreads throughout the room and mixes with the beginning of the symphony. In her own words: “The violin bows become magic wands, which in turn transform the aroma of the coffee into music”.
The process behind it is very simple though. First there is the idea, then a sound, in this case the bubbling of the coffee and then she looks for solutions as to how this can be connected to the sound of the instruments. The performative actions of the concert masters form a bridge for the audience between the sounding everyday object and the instruments. Based on this simple principle, Stanic transforms everyday objects into music and leaves a lasting impression on my morning coffee. Gabrielle Weber
Lara Stanic is co-founder and member of the trio Funkloch featuring also PR and SH, which invites six composers each year to an experimental studio concert broadcasted live on air, or the GingerEnsemble, a Bern-based composer-performer collective. She composes for soloists, ensembles and orchestras, as well as for her own performances, which she regularly performs at international festivals and has been a lecturer in Performing New Technologies at Bern University of the Arts since 2011.
FunkLoch celebrated its sixth anniversary on Saturday, 20.1.24, 17h at Kunstraum Walcheturm with works by Annette Schmucki, Daniel Weissberg, Svetlana Maraš, Dorothea Rust and Joke Lanz.
SRF-Video interviews of How Noisy are the Rooms? and Der Verboten
Since its foundation in 1975, Willisau Jazz Festival has been an important hub for improvised music. Every year in late summer, improvisers from all over the world gather together in the Lucerne hinterland, where they perform in intimate settings or as larger acts in the festival hall. SRF 2 Kultur portrays them every year in various programmes. This year, SRF Kultur music editors Roman Hošek and Luca Koch also conducted live video interviews with various bands and artists. Luca Koch presents two of the featured bands in our neoblog: Der Verboten and How Noisy Are The Rooms?
‘Der Verboten’: Antoine Chessex, Christian Wolfarth, Frantz Loriot, Cédric Piromalli
Luca Koch Anyone who discovers the band name (Der Verboten) in a programme might immediately think of a white, round sign with a red border or even think the name is a typo. Does it mean “das Verbot” (prohibition) or “die Verbotenen” (the forbidden) or “Der Vorbote” (the precursor)? What appears to be grammatically incorrect originally arose from a joke, as the quartet featuring Christian Wolfarth, Frantz Loriot, Antoine Chessex and Cédric Piromalli rehearses in both German and French, including translation errors. The name has stuck, because who defines what is right and what is wrong? Like music, our languages are made up of rules and structures that can be broken. Der Verboten’s music of is free of rules, intertwined, and it’s precisely this interplay that drives the band.
Der Verboten: Refinement instead of innovation
Exploring new sounds or expanding the individual instruments’ sound is not the focus of the ensemble, they try instead to sonically merge and deepen their collective sound. In the interview, Christian Wolfarth repeatedly emphasises how important it is to find the right bandmates. This quartet is like an old friendship, even if they haven’t rehearsed or played on stage for a long time, they pick up exactly where they left things when they last met.
Time merging
In order for piano, drums, viola and tenor saxophone to grow into a single musical organism, the band needs one thing above all – time. The desired form of interwoven interplay only emerges during long improvisation sessions. “I think I can say that we manage to achieve it during every concert,” says Christian Wolfarth in the interview. The ensemble played a total of two pieces in their one-hour set at the Willisau Jazz Festival and the break in between served as an opportunity for everyone – especially for the audience – to catch their breath. Slow developments and barely noticeable changes meant that the audience in the concert hall kept wondering how Verboten had musically moved from A to B.
Christian Wolfarth and Antoine Chessex before their concert in a live interview at the Jazz Festival Willisau 2023.
The band performed on stage with the same calm and reflective approach as in a conversation. They transported me into their world of sound to such an extent that during the concert I no longer knew whether twenty or just two minutes had passed.
Another band that plays with the audience’s sense of time is How Noisy Are The Rooms? In contrast to Der Verboten, however, the minutes seem to run by, as their sound aesthetic is shaped by high tempos and high density of sounds.
‘How Noisy Are The Rooms?: Almut Kühne, Joke Lanz und Alfred Vogel
‘How Noisy Are The Rooms?’ likes to ask questions.
The trio featuring Alfred Vogel, Joke Lanz and Almut Kühne likes to ask questions: How much noise can a room tolerate or can music cause whiplash? Improvisation with lots of energy, punk aesthetics and fast interaction gives the listeners at How noisy are the rooms? concerts the feeling of being flung back and forth like balls in pinball machines. The trio’s creative musical anarchy on stage challenges the audience, sometimes even overwhelmingly. Alfred Vogel emphasises: “I don’t really mean to overwhelm people. Understanding follows listening. You just have to open your ears and, at best, it does something to you.”
Turntables and whistle notes
The driving rhythms of Alfred Vogel on drums with Almut Kühne’s vocal acrobatics lend How Noisy Are The Rooms?’s music an archaic flair, as percussion and voice are probably the oldest instruments known to mankind. Joke Lanz, looping and distorting sound samples with his turntables, brings a performative, electro-analogue and humorous component into play.
Alfred Vogel before the concert of How Noisy Are The Rooms? in a live interview at the Jazz Festival Willisau 2023.
Alfred Vogel wanted to become a rock star and this energy is still present in How Noisy Are The Rooms? but he is glad that he took a different path, as his current musical output is diverse and rich.
Post-musical hidden object image
The trio’s music consists of eclectic sounds and short, pointed phrases like in hidden object images. There are no clear structures, harmonies or tangible melodies in their soundscape. Nevertheless, the musical disputes between the three musicians conjure up images in the mind: I feel transported to a roaring metropolis or as part of a game animation.
With their density and abundance of individual musical parts, How Noisy Are TheRooms? capture the zeitgeist of today’s restless world. Alfred Vogel explains in the interview: “Music or art should always reflect the world we live in. What is overwhelming? Today’s events are also overwhelming. Everything happens at the same time. Everything, everywhere, all at once. It’s the same in our sound”. How Noisy Are the Rooms? is this year’s edition biggest discovery for me at Willisau Jazz Festival. Luca Koch
Contrechamps Genève celebrates listening: partage ton Vinyle!
A busy season with numerous highlights just started for Ensemble Contrechamps Genève. The programme represents the new direction of Geneva’s most important ensemble for contemporary music under the artistic direction of percussionist Serge Vuille. He took over five years ago and has since radically reshaped the ensemble’s DNA. Conversation with Serge Vuille:
Gabrielle Weber Contrechamps performs in Geneva’s Victoria Hall, opens the Biennale Musica Venezia as well as Sonic Matter Zurich festivals or simply invites you – without giving a concert – to a vinyl and neo.mx3.ch release listening weekend in Geneva. The different events are characteristic of the new direction of this long-established ensemble under the direction of Serge Vuille.
“Contrechamps seeks balance between different musical practices,” Vuille explains. On one hand, there are concerts with instrumental music for large ensembles, often linked to composers and Switzerland’s French-speaking young music scene; on the other hand, there are projects in connection with other disciplines and musical genres, in combination with visual and performative music, electronics, pop or jazz. Vuille is always interested in very special listening experiences.
The first part was represented at the beginning of the season by a concert to mark the 65th birthday of Geneva composer Michael Jarrell, with a “traditional”, conducted concert for large ensembles in Victoria Hall. Contrechamps commissioned seven new short pieces from its students. “We are thereby supporting and promoting the regional creative scene, which is an important objective for us,” says Vuille.
At the end of 2022, a tribute to Éric Gaudibert had taken place, Gaudibert was a composer from Lausanne who died ten years ago and had a significant influence on the scene. In addition to Gaudibert, 22 new pieces by former students had been performed, miniatures lasting only around one minute each, with very different, freely chosen instrumentation.
Éric Gaudibert, Skript, pour vibraphone et ensemble, Contrechamps, Bâtiment des Forces Motrices de Genève, Concours de Genève, 2009, in house-production SRG/SSR.
In a completely different context and setting, for the Biennale Musica Venezia opening, Contrechamps presented GLIA for instruments and electronics, a work by US electronic pioneer and sound artist Marianne Amacher, who died in 2009. Vuille is also interested in the aspect of special shared listening experiences in Amacher’s work: at the festival opening in a large, empty and darkened hall of Venice’s converted Arsenale shipyard, the large audience (including the author), surrounded by loudspeakers, followed extreme sound changes by wandering around and with the instrumentalists playing on a platform, as vibrating sound sculptures, or moving through the audience. “GLIA is almost a sound installation, part of it actually takes place in the listeners inner ear vibrations, not in the room and it is not based on a score, but on reports from those involved, which demands a high level of creativity from each individual performer,” says Vuille.
Back to the Gaudibert miniatures: they can now be found on one of the new vinyl records mentioned at the beginning and mark the start of the new Contrechamps/Speckled-Toshe vinyl series, together with the Lausanne label Speckled-Toshe. “The 22 composition commissions, each lasting one minute, were an immense amount of work and resulted in such diverse works that we wanted to conclude the homage with a lasting object of this new generation. The vinyl record is the most suitable format for this: there is hardly anything better in terms of recording and transfer quality”.
Daniel Zea, «Eric – Cara de Tigre» for ensemble and tape, one of the 22 miniatures on the new vinyl, Contrechamps / Speckled-Toshe 2023. The story: Gaudibert appeared to Zea in a dream shortly after his death as a laughing tiger: he cried for a long time afterwards between grief and joy.
For the vinyl launch, Contrechamps invited guests to a special listening experience: at les 6 toits, a trendy Geneva cultural centre on a former industrial wasteland, the public could listen to the new vinyl releases as well as its own favourite records in listening lounges during an entire weekend. The newly released Contrechamps audio archive on neo.mx3.ch was also celebrated with a vernissage and there were also live recordings and radio broadcasts on RTS as well as SRF2Kultur about listening and recording contemporary music.
Like vinyl, the SRG online platform stands for a way of listening and a care in production: “There is a link between the two, as they give contemporary music visibility and duration – through both meticulous new editions as well as maintenance of historical archives”.
The platform for Swiss contemporary music also features numerous rarely performed works with unusual instrumentation, such as Michael Jarrell’s Droben schmettert ein greller Stein from 2001 for double bass, ensemble and electronics.
Contrechamps recorded Jarrells piece 2005 in tthe Ansermet radio studio under the direction of George Benjamin, in-house production SRG/SSR.
Contrechamps is gradually opening up the extensive radio archive, going back to the earliest recordings of 1986. It is important that such platforms exist and are appreciated. Many of the pieces cannot be heard anywhere else: that is unique,” states Serge Vuille.
Feux by Caroline Charrière, is another piece to be discovered. Born in Fribourg in 1960, the composer Charrière died young, in 2018, and Contrechamps is committed to her work, as Vuille is also keen to give more visibility to the work of female composers and contribute to a better gender balance in contemporary music.
Feux for Flöte, Clarinette, Marimba and Strings by Caroline Charrière, under the dircetion of Kaziboni Vimbayi, performed by Contrechamps 2019 at Victoria Hall Geneva, in-house production SRG/SSR.
At the opening concert of this year’s Sonic matter festival in Zurich, Contrechamps will present new pieces by three female composers from the Middle East for small electronic ensemble. Vuille’s other passions come together here: “I’ve been very interested in the Middle Eastern scene for a long time. It is very lively in terms of creation, especially in regard of electronics”. The fact that Sonic Matter is collaborating with the guest festival Irtijal from Bejrut this year is an excellent opportunity for the first collaboration and certainly also for unique listening experiences. Gabrielle Weber
broadcasts SRF Kultur: Musik unserer Zeit, 18.10/21.10.23: Partage ton Vinyle! Ensemble Contrechamps Genève feiert das Hören, Redaktion Gabrielle Weber neoblog, 7.12.22: Communiquer au-delà de la musique, Autorin Gabrielle Weber neoblog, 19.6.2019: Ensemble Contrechamps Genève – Expérimentation et héritage, auteur Gabrielle Weber
broadcasts RTS: L’écho des pavanes, 21.10.23: Aux 6 toits, enregistrer la musique contemporaine, auteur: Benoît Perrier Musique d‘avenir, 30.10.23, Partage ton Vinyle, ta cassette ou ta bande Revox! auteur: Anne Gillot
Summer series on the Swiss Music Prize: No. 2 : Ensemble Nikel.
Vibrant and virtuoso interpretations of contemporary music form the unique DNA of Ensemble Nikel led by electric guitarist Yaron Deutsch (*1978). Nikel almost acts as a pop band and transcends the image of an often radically loud electro sound. Nikel is “radically contemporary”, according to the justification for the Swiss Music Prize 2023 awarded to the Basel ensemble. Gabrielle Weber met Yaron Deutsch, electric guitarist and founder of the ensemble.
Gabrielle Weber What does the prize mean for Nikel?
It is simply heartwarming and rewarding to be noticed and recognized for the work you do. Especially when there is no application involved, nothing prepared us for receiving the message from the committee, making it even more special. From the most pragmatic angle the award opens further doors for us and allows additional means to fulfil large scale plans we have for our future artistic growth.
An ‘alternative chamber music sound’ mixing electronic and instrumental sounds characterises the ensemble. Let’s talk about the beginning of Nikel: How did you find your way to contemporary classical music with the electric guitar – the combination is not obvious?
Playing the electric guitar, I was initially drawn to rock and jazz, but I felt like a ‘copy cat’ of an American culture that is not mine. Then, in 2005, I came across a piece by Luis Andriessen: ‘Hout’ (1991) for saxophone, electric guitar, percussion and piano. It felt like a ‘eureka’ moment. The piece mixes musical genres and elements in an uncomplicated way. I found a connection to my roots and the European classical music avant-garde felt like a sort of homecoming. It gave me a kind of direction in which soundscape I wanted to go.
With Hout we gave our first concert in Tel Aviv in 2006 and its instruments became the permanent line-up of Nikel. After a few changes, we have now been the regular line-up for about ten years: Brian Archinal on percussion, Antoine Françoise – piano, Patrick Stadler – saxophone and me on the electric guitar. We inspire each other.
Three points: First, I didn’t want a music related name, then it should feature ‘metal’ as is one of our timbres and lastly, it is reminiscent of Israeli artist Lea Nikel and her abstract colour-intensive works. She was active in Paris and New York in the sixties and seventies and died in Tel Aviv in 2005.
It’s like water drops slowly gathering into an organism.
How come you settled in Switzerland?
The fact that three out of four members live in Switzerland has been decisive. I have always been a ‘missionary’ of non-nation related music-making and ensembles without national nor local definition: for me it’s all about working with the musicians I’m most interested in, who inspire me, no matter where they live. That’s how I got to Patrick Stadler in Basel, for instance. But our vision is international. It’s like water drops slowly gathering into an organism.
Starting from an invitation for a concert we get together. Our task as artists is to be fascinating, interesting and also good enough to create a demand. It’s about passion: as long as we are passionate, we exist as a group.
Your first performance in Donaueschingen in 2012 was legendary – this vibrant energy and raging virtuosity, for example in the premiere of Michael Wertmüller’s piece “Skip a beat”, is a lasting memory for me: How did the invitation come about?
In 2010 we performed at the Darmstadt Summer Courses. The new artistic director at the time was Thomas Schäfer and he wanted to present new voices in his first edition, so he invited us and our performance had a great echo. Shortly after, Armin Köhler, Donaueschingen’s artistic director, called and invited us to the festival two years later.
Michael Wertmüller, Skip a beat, Ensemble Nikel, world creation Donaueschinger Musiktage 2012
What did this performance do for Nikel?
Performing in front of a large audience with international resonance was one thing: a career ‘boost’: the familiarity with the international scene was very important for our growth. But Donaueschingen also enabled us to play four world premieres by four important composers who wrote especially for us and our instrumentation. We wouldn’t have had the financial means to commission such pieces ourselves. We have played these completely different pieces all over the world ever since. This mechanism continues by the way: when the festivals invite us, they commission pieces for us which we then keep in our repertoire. We always get involved in the selection process and suggest composers we are enthusiastic about and this enthusiasm is tangible during our performances.
Our memory tends to remember extremes
Nikel’s performances are known for an often radically loud electronic sound…
First of all, I have to reject this ‘loud’ ensemble definition as we also play many subtle pieces, quiet, tactile music. Probably our virtuoso quality leads to the impression: “the musicians can make walls shake…. “ (laughs…)
Masculine power, is not our thing. Our memory tends to remember extremes. But so much happens outside the extremes, in fact most…
We are like an ‘electrified string quartet’, an organism that works very well together and whose sound blends very well. We are able to finetune and find balance between loud and soft.
In 2017, Nikel released a comprehensive CD for the ensemble’s 10th anniversary – do the chosen pieces reflect the characteristic of the specific “Nikel sound”?
Quite hard to say, especially since the first decade was very formative so from a bird’s eye view the collection and curation of the pieces summarises our characteristics but once zooming in you notice that each work, though capturing predominant qualities of the group, still keeps our artistic character on the elusive end.
Stefan Prins, Fremdkörper 2, Ensemble Nikel 2010 (Decennial-Box).
You just got back from the Darmstadt Ferienkurse where you performed new pieces by Jennifer Walshe and Matthew Shlomowitz: what was the atmosphere like and how did it feel to be back at one of Nikel’s first important performance venues?
Darmstadt was fantastic: it was our fourth visit there. We played a piece we feel very comfortable with, both artistically and personally: an extraordinary collaboration of over two years with Matthew & Jennifer, who also accompanied us on stage. With two sold-out shows and a very positive review in the New York Times, it was a perfect premiere for the project.
Minor characters, Matthew Shlomowitz / Jennifer Walshe, Ensemble Nikel, world creation Ferienkurse Neue Musik Darmstadt 2022.
What’s next?
We have a new album (Radio Works) coming up with pieces commissioned and recorded by various European radio stations during the pandemic, including the Shlomowitz/Walshe piece followed by a world premiere of a four-piece cycle by composer Sarah Nemtsov for nikel and orchestra, due in Cologne and Essen with the WDR Symphony Orchestra. Our new season in Switzerland will begin in January 2024 with a world premiere by John Menoud. Gabrielle Weber
Sarah Nemtsov, Tikkun pour orchestre, part 1 of the tetralogy, Ensemble Nikel, Camerata Ataremac, Ensemble Vertigo, conductor: Peter Rundel, Festival Les amplitudes 2022, SRG/SSR in-house production.
Schweizer Musikpreise 2023: Grand Prix Musik: Erik Truffaz
Musikpreise:
Katharina Rosenberger, Ensemble Nikel, Carlo Balmelli, Mario Batkovic, Lucia Cadotsch, Sonja Moonear, Saadet Türköz
Spezialpreise:
Helvetiarockt, Kunstraum Walcheturm, Pronto
broadcasts SRF Kultur: SRF Kultur online, 11.5.23: Trompeter Erik Truffaz erhält den Grand Prix Musik, Redaktion Jodok Hess.
Musikmagazin, 22.7.23, Carlo Balmelli: Ein Leben für die Blasmusik, Redaktion Annelis Berger, Musiktalk mit Carlo Balmelli (ab Min 9:40).
Musikmagazin, 17.6.23, Inspirationen mit offenem Ende: Die Vokalkünstlerin Saadet Türköz, Redaktion Florian Hauser, Musiktalk mit Saadet Türköz (ab Min 8:38).
Musikmagazin, 13.5.23, Schweizer Musikpreise 2023, Redaktion Florian Hauser, Musiktalk mit Katharina Rosenberger (ab Min 4:55)
Enno Poppe @Lucerne Festival 2023 – A portrait by Annelis Berger
Enno Poppe is considered one of the most original composers of our time. The 55-year-old composer’s music is highly complex and yet extremely attractive to the ears and often as exciting as a thriller. Enno Poppe is this year’s composer-in-residence at the Lucerne Festival. He’ll present his work Fett, among others, as well as the orchestral piece Prozession.
Annelis Berger
He is a city person through and through: “Life in the countryside would be too complicated for me. I really like living in the city, where I can buy a litre of milk at any time without having to think much. This doesn’t mean that I don’t like to climb a mountain or jump into a lake sometimes.” Unfortunately, he won’t have time for that in Lucerne: “No way, I know that from the last time I worked with the Academy. I look after some 100 young people, all greedy and hungry for knowledge; they want to work from morning to night and experience things, so no time for climbing mountains”.
Poppe studied composition and conducting in Berlin, still lives in the German capital and works throughout Europe with the most important contemporary music ensembles. I met him in Zurich, where he has just rehearsed with the Collegium Novum ensemble. A midsummer late afternoon, Poppe could just have a beer before the interview. We first talk about what distinguishes his music.
“I like intense and expressive music, I like to take the listeners with me. But I have to look for a new form of expressivity, expressivity cannot only be claimed, nor can it be imposed or sentimental. I cannot borrow the expressivity of a Bruckner symphony, I have to find one that has something to do with today and with the means available today. It is not simply a search for new sounds, but a search for a new expressivity. That’s something that constantly occupies me.”
The piece Procession is an example of this. “The work is actually a single process of growth,” says Poppe. “It begins with single notes, from which melodies emerge, then chords, which accumulate into chorale-like passages and the piece continues to build up, becoming more and more intense. Formally, there are nine big waves of increase, the sixth being the biggest and then it slowly decreases again. Every single musician in the ensemble has a solo part here and then leads one part at a time until the next part comes with the next solo.”
An important source of inspiration for this work was the Catholic procession “Semana Santa” in Seville, which takes place every year during Easter. “They run through the city for seven days, 24 hours at a stretch with brass bands and drums, the Basel Fasnacht is a doddle compared to that. This Spanish processional music has a deep connection with the piece, without me quoting it directly.”
Prozession is a work that develops a pull during the listening process, as it really becomes denser and denser and one can hardly escape it. The work also conveys the feeling of tenacity: there’s no way of evading this music, its expressivity is very direct.
Enno Popp finds a compositional means for expressivity in glissandos and vibratos, which is beautifully demonstrated in Wald from 2010 for four string quartets. For many years, Enno Poppe has been working with the “moving” tone, inspired, among other things, by the Asian tradition of tones that are always in motion, i.e. one never hears the same tone twice, the musician intones it differently each time. Enno Poppe has often worked with this. “In Wald, every note is constantly sliding, moving up and down, back and forth. At the most varied speeds. That, in turn, is immensely expressive, because every single tone becomes animated.”
Enno Poppe also deals with the “moving” sound in the ensemble work Scherben, in the recording with the Collegium Novum Zürich, conductor: Enno Poppe, 2008, in-house production SRG/SSR.
Enno Poppe talks easily about his music. It is rare to find composers who do this in such an uninhibited and relaxed way. That makes a meeting with him very pleasant.
Of course I would also like to talk with him about the work Fett, one of the highlights at Lucerne Festival, conducted by Susanna Mälkki in the great KKL hall: “The piece IS indeed fat! Otherwise it shouldn’t be called that,” he says with a smile. In this composition, Poppe completely dispenses with melodies and themes and everything else that classically characterises symphonies. He worked with Chord clusters – at first only four-note chords that get bigger and bigger. “Towards the end we have 40-50-note chords! And not just octaves, but microtonal agglomerations.”
Enno Poppe, Fett (2018/19): Helsinki Philharmonic Orchestra, conductor Susanne Mälkki, World premiere 10.5.2019, Helsinki Music Center
Finally, the conversation turns to the composer’s working method. He always enjoys both composing and conducting. Otherwise he wouldn’t do it at all. Sometimes, when opening a door to a new tonal world for a composition – like the microtonal agglomerations in Fett’s case – it is very easy for him because he quickly finds himself at ease in the new world. “Fett went incredibly fast. I was really into it. It was untouched terrain, which always invigorates me, I can then sometimes work very quickly. For Fett it took me about ten weeks, it’s actually a mystery to me why it went so quickly, because there are an incredible number of notes in this work.” There is a sense of lightness – and that is precisely what distinguishes Enno Poppe’s music: it is complex and multi-layered, but never bulky. This takes the listener on a journey through a world that never stands still. Annelis Berger
Finisterre – Festival Neue Musik Rümlingen / La Via Lattea 28.7.-1.8.23
The Neue-Musik Festival Rümlingen, located near Basel, with its Ticino counterpart la Via Lattea and Associazione Olocene of the Onsernone Valley jointly invite you to a special sound hiking festival in Ticino. Under the motto Finisterre, from 28 July to 1 August, you can set out along symbolic places searching for the end of the old world and a new and better one: on Monte Verità, along the old via delle Vose in Onsernone Valley and on the Brissago Islands.
Gabrielle Weber
Following the footsteps of past world-changers through music and art in the countryside is what this joint festival invites you to do over four days. Enough time to discover alternative lifestyles based on the social utopias of the Monte Verità commune, close to nature and the body. Featuring numerous international artists such as Isabel Mundry, Carola Baukholt, Jürg Kienberger, Mario Pagliarani or New York composer Du Yun or Norwegian Trond Reinholdtsen in new works related to concrete places, visions and visionaries.
Starting point is the Monte Verità, a hill above Ascona that became a magical place for people fleeing civilisation and seeking meaning at the beginning of the 20th century. On the first day of the festival, the hill will be the setting for new works and installations by Manos Tsangaris, Trond Reinholdtsen and Lukas Berchtold.
The “Mountain of Truth” was purchased in 1900 by the son of a Belgian industrialist and his partner, the Munich pianist and music teacher Ida Hofmann. On the piece of land, initially 1.5 hectares in size, they realised their dream of a life close to nature in classless freedom, away from industrialisation, capitalism and materialism. Numerous well-known writers, artists, intellectuals and anarchists from all over Europe and overseas joined them and at a later moment also emigrants from the world wars. In 1913, for example the Munich choreographer Rudolf Laban, who opened his pioneering dance school for expressive dance. Light, air, water and sun were the elixir for a soul-mind-body unity, lived in eurythmy, feminism, gardening and sunbathing in airy garments or nude.
The Swiss curator Harald Szeemann and former director of the Kassel’s documenta5 back in 1972, also became fascinated by Ticino and made it his adopted home from the 1970s until his death in 2005. He described the hill as “the place where our foreheads touch the sky”, collecting everything he could find on it for his 1978 exhibition “Monte verità – le mammelle della verità / the breasts of truth”, which toured internationally, in Zurich, Berlin, Munich and Vienna, making the place famous. The original exhibition, reopened in 2017, will be accessible during the festival. The new works on the mountain borrow from the commune’s expressive dance, love of nature and worship of Wagner.
On the following days, we will follow in the footsteps of other historical truth-seekers from Ticino.
La Via Lattea (“Milky Way”), the Ticino cooperative festival, sets out on the trail of St. Brendan. According to medieval legend, the Irish monk sought earthly paradise on a legendary island on an adventurous journey with other friars. The festival with the resonant name combines theatre with the means of music and vice versa.
It is based in Mendrisiotto in the Sottoceneri, south of Mount Ceneri and usually brings art and sound to historical-cultural places around and on the lake of Lugano.
La Via Lattea 10, Argonauti 2013, Trailer
This year and for the first time, it will be visiting Locarno and playing on lake Maggiore. Starting with a concert spectacle in Muralto’s Romanesque Chiesa di San Vittore, through a theatrical walk through the alleys of Muralto, it will undertake Brendan’s boat route, accompanied by music, ending with nightly meditative concerts under the open sky on the Brissago Islands.
Among other works, the world premiere of Composizione per l’Isola di San Pancrazio, for various objects and 16 players by Mario Pagliarani – composer and artistic director of La Via Lattea – will be presented.
Mario Pagliarani, Debussy – Le jet d’eau, UA Lugano 2009, in-house production SRG/SSR
The valleys around Locarno were popular with hyppie as retreat communities from the sixties onwards. In the Onsernone Valley, on the old Via delle Vose, visitors encounter historical figures in new guises and historical places are revived. Isabel Mundry, for example, chose the culturally and historically charged chapel of the Oratorio Giovanni Nepumoceno in Niva to present her new work ‘Niva-Engramme’, based on a motet by Claudio Monteverdi, which she translates for solo viola in dialogue with the site itself. Mundry’s choice fell on the chapel and its inscription as a fascinating place where a visionary brought together different cultures and religions in the remote Ticino valley. A vision that seems more contemporary to her than Monte Verità’s escape from civilisation, which she finds – albeit – appealing, as Isabel Mundry explains in her neoblog interview. Gabrielle Weber
Composing as a form of listening: Composer Isabel Mundry, who lives and teaches in Zurich and Munich, chose the culturally and historically charged chapel of the Oratorio Giovanni Nepumoceno in Niva to present her new work Niva-Engramme, based on a motet by Claudio Monteverdi. Isabel Mundry discusses her relationship to nature, culture and drop-out communities as well as utopias with Gabrielle Weber. Audio interview exclusively for neo.mx3.ch / Monday, 17.7.23. in-house production SRG/SSR; Music: Sound archeologies, Trio Catch, 2018.
The Swiss Music Prizes will be awarded for the tenth time in 2023: in addition to the main prize, won by jazz trumpeter Erik Truffaz, another 10 prizes and special prizes will be awarded during Musikfestival Bern on September 8. Neoblog portrays some of the contemporary music related prize winners, with Katharina Rosenberger, composer, professor of composition in Lübeck and co-director of the Zurich festival for contemporary music Sonic Matter, starting the series. Katharina Rosenberger works with cross-media combinations between music, text and image and usually also involves the audience in the performance processes. She is all about communication, dialogue and participation in contemporary music. An interview by Florian Hauser. An interview by Florian Hauser.
Florian Hauser To receive one of the prestigious Swiss music prizes is something special and testifies to how highly your work is appreciated. What about the appreciation of your work in everyday life? You have to do what you have and want to, which is not necessarily compatible with the masses. You don’t make blockbuster films… How does your audience react to your art?
I am always very touched when people approach me and react to my music. It’s people I don’t know or people who are not insiders, i.e. not musicians themselves. They often react very positively – mainly because they discovered something new. When they get involved with this new, unknown thing and are positively surprised, it makes me very happy. Actually, these are the ideal fans who come with an open mind and just want to listen… Of course, there are also moments when the audience reacts very ambivalently. From: ‘For God’s sake, what kind of piece was that!’ to: ‘Wow, that’s the greatest thing I’ve heard in a long time’.
Communication with the audience is very important to you per se. You interact with people, also involving the public in performance processes. Why?
Let me answer with an example: I called a duet (within a video opera that premiered at the Theaterspektakel Zurich) La Chasse. Two singers face each other at a certain distance. The audience sees them only in profile. And then the voices begin to chase each other. At first only with sounds like wah, wah, wah! Very abstract, very reduced. There is no melody and it’s not so easy to listen to. But when people from the audience came up to me and talked about the experience of how powerful these sounds were in the space, how much the bodies became part of the structure of the music, a light went on: The connections between sound and space, performers and audience are incredibly important. It is not primarily about the music itself, I mean, the self-sufficiency of the music, but it is really about dialogue and exchange with the audience as well as the environment.
Katharina Rosenberger, La Chasse von Katharina Rosenberger, instrumental-version by Landmann-/Stadler-Saxofonduo, recorded NYC 2018.
Can you tell us about another example?
The Urban morphology project, a walk-in concert installation that has music-theatrical elements and is also participatory. The audience is invited to actively participate. It’s about urban change: what happens, for example, when luxurious new buildings cause neighbourhoods we grew up in to disappear? When the place I feel I belong to suddenly no longer exists? In other words, places where there is room for so many memories: When that is wiped away, what happens to us? What happens when the architectural, social, sonic components structures we orient ourselves by are gone?
The public could decide how to move. Whether visiting a performance island first or rather watch a video, attend a normal concert situation with a very focused listening or ride a bicycle in an installation to generate electricity and light.
This way, the public could also have a say in how to put the different pieces of information together. In projects like this, I always notice how important the cross-media connections are between text and music, but also image and music, spaces, bodies. How spaces open up for the audience, where they can connect to situations related with their everyday lives. This always gives rise to new questions: how do I hear music, how is music performed? And new insights emerge, which is fascinating.
You are very communicative…
Yes, of course. I also really like to be in contact with the musicians I work with for longer periods of time.
There are composers and colleagues of yours, for whom it is perfectly sufficient to sit at a desk to compose and design structures. That was never an option for you?
Sure, one doesn’t exclude the other, does it? Of course, there are phases when I am extremely isolated. But when I deal with cities, I want to walk through the streets, get to know the people. To explore the core, the content of a project. For example, in the installation quartet – bodies in performance, where I only filmed the back muscles of four musicians. You can imagine that depending on the musical instrument you play, the many, many years of practising shape the back muscles quite differently. Each performance had its own image and only the back that was playing appeared. That was a completely new way for the audience to experience performance, by seeing sound through the muscles.
In Katharina Rosenberger’s sound and video installation The journey, the singers were also filmed from unusually close perspectives, Neue Vokalsolisten Stuttgart, directed by Lutger Engels 2020
In any case, it’s a long way to the result, a common path. But how do you come up with such ideas? You walk through the world with your aesthetic antennas wide open, and bang, a theme, a topic jumps out at you?
My common thread is the human being, be it the performer with his or her body, be it the audience with their ears, eyes and bodies. And what is it about? What is actually touching us? That is the question. What is the significance of music, even in times of crisis, or of reorientation? I’m not claiming that I as an artist present this in a groundbreaking way in my work, but it’s about questioning and exploring new sonic, pictorial situations. It’s about dealing with the moment. It’s not a must. An audience never has to do something mandatory, but I want to open the doors in order to make it possible. Florian Hauser
Schweizer Musikpreise 2023: Grand Prix Musik: Erik Truffaz
Swiss Music Prizes:
Katharina Rosenberger, Ensemble Nikel, Carlo Balmelli, Mario Batkovic, Lucia Cadotsch, Sonja Moonear, Saadet Türköz
Spezialpreise:
Helvetiarockt, Kunstraum Walcheturm, Pronto
broadcasts SRF Kultur: Musikmagazin, 13.5.23, Schweizer Musikpreise 2023, Redaktion Florian Hauser, Café mit Katharina Rosenberger (ab Min 4:55)
SRF Kultur online, 11.5.23: Trompeter Erik Truffaz erhält den Grand Prix Musik, Redaktion Jodok Hess:
