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Cathy Van Eck: The transcendent role of a concert piece

Cathy Van Eck, composer and media artist, shapes the Swiss and international contemporary music scene with her subtle and highly aesthetic sound performances. Her piece In the Woods of Golden Resonances for solo percussion played a special role within a dedicated concert evening. A portrait of Alexandre Babel.

Alexandre Babel
The theme sounds like an invitation: Spanish percussionist Miguel Angel Garcia Martin curated a concert evening entitled Aufbau/Abbau (set-up / Dismatle) in the friendly takeover series at Basel’s Gare du Nord, entirely dedicated to solo percussion. Six world premieres to shed light on the logistical reality of professional percussionists. After all, setting up and dismantling for a concert often takes up almost as much time and significance as the music itself. Even if the theme of the evening seems somewhat vague at first glance, it served as starting point for a multifaceted question that all participants made their own by creating a new work. Cathy Van Eck’s In the Woods of Golden Resonances is a unifying example.

 

Portrait Cathy van Eck zVg. Cathy van Eck.

 

In the Woods of Golden Resonances features drummer Miguel Angel Garcia Martin centre stage, in relative darkness with a red headlamp, so that the audience only recognises his darkened silhouette. With slow and controlled movements, he walks to a cymbal lying on the floor in a corner of the stage, lifts it and then holds it horizontally at mouth height. A clear, amplified breath sound shows that the performer is wearing a microphone and blowing on the instrument as if trying to clear the dust from it. This sound is obviously processed electronically and the playback through the speakers makes up the majority of the sound environment. “The blowing increases the ‘volume’ of the two speakers in the room and creates an acoustic feedback. The whole piece consists of such feedback sounds, as if Miguel were ‘beating’ the room,” says Cathy van Eck.

He then walks to a metal stand on which he places his instrument. This simple but carefully choreographed action is repeated several times with other cymbals hidden in the room, allowing the audience to observe the step-by-step and ritualised set-up of a percussion set on stage.

In Van Eck’s works, the musician’s body often takes centre stage. Dutch-born Van Eck completed her masters degree at Leiden University. Among other things, she publishes and researches regarding possible connections between gestures, sensors and sounds and teaches at the Sound Arts Department of Bern’s University of Arts. “In In the Woods of Golden Resonances there is also a fairly strong relationship between the performer’s movements and his material. His movements are not meant as a gesture of ‘pointing outwards’, with the meaning ‘I control the sound’, but rather as a careful searching and perceiving. That’s why Miguel has a different posture on stage in this piece than in the other pieces of the evening,” says van Eck.

 

Cathy van Eck, In the Woods of Golden Resonances, Miguel Angel Garcia Martin, world premiere gare du Nord Basel, 9.4.2024.

The strength of In the Woods of Golden Resonances lies in its repetitive, simple formal structure. The piece serves to move from state A to state B and ends as soon as the installation is completed. Cathy Van Eck’s score does not stipulate that the cymbals are to be played once they have been set up. Instead, they serve as a structure for the next piece in the programme, Cymbals by Barblina Meierhans. Van Eck’s piece thus not only translates the theme of the concert exactly, but also establishes a concrete connection to the evening’s next element.

The installation and stage change-over, form the actual piece and while one normally tries to reduce the duration and significance of the reconstruction in order to ensure the musical flow, In the Woods of Golden Resonances does exactly the opposite: it uses this intermediate space between two states for a moment of introspection into the musician’s private sphere. Van Eck’s aesthetic choices emphasise this through the dreamy atmosphere created by the semi-darkness or the sensual impression left by the amplification of the musician’s breathing sounds.

The work poetically evokes the technical reality of the percussionist and his instruments and at the same time connects it with the environment. The spatial dimension of the concert hall is also emphasised. Cathy van Eck explains: “The sounds arise from an interplay between Miguel’s exact position in the room, the cymbals and the loudspeakers, and then of course the room acoustics.”

However, Van Eck goes one step further, as she invites the audience to feel part of the process. Sound effects such as the electronic processing at high volume create an immersive impression and the drummer’s actual ‘ballet’ gives the audience the illusion of beeing part of the process. Finally, she ‘neutralises’ the drummer’s figure through the lighting effect to a simple silhouette that everyone in the audience can identify with. Van Eck explains: “In this case, the lighting was a decision made by Miguel, the drummer, who worked with me and the director. I can also imagine this piece in a brighter environment. For me, the way light is designed, very much depends on the space.”

In the Woods of Golden Resonances is part of a series of consecutive and differentiated works. Within the series, it subverts the usual expectations of a concert piece while respecting its primary code. The sound treatment is so interesting, that it can also be simply ‘listened’ to.

However, the role of the individual work or its creator is called into question in favour of a unity that creates a link between both elements. I ask myself whether the necessity of creation does not lie in the fact that it leads from one state to another?
Alexandre Babel

Alexandre Babel is from Geneva and lives in Berlin. He is a composer, percussionist, curator and publicist. This is his first contirbution to the neoblog and its team.

neo-profiles :
Cathy van Eck, Gare du Nord, Alexandre Babel, Barblina Meierhans

broadcasts SRF Kultur:
Musik unserer Zeit, 29.01.2014: Grünes Rauschen – Klangkunst mit Cathy van Eck, editor Cécile Olshausen.
Onlinetext, 28.01.2014: Bei Cathy van Eck klingt Gewöhnliches ungewöhnlich, author Cécile Olshausen.
Musik unserer Zeit, 16.6.2021: Alexandre Babel: Perkussionist, Komponist, Kurator, editor Gabrielle Weber.
neoblog, 10.09.2021: un projet est avant tout une rencontre.., author Gabrielle Weber.

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Sabina Meyer – a voice for Scelsi and songs

The soprano and composer Sabina Meyer has found an inspiring musical base in Rome, where she can express her versatility. She combines improvisation with jazz, contemporary music, baroque music and electronics. Meyer also writes her own songs for the duo Cry Baby, in which she plays electric bass.
A portrait by Friederike Kenneweg.

 

Sabina Meyer und Alberto Popolla, beide mit E-Bass auf einem Bandfoto als Duo Cry Baby. © Giulio Napolitano
Sabina Meyer and Alberto Popolla form the duo ‘Cry Baby’ © Giulio Napolitano

 

Friederike Kenneweg
Three musicians play a concert in Rome, a singer and two clarinettists. It’s actually a free improvisation concert, but then the three of them play a song written by the singer. And it clicks.
“That really was the best moment of the concert,” is how Sabina Meyer describes the moment when she and clarinettist Alberto Popolla realised that they wanted to continue working on Meyer’s songs together. As the duo Cry Baby, they have now had several successful performances and recorded their first songs. The condensed product of Sabina Meyer’s career.

 

Off to Italy

“I always knew that I didn’t want to stay in Zurich,” says Sabina Meyer. For the daughter of an Italian mother, the path to the south was an obvious one, so she went to Bologna to study anthropology and musicology. The city in northern Italy offered the experimental young artist ideal conditions. “In the 1990s, Bologna was very open and culturally extremely diverse,” she recalls. Under these favourable conditions, Sabina Meyer began to work as an actress, singer and musician alongside her studies. With the band Antenata, she already started setting works by poets such as Ingeborg Bachmann, Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton and Meret Oppenheim to music.

 

Contemporary music in Rome

Her growing interest in contemporary music eventually led her to Rome, centre of the Italian musical avant-garde at the time. There she met Michiko Hirayama (1923-2018), a Japanese singer who had worked closely with the Italian composer Giacinto Scelsi (1905-1988). “You could say that Scelsi dedicated his vocal work to her and was inspired by her.” Sabina Meyer started taking lessons with Michiko Hirayama and immersing herself more and more in Scelsi’s work.

 

Personally mediated: Hô 1 by Giacinto Scelsi

The collaboration with her teacher on the score of Hô 1 by Giacinto Scelsi was particularly formative.

“The interesting thing about Scelsi’s music is that the score is very reduced, similar to the lead sheets in jazz. How exactly the music is to be interpreted can only be revealed through the personal mediation of a person like Michiko,” says Meyer.

“The piece actually only consists of an F, one in the top octave and one in the centre. But that’s not all. There are also quarter notes, three-quarter notes, a little above and a little above the F. The score also features little signs, but they are not explained. You first have to find out exactly what kind of vibrato this indicates and where you should use a messa di voce.”
The type of vocal colouring cannot be determined from the score alone either.
“You need a mix between a classical voice and the naturalness of an untrained voice. It’s very important for this music that it does not sound purely academic.””

 


Hô 1 by Giacinto Scelsi, sung by Sabina Meyer.

 

Looking back to the present day: baroque music and electronics

Sabina Meyer is not only attracted to contemporary music, she is also fond of early music. Her repertoire includes works by John Dowland, Claudio Monteverdi and Barbara Strozzi. In her project “XANTO. Ninfa in Lamento”, she combined baroque music works with video and electronics.

 

Szenenfoto aus XANTO, Ninfa in lamento. Zwei Leinwände hintereinander, darauf das Gesicht der Sängerin Sabina Meyer mit singend geöffnetem Mund. © Folkert Uhde
Scene photo from ‘XANTO, Ninfa in lamento’ by Sabina Meyer from 2016. © Folkert Uhde

 

The path to her own songs

Sabina Meyer’s experiences with the music of Giacinto Scelsi have characterised her and her work to this day. For example, the songs Under cover of night with the duo Cry Baby.

 


In the song Run, Sabina Meyer addresses the dangers of unconditional love.

Sabina Meyer composes the songs for the duo, writes the lyrics and plays electric bass. The musical line-up she has found for her songs is rather unusual.
“In addition to the electric bass, which I play myself, there is also a second electric bass and a bass clarinet. So the mood is very dark, nocturnal, and therefore fitting for the title Under cover of night. Without my experiences with Giacinto Scelsi and baroque music, I wouldn’t have been able to write such songs in this way.”

Friederike Kenneweg

 

Cry Baby, Giacinto Scelsi, Alberto Popolla, Michiko Hirayama

neo-profile:
Sabina Meyer

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World premiere in 100 years?

Music of the future – escaping the Zeitgeist this is the title of a project to celebrate SUISA’s 100th birthday. 40 Swiss musicians were asked to write down their ideas regarding music that will be premiered in a hundred years’ time: A greeting from the present for the year 2123 to hopefully mark SUISA’s 200th birthday. The project was presented at the Yehudi Menuhin Forum in Bern on 16 April 2024. Bettina Mittelstrass spoke to the musicians involved.

 

The composition by HYPER DUO is titled with the number of seconds from now until 2123—3,406,699,560. Here is a roto of HYPER DUO at a Vinylséance on November 21, 2020 © 2020 Pablo Fernandez.

 

Bettina Mittelstrass
Helena Winkelmann, the HyperDuo, Joke Lanz, Martina Berther, Patrick Frank, Annette Schmucki, Fritz Hauser and Nik Bärtsch – these are just seven of a total of 40 Swiss musicians whose music of the future ended up in an archive box in April 2024 without ever being heard. Hermetically sealed, this archive will be supervised by the Swiss National Sound Archives in Lugano for 100 years and displayed in the entrance area of the Città della Musica. The archive will hopefully not be reopened until 2123, when the music will be awakened from its slumber and played for an audience not even born yet.

Leo Hofmann describes his music of the futur in a graphically designed text.

How will Switzerland sound in 100 years?

How will Switzerland sound in 100 years? An initial answer could be lying dormant in the archive box. The answers were not easily found by the 40 respondents. Scepticism prevailed. What instruments will be available in 100 years’ time? Will there still be western musical notation? Wooden instruments? Or will climate change have killed off the trees? Against the backdrop of the planet’s dwindling resources, it is impossible to know whether we will “ultimately have to burn violins and boil strings so as not to freeze or starve to death”, says percussionist Fritz Hauser.

He therefore set his composition in Morse code – in the hope that these archaic signs will inspire people of the future to make rhythmic music, whatever the instrumentation.

 

Fritz Hauser transcribes his music of the future entirely in Morse code. Here is his Schraffur for gong and orchestra, Basel Sinfonietta 2010, an SRG/SSR in house- production.

 

Music as ambassador for interplay?

Despite all the scepticism about what music will mean or enable in 100 years’ time – it will probably retain two social functions, says Swiss-Dutch composer and violinist Helena Winkelmann: acting as ambassador for interplay and mediator as well as integrator of good energy. Another thing is likely to persist in human societies, namely “that people will continue to have problems living together in the future.”

Helena Winkelmann has therefore placed the instructions for a ‘music council’ of the future in the archive box. It is the musical version of a thousand-year-old concept, the “Council of Chiefs” of indigenous American societies. In a circle, musicians take on different functions – both musically and socially. There is – for example – a questioning voice, an inventive voice, a preserving voice, a warning voice, a narrative voice and a developing voice. “That’s also the magic of this whole circle, in the sense that it is the exchange of perspectives that really helps us move forward.”

 


Helena Winkelmann contributes to the archive box with instructions for a ‘Music Council of the Future‘. In Geisterlieder, a cycle based on poems in 18 European original languages accompanied by various instrumental groups, Helena Winkelmann also explores the overcoming of temporal and regional boundaries. World premiere on August 5, 2023, at the Church of Ernen, an SRG/SSR in house- production.

 

A spaceship full of perspectives and criticism of the present

“This little spaceship basically contains a cross-section of current Swiss music creation,” is how ethnomusicologist and curator Johannes Rühl, inventor of the project, describes it. New music, electronic music, jazz, pop and folk music are represented among the 40 composition proposals, as well as sound installations and crazy ideas such as music with mushrooms, whose amino acids can already be converted into sounds today. Another proposal takes the sound of melting glaciers and transports it in the form of DNA into a future in which there will presumably no longer be eternal ice in the Swiss Alps.The sound of melting glaciers transported into the future in the form of DNA.

 

The sound of melting glaciers is transported by Pablo Diserens into the future in listening to glacial thaw in the form of DNA. © Clément Coudeyre.

 

Most of the proposals submitted for the archive box were characterised by a sceptical and socially critical zeitgeist, confirms Johannes Rühl. The attempt to escape the zeitgeist was understandably bound to fail. “We obviously cannot get out of the now. You also get the feeling that there is a dynamic in development these days which did not exist in the past.” Is that true? We won’t be around in 2123 to find out. May those after us play “our” future music or not.
Bettina Mittelstrass

 

Zukunftsmusik – dem Zeitgeist entkommen: 100 Jahre SUISA. The original idea came from Johannes Rühl, ethnologist and curator of music programmes.
Città della Musica 

broadcasts SRF Kultur:
Zukunftsmusik, Passage, 12.4.2014: Redaktorin Bettina Mittelstrass

neoprofiles:
Helena Winkelman, HYPER DUO, Joke Lanz, Martina Berther, Patrick Frank, Annette Schmucki, Fritz Hauser, Leo Hofmann, Nik Bärtsch, u.a.

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Composing for string quartet with the Arditti Quartet

Gabrielle Weber: workshop with Arditti Quartet at ZHdK

The London-based Arditti Quartet is synonymous with contemporary music for string quartet. Since 1974, the ensemble led by violinist Irvine Arditti, dedicates itself entirely to the contemporary repertoire, both through concerts and recordings as well as in its work with young composers. At the end of February, during a stop on the quartet’s 50th anniversary concert tour, I accompanied the four musicians to a public workshop at the Zurich University of the Arts (ZHdK).

 

Das Arditti Quartett at the Lecture Performance with Isabel Mundry at ZHdK, 28.2.2024 Foto zVg. ZHdK

 

Gabrielle Weber
In a conversation on the evening before the workshop, after a lecture performance, Irvine Arditti tells me that “a piece is good when it fills time and space well’. The lively star violinist with the characteristic grey mop of curls is always somewhat ambiguous and humorous. The music has to ‘work’, regardless of style or type. He is very open regarding quality criteria: ‘We have played many good and many bad pieces. New pieces must first be given the chance to be played. Only then does it become apparent if they are good or bad’.

 

‘A piece is good when it fills time and space well’

The Arditti Quartet offers precisely such opportunities. Irvine Arditti, first violinist and founder, Lucas Fels, cello, Ashot Sargsyan, second violin and Ralf Ehlers, viola, are curious about young musicians and promote them in a targeted manner. They teach enthusiastically, whether at international festivals such as the Darmstadt Summer Courses for New Music or at music academies such as the ZHdK.

At the lecture performance, they first explained the general challenges of notating and rehearsing new pieces for string quartet, using pieces by composers renowned for their complex compositional style, like Iannis Xenakis and Helmut Lachenmann, and which they had premiered together.


In a lecture performance, the Arditti Quartet exemplified the challenges of composing for string quartet using the piece ‘Tetras’ (1983) by Iannis Xenakis, SRG/SSR 2023.

 

Together with nine composition students, they rehearsed their new pieces for the final concert the following day. Almost all of them world premieres. Rehearsals take place publicly in the large concert hall.

Schmerzquartett is the title of Franziska Eva Wilhelm’s composition. Wilhelm comes from Munich and has been studying composition with Isabel Mundry in Zurich since autumn 2021. Born in 2003, she is one of the youngest participants in the workshop.

 

Portrait Franziska Eva Wilhelm © Franziska Eva Wilhelm

 

“Pain has a lot to do with friction in my opinion and the sound of string instruments is also created by a kind of friction,” says Wilhelm. “Pain is a difficult subject and I didn’t want to romanticise it. I’m interested in the perception of pain and how it can be embodied in music: rather through texture, than a story”.

 

Humour is a must

On one hand there’s concentration and work, but also a lot of laughter: At one point, the musicians lose their bearings in the score and Lucas Fels lightens things up with an episode: ‘New York, Carnegie Hall!’ was Sergei Rachmaninoff’s loud reply in the middle of a concert he was conducting when a musician asked where they were. Humour relieves tension and brings the composers together.

 


Schmerzquartett by Franziska Wilhelm is about the texture of pain, première by Arditti Quartet,  ZHdK, 1.3.2024.

“That’s all? How’s that?” asks Irvine Arditti at the end of the Schmerzquartett rehearsal, laughing once more. Wilhelm is satisfied, but would like to try out more, which is carried out without question.

Her conclusions after the rehearsal: “I have learnt a lot about specific notations. They leave nothing to chance and if there is something to be decided, the person who composed decides. As a composer, I have to know exactly what I want and be able to communicate it”.

 

Das Arditti Quartett at concert at the main hall of the ZHdK on March 1, 2024. Photo courtesy of ZHdK.

 

Translating notated ideas into sound as precisely as possible

In premières, the quartet always endeavours to translate the notated ideas as precisely as possible into sound. This applies just as much to big names as it does to young, yet unknown musicians, says Irvine Arditti. Several hundred string quartets have been dedicated to the ensemble over the past 50 years and the Arditti quartet has worked on most of them with the composers directly.

“I really want to play the piece the way you want it to sound,” he says again and again during rehearsals, for example to Andrzej Ojczenasz.

Ojczenasz clarifies any last-minute notation errors in advance. This is appreciated. For example, the cello should play an octave lower in the very first bar. “That’s a good start,” the musicians comment with a laugh.

His quartet Maris Stella is inspired by Gregorian chant. “The structure is based on the counterpoint of the chorale. I combine tradition with the present,” the composer explains.

 

Portrait Andrzej Ojczenasz zVg. Andrzej Ojczenasz

 

Ojczenasz comes from Poland. After studying at the Krysztof Penderecki Academy of Music in Krakow, he continued his education at the University of Louisville (USA) and is now completing a master’s degree in composition with Isabel Mundry.

 

Major notation errors may occur

Ashot Sargsyan uncovers a more serious notation error a little later: You have to write exactly what you aim to hear, he says. At the same time, you can feel that the musicians are convinced by the piece. The rehearsal atmosphere is trusting and Ojczenasz gladly accepts the correction.

 


Maris Stella by Andrzej Ojczenasz is based on Gregorian chant, recording of the première by Arditti Quartett, ZHdK, 1.3.2024.

 

Towards the end of the rehearsal, Irvine Arditti asks him as well if he liked it: “Yes, but…’”- He would also like to correct a few passages.

Ojczenaszs summarises his learning as follows: “Write it down precisely, then it will be played like that! And: always be honest with yourself and your message without wanting to portray someone else.”
Gabrielle Weber

The Arditti Quartet in concert at the main hall of the ZHdK on March 1, 2024. Photo courtesy of ZHdK.

 

At the final concert on March 1, 2024, in the main concert hall of the ZHdK, the following were heard:
Wojciech Chalpuka: Wohin jetzt? (UA)
Luis Escobar Cifuentes: Ewige Leben (UA)
Wenjie Hu: The Rift (UA)
Amir Liberson: Emptiness (UA)
Franziska Eva Wilhelm: Schmerzquartett (UA)
Nuño Fernández Ezquerra: Lienzo de Luz (2021)
Fabienne Jeannine Müller: Incertain (UA)
Pengyi Li: … Echo … (UA)
Andrzej Ojczenasz: Maris Stella (UA)
Isabel Mundry: Linien, Zeichnungen (2004)

broadcasts SRF Kultur:
Musik unserer Zeit, 3.4.&14.8.2024: Streichquartett heute, Das Arditti Quartett orund der Nachwuchs, editor Gabrielle Weber
Neue Musik im Konzert, 3.4.&14.8.2024: Das Arditti Quartett im Konzert mit jungen Komponierenden, editor Gabrielle Weber

neo-profiles:
Arditti Quartet, Isabel Mundry, Franziska Eva Wilhelm, Andrzej Ojczenasz, Wojciech Chalpuka, Luis Escobar Cifuentes, Wenjie Hu, Amir Liberson, Nuño Fernández Ezquerra, Fabienne Jeannine Müller, Pengyi Li

 

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The sound utopian Thomas Kessler

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.

 

Thomas Kessler, Basel 29.11.2018 ©Copyright: Thomas Kessler / Priska Ketterer

 

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.

 

Thomas Kessler and Saul Williams © Werner Schnetz

 

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

 

Thomas Kessler, Basel, 29.11.2018  © Thomas Kessler / Priska Ketterer

 

Saul Williams, Elektronisches Studio der Musik-Akademie Basel

 

features SRF Kultur:
Neue Musik im Konzert, Oratorium von Thomas Kessler und Lukas Bärfuss, 5.1.2022, editor Florian Hauser.
Musik unserer Zeit, My lady Soul I, 28.10.2020, editor Florian Hauser.
neoblog, 8.8.2019: „Ein Mischklang, den man noch nie gehört hat“: Thomas Kessler – composer in residence am Lucerne Festival, author Thomas Meyer

Neo-erofile:
Thomas Kessler

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Daniel Zea composes for cardboard boxes and avatars

The Colombian-Swiss composer Daniel Zea understands sound as a plastic material. In his work, he combines sounds, movement, electronics and video with digital setups. A portrait by Jaronas Scheurer.

Jaronas Scheurer
“I compose more from a designer as from as a composer’s point of view,” says Daniel Zea during our interview. “I’m interested in things like symmetry and asymmetry, ergonomics and balance and sound is a plastic material to me.” He also studied industrial design in Colombia before going on to study composition with Harold Vasquez-Castañeda in Bogotá. He then came to Geneva and finished his studies with Eric Gaudibert at the haute école de musique (HEM) and also studied at the Institute of Sonology in The Hague for two years before co-founding Ensemble Vortex and starting his teaching carreer in interactive design at Geneva’s HEM: Daniel Zea’s CV is therefore long and varied – industrial designer, composer, audio designer, media artist and programmer.

Daniel Zea as avatar in his piece Autorretrato. © Daniel Zea

Zea usually writes music for complex networks where performers, self-developed and conventional instruments, electronics, video projections and computer programmes are linked together. “When I work with interactive systems, it’s actually a design project: I develop a setup combining hardware, software and human interaction in such a way that sound and music are created.” His works blend movement and sound, resulting in self-developed instruments or scores that generate themselves in real time – such as in Box Tsunami from 2021.

Daniel Zea composed Box Tsunami 2021 during the Corona pandemic for the four musicians of the Concept Store Quartet.

Box Tsunami

Zea wrote Box Tsunami for young Basel-based Concept Store Quartet during the coronavirus pandemic, with the huge ammount of parcels and packages mailed, symbolizing the consumer craze, as starting point: “A person in front of an empty box – that’s very poetic. What does it mean? Why is the person sitting there? Why is the box empty?”. That’s how Box Tsunami begins: the four musicians sit in front of large cardboard boxes with their instruments and a laptop. These are open at the top with white light shining out. The boxes knock, rustle and creak. The musicians look intently at their laptops and lay delicate, filigree sounds over the boxes’ rumbling – all on their own, without paying much attention to each other.

For Box Tsunami, Zea started by developping the sounding boxes. He fitted them with small electric hammers and so-called transducers, which transmit signals in the way a loudspeaker would. This turns the cardboard boxes into instruments one can control electronically. However, the signals are rather quiet, which is why the four musicians can only play quietly and softly. In order to link musicians and boxes, their electric hammers are controlled by the percussionist using a midi drum pad. An interactive loop links the musicians with the cardboard boxes and the score is generated from this in real time. Similar to what pappened during the lockdown times, everyone sits mesmerised in front of their screens. They are dependent on the actions of others and, above all, on the technological means of communication, but never meet each other and the boxes from online purchases pile up around them – the box tsunami.

In the self-portrait of Daniel Zea and the solo show Autorretrato from 2023, you see him sitting in front of a camera and a larger-than-life avatar of him on the screen.

Autorretrato

The setting for the composition Autorretrato (Self-Portrait) is simpler: Zea himself sits in front of a camera and on the screen behind him you can see an avatar performing the same facial expressions. A digital doppelganger. Zea can control and manipulate sounds with his facial movements. Over time, the screen is populated by various objects such as a can of cola, high heels, a hand grenade or a crucifix. This is done using a face tracking app that links Zea to the audio programme. For Autorretrato, Zea is composer, audio designer, software developer and performer all at once. “The most difficult part was definitely the performing,” the composer explains. “I’m not used to standing alone centre stage, so I was nervous before the premiere. It’s also a very personal piece. On one hand, it’s risky, but it also allows me to say and do things that I wouldn’t otherwise dare.”

Autorretrato is new and Zea describes it as a “work in progress”: “I would still like to work on the piece and expand some of its parts. The work on our self-portrait is in some way ongoing,” says Daniel Zea. He therefore continues to build, combining sound and movement, examining the subtlest facila expressions in terms of composition, developing instruments and embedding all of this in his socio-political considerations.
Jaronas Scheurer

Portrait Daniel Zea © Vincent Capes

Between April 30 and May 5, 2024, les Amplitudes Festival in La Chaux-de-Fonds will be dedicated to the work of Daniel Zea. Among other proposals, the Ensemble Vortex, which Zea co-founded, will premiere a new work for orchestra by Zea and a sound installation by Daniel Zea and Alexandre Joly will take place throughout the festival.

Nejc Grm, Alicja Pilarczyk, Pablo González Balaguer

Broadcasts SRF Kultur:
neoblog, 14.10.2020: la ville – une composition géante, auteur Anya Leveillé
neoblog, 23.01.2022 : Portrait unserer Zeit, Autorin Gabrielle Weber

Neo-profiles: Daniel Zea, Concept Store Quartet, Ensemble Vortex, Eric Gaudibert, Jeanne Larrouturou

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Composer Hermann Meier, an unconventional avant-gardist

Hermann Meier (1906-2002) was a school teacher in the village of Zullwil in the so-called Schwarzbubenland and had five children to feed. Despite all this, he always found time to work on his unusual compositions – even if initially merely destined to sit on a shelf, as he experienced no major successes or performances during his lifetime. His legacy has been analysed by musicologist Michelle Ziegler.

An interview with Friederike Kenneweg.

 

Ausschnitt aus dem grafischen Plan von Hermann Meier für sein Stück für zwei Klaviere HMV44 aus dem Jahr 1958. Vergilbtes Papier mit Linien, darauf mit Buntstift in rot, schwarz und blau eingetragene Flächen-
A section of the graphic plan for a piano piece by Hermann Meier from 1958 (HMV44). Hermann Meier called these plans ‘Mondriane’, which he created from the 1950s onwards before he worked out the pieces in musical notation. The composer’s legacy has been at the Paul Sacher Foundation since 2009 – and with it a large number of these prints, rolled up and stowed away in boxes. © Paul Sacher Stiftung.

 

Friederike Kenneweg
‘It all started when I first heard Hermann Meier’s during a concert back in 2011,’ recalls Michelle Ziegler, ‘I was immediately fascinated by it.’ Back then, Tamriko Kordzaia and Dominik Blum played Hermann Meier’s Thirteen Pieces for Two Pianos from 1959.
‘These are thirteen separate sections with very different characters. At that time, I was already working on the realisation of artistic ideas in music, and I found this to be consistently implemented here.’

 

 


The Thirteen Pieces for Two Pianos reveal the multifaceted nature of Hermann Meier’s music, which can be loud and direct, but also delicate and sometimes humorous. Tamriko Kordzaia, Dominik Blum, Concert 19th of May 2011, Museum für Gestaltung Zürich, produced by SRG/SSR.
When Michelle Ziegler learned that the composer’s works were sitting largely unexplored at the Paul Sacher Foundation and that there all kinds of graphic plans were to be discovered there, she found her dissertation project. “That ended up being the focus of my project: Meier’s piano music and his pictorial notation.”

 

Die Musikwissenschaftlerin Michelle Ziegler bei einer Führung durch die Ausstellung "Mondrian-Musik. Die graphischen Welten des Komponisten Hermann Meier". © Daniel Allenbach/HKB
Michelle Ziegler during a guided tour of the’Mondrian-Musik exhibition. The graphic worlds of composer Hermann Meier’ (Kunstmuseum Solothurn, October 2017 – February 2018) © Daniel Allenbach/HKB. .

 

Notes in school notebooks

In order to be able to read Meier’s notes, Michelle Ziegler even learnt a special shorthand writing. The composer, who had unlimited access to exercise books as a primary school teacher, constantly recorded his thoughts in this form: on music, contemporary art and the progress of his work.
‘You could almost call him a graphomaniac,’ says Michelle Ziegler. The large number of exercise books, plans and sheet music that are now in the Paul Sacher Foundation could keep one busy for a lifetime.

 

At odds with his time’s music scene

The fact that, despite his constant productivity, Hermann Meier received little recognition during his lifetime is due to his unconventional compositional path. He had been studying twelve-tone music on his own since the 1930s and initially found a sympathetic teacher in Wladimir Vogel after the Second World War. However, he increasingly turned away from it, first finding an even more radical approach to serial composition and finally, inspired by the visual arts of Piet Mondrian and Hans Arp, moving on to work with sound surfaces. From 1955 onwards, Meier worked with graphic plans in which he visually sketched the structure that he later translated into musical notation.
His way of composing encountered little understanding at the time. Although endeavouredly searching for performance opportunities, he only received rejections, but nevertheless continued to compose unwaveringly, although only for the shelves.

 

Der Komponist Hermann Meier 1979 in Yverdon am Klavier.
Hermann Meier 1979 in Yverdon. © Privat

 

Sound as canvas

Keyboard instruments play a central role in the Meier’s work, as he was himself a very good pianist. A work that Michelle Ziegler particularly appreciates is the 1958 piece for two pianos (Hermann Meier-Verzeichnis HMV 44).
“This is a stunning piece in my opinion. I can listen to it again and again and always hear different things.”

 

 


In the piece for two pianos HMV 44 written in 1958, here played by von Tamriko Kordzaia and Dominik Blum, Hermann Meier experimented with three structural elements dots, lines and areas.

 

 

Ausschnitt aus dem graphischen Plan zu dem Stück für zwei Klaviere HMV44 von Hermann Meier aus dem Jahr 1958. Auf vergilbten Karopapier sind schwarze, blaue und rote Flächen eingezeichnet, mit Bleistift Anmerkungen des Komponisten verzeichnet. © Paul-Sacher-Stiftung, Basel
Detail of the graphic plan for the piece for two pianos HMV 44, in which the three formal elements dots, lines and areas are expressed in different colours. Dots are red, lines blue and areas black. © Paul Sacher Stiftung, Basel

 

Late recognition:Klangschichten’

The fact that Meier’s efforts to have his works performed did not bear fruit was also due to the fact that they were too difficult for the instrumentalists of the time. It is therefore not surprising that the composer turned to electronic music. In 1976, at the age of seventy, he indeed succeeded in realising his first work for tape, Klangschichten, in the SWF experimental studio – with which he was awarded a prize in December of the same year.

 

A new style in his later years

From 1984 onwards, pianist and composer Urs Peter Schneider took an interest in Hermann Meier’s music and premiered some of his works as part of the ‘Neue Horizonte Bern’ concert series.

 


Piano piece for Urs Peter Schneider, played by Gilles Grimaitre
With the late opportunity to see his instrumental pieces performed, Hermann Meier once again developed a new style. Michelle Ziegler discovers this, for example, in the Piano Piece for Urs Peter Schneider from 1987.
Concert HKB Bern 2017, SRG/SSR Eigenproduktion.

 

“The rhythm as well as the element of duration became very important. By then he was already over eighty and changed his composing considerably because he became even more fascinated by other aspects.”

In the meantime, Hermann Meier’s work has received a fair amount of attention. In 2018, his piece for large orchestra and piano four hands from 1965 was premiered at the Donaueschingen Music Festival. Michelle Ziegler particularly enjoys concerts like this. “It’s important to me that Hermann Meier’s music doesn’t just remain on paper, it should be heard.”
Friederike Kenneweg
 

 
The Paul Sacher Stiftung has organised and restored the composers archives and compiled a catalogue. Composer and bassoonist Marc Kilchenmann made the sheet music available as a facsimile edition published by aart Verlag.
Pianist Dominik Blum has recorded the complete works for piano solo by Hermann Meier from 1948 onwards.
Michelle Ziegler published the volume Musikalische Geometrie. Die bildlichen Modelle und Arbeitsmittel im Klavierwerk Hermann Meiers and, together with Heidy Zimmermann and Roman Brotbek, the catalogue for the exhibition Mondrian-Musik. Die graphischen Welten des Komponisten Hermann Meier.

 

Sendung SRF Kultur:
Kontext, 10.1.2018: Hermann Meier, ein lang verkannter Musikpionier, Autor Moritz Weber

neo-profile:
Hermann Meier, Urs Peter Schneider, Gilles Grimaître, Tamriko Kordzaia, Dominik Blum, Marc Kilchenmann

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Simone Keller – forgotten piano music rediscovered

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.

 

Portrait Simone Keller © Doris Kessler

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.

 

St. Gallen – Portrait of the pianist Simone Keller on the occasion of receiving the IBK Prize for Music Mediation © Lisa Jenny

 

“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

Julius Eastman (1940-1990), Irene Higginbotham (1918-1988), Olga Diener (1890-1963), Lucerne Festival Forward, Festival MärzMusik.

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.

Simone Keller: Hidden Tour, march 19.–27. 2024.

Julia Perry Centenary Celebration & Festival, New York City, march 13.–16. 2024.

broadcasts SRF Kultur:
Musik unserer Zeit, 17.1.2024: Erst vergessen, heute ein Hype: Julius Eastman (1940–1990), editor Corinne Holtz.

neo-profiles:
Simone Keller, Kukuruz Quartett, Jessie Cox.

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Music is always political! Luigi Nono 100

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, On November 12, 1976, at the Rote Fabrik in Zurich, Nono presented electronically processed original sounds from a factory and discussed his works with the audience. © Keystone.

 

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

 

Luigi Nono (1924 – 1990) conducting his piece ‘Canti di vita e d’amore: sul ponte di Hiroshima’ in rehearsal at the Royal College of Music, London, 7th September 1963. © Erich Auerbach/Hulton Archive/Getty Images.

broadcasts SRF Kultur:
Luigi Nono zum 100: Helmut Lachenmann und seine Erinnerungen an Luigi Nono, Musik unserer Zeit, 31.01.2024, editor Florian Hauser.
Er vertonte die Abschiedsbriefe von Widerstandskämpfern, online-Text srf.ch, 29.01.2024: author Florian Hauser.
Zum 100. Geburtstag: Luigi Nono: Fragmente – Stille. An Diotima, Diskothek, 29.01.2024, editor Annelis Berger

neo-profil:
Luigi Nono