These
performances released by
musica viva
- the experimental music ensemble of the Bayerischer Rundfunks -
are outstanding in every regard. The Austrian-born composer
Bernhard Lang may not be a household name outside the European
continent, but it is good to find that his music is receiving
the inspired advocacy it deserves. If you're into bold
exploration of strange new musical territories, chances are
you'll find much of interest here.
Lang's
(left) series of
DW works - abbreviated
from Differenz/Wiederholung
("Difference-Repetition") - is part of his ongoing experiments
in electronic music, with a touch of aleatory and minimalism
thrown in. Electronics is, of course, the Rodney Dangerfield of
serious classical music, and has never quite lived down its
early days of musique
concrète
noise-making. (Musique
concrète
was the technique of taping and manipulating natural sounds like
static, coughs and engine noise, and passing them off as
"music.") Nonetheless, it has come a long way since the styles
and "isms" of Stockhausen and Varèse, and Bernhard Lang's
principal interest in
DW is to explore the
inner logic of looped sounds and passages, and how they can be
built up to form interesting, narrative episodes.
Differenz in German
means "difference" - and interestingly enough, differenziert
means "complex."
This does not mean that melody and harmony are not important -
they are - but only of relative significance, as the focus
shifts to the change of textures, timbral densities and volumes.
(Ligeti's
Ramifications, for
example, was written for 2 groups of 6 solo strings, with one
group tuned up a quarter-tone, in essence creating a shimmering
sonic blur, accentuated with the rhythmic repetition of notes
played semi-tones apart, eerie and beautiful, giving that
feeling of "there's something
off
with the music, but I'm not sure what.") In this school, playing
a wrong note is not as great a sin as playing the correct note
in the wrong manner: too soft, or too loud, or with the wrong
tone colour.
DW 8
takes its starting point from a pre-recorded passage of
DW 11,
an orchestral sequence played by the Bayern Radio Symphony and
cut onto vinyl, and "performed" upon by two turntable artists.
Thus, the music becomes a continuous repetitive loop, and it is
the variegated and asymmetrical contexts of repetition which
makes this music ear-ticklingly interesting to listen to, almost
like the way modern DJs electronically remix popular songs
(except the musical material here is far less banal than
brain-dead pop tunes.)
DW 15
is an cyclic innerscape ("Binnenzyklus", as Lang himself
describes it) of four songs, with the vocal writing representing
the inward-looking. The accompanying zither is overlaid with an
electronic texture - and the result is hauntingly effective,
almost minimalist in its harmonic sparseness and fuzzy, granular
repetitiveness, kind of like the flicker you get when you push
the pause button on a video player.
DW
3 is an
instrumental work for the strange combination of flute,
accordion and cello (or perhaps not: Sofia Gubaidulina's
Seven Words
calls for solo cello and solo accordion, and "white tone"
strings.) And similar to Gubaidulina, the music here alternates
between solo narratives against a larger, holistic soundscape -
hence, quite literally the title, "Difference-Repetition."
(right:
Martina Koppelstetter, solo voice in DW15)
Navel-gazing aside, this is music of great aural intuituion.
Taken from live performances in March 2004 at the
Herkulesaal and the
Carl-Orff-Saal in
Munich, this disc has been engineered to the typical high
standards you'd expect from the Bayerischer Rundfunks engineers.
The musicians acquit themselves with an intimate and sympathetic
feel for Lang's music, and the sound is bright and surprising
free of intrusive audience noises and dryness which characterise
so many "live" recordings. No hesitations here about
recommending this to newcomers - except with the sole
caveat
that one could get spoilt, as most electronic recordings don't
come as good as this.
