Fathers and Spaces - Salzburger Festspiele 97 14/06/10 10:43

Karlheinz Essl

Fathers and Spaces

About the programming of two portrait concerts
at the Salzburger Festival 1997

Deutsche Fassung

In early 1994 Hans Landesmann and I first met in a Viennese café to talk about a
composition assignment for the Salzburg festival. I was very pleased to hear that
Dr. Landesmann not only invited me to write one piece for the festival but asked
me to additionally write two full concert programs in which I was supposed to
relate my own music to the music of my musical fathers.

Fathers...

A few days later the program for the concert was drawn up. This program, in conjunction with the
ensemble Klangforum Wien, references my musical origins. It is not based on the classical
"bourgeois" heritage, traditionally recalling "from Bach to Beethoven" (a knowledge I later had to
acquire somewhat painstakingly), but is rooted in my preoccupation with improvisation and the
experimental investigation into gothic music. What I still find particularly gripping with gothic music is
its multi-layering (in its truly post-modern meaning): the fact that a rich substructure full of intrinsic
meaning at various levels is hidden beneath the surface of sounds. It is this structure - as a kind of
secret musical program - which conveys its sensual effect. The richness of this enigmatic network of
relations is emphasized by the manner John Dunstable's Ballata O rosa bella (around 1440) was
token up and further processed by other composers of his time.

While gripped by an examination into the sources, I discovered a great variety of paraphrases,
intabulations and parodies from which I was eventually able to distill a composed realization. The
early Karlheinz Stockhausen can probably be regarded as my most important compositional point
of reference. His music already took hold of me when I was still an adolescent, at a time when my
examinations of advanced Rock music made me venture into the electronic music of the 50s.
Stockhausen's "Texte", the first two volumes of which I had already devoured during my school
years, provided me with the theoretical superstructure which, at that time, I was far from
comprehending in its full scope, but which I nevertheless found exceedingly fascinating. A
performance of Stockhausen's "Kontra-Punkte" given by the Ensemble InterContemporain directed by
Peter Eötvös, eventually confirmed me what I had been sensing for years: this music, often
disqualified as austere and esoteric could be played in such a natural and obvious manner that it was

http://www.essl.at/bibliogr/fathers_spaces.html Página 1 de 3
Fathers and Spaces - Salzburger Festspiele 97 14/06/10 10:43

able to reveal indeed Schubert-like expressive qualities.

John Cage, on the other hand, became important to me as an antipode, as a disturbing corrective
to the rigid principles of order in its serial coinage. Like no other before him, he was able to stress
the topicality of the dialectics of order and freedom and fulfill them compositionally. By the end of
the 80s I was commissioned with the wonderful task of producing his "Music for..." for a
"conversation concert" in the Vienna Konzerthaus. It was at this occasion that I got to meet John
Cage personally and was honoured to be able to spend three unforgettable days with him, three days
which had a lasting effect upon me. The "malgre lui"-interrelation of serial music, once criticized by
Ligeti, is reversed in a striking manner in "Music for...": although this kind of music is based on
chance operations and the individual voices are not coordinated with each other, an abundance of
musical interrelations is created during the process of listening, an abundance which can truly
captivate the listener.

Against these three fathers I juxtaposed two of my own pieces: Cross the Border (1994), dealing
with multi-lingualism and the dialectics of the individual, the collective and the mass (one of my pre-
eminent themes) and Déviation (1993), which draws its impulse from the tension between approach
and disappearance, convergence and dispersion.

Spaces...

The programming of the second concert with the Ensemble Modern, however, extended over a period
of several years. First I wanted to juxtapose my "fathers" against my "brothers and sisters", but was
met with scepticism. So I had to put the cart before the horse by proceeding from my own music, in
this particular case from a commissioned work written for the Great Hall of Salzburg's Mozarteum.

Its architectural peculiarities, with picture frame stage (proscenium) and encircling gallery, served as
a guiding principle for ... wird sichtbar am Horizont (1996) ["... becomes visible on the horizon"]: an
ensemble piece written for four sub-ensembles that were scattered across the place, consisting of
one piano, two percussionists, three woodwinds and four strings. As in most of my music, I was
trying to contemplate and analyse the concept of space in its multifarious implications, as an
architectonic and metaphysical area, as space sound and sound space. Horizons should thematically
be dealt with -- horizons on the one hand representing something unknown, alien, appearing in the
distance, but which, on the other hand are supposed to be widened.

This thematic treatment not only arises from the mere interest in the acoustic phenomena alone:
music in space unfolds to the audience in a new way and invites for active participation in the sound
phenomenon. The listener, while actually experiencing the sound of the performance, becomes a
creator while distilling his or her individual version of the composition from the ambiguous
information in space. Creative listening thus becomes a reflection of our own faculty of perception
and, on beyond that, it can point to possibilities for (the entity) world.

Also the composition Entsagung ["Renunciation"] for 4 musicians and 4 loudspeakers scattered in
space, written in 1992/93 at IRCAM, takes this kind of treatment into account. Here it is the
electronics aiding to create virtual spaces which transcend the inexpressible far from earth.

The other two works are also related to this principle: György Kurtag's Quasi una fantasia,
contemplating and analyzing the phenomenon of space-sound in an extraordinary subtle way, and
Giacinto Scelsi's Anahit, the complex and interwoven harmonics of which intentionally blur the
dividing lines between the individual ensemble instruments and the solo violin to literally rip open
new spaces.

To make the ultimate connection to the original idea of fathers, there are the orchestra pieces Op. 10
by Anton Webern, whose music at the Webern festival in 1983 has blessed me with a genuine Pauline
conversion.

http://www.essl.at/bibliogr/fathers_spaces.html Página 2 de 3
Fathers and Spaces - Salzburger Festspiele 97 14/06/10 10:43

Sound installations

These two concerts are complemented with two sound installations which are intended to shed light
onto another aspect of my work: the aspect of the so-called "real time composition", in which, in
contrast to my other pieces, no elaborate scores have been reproduced. The music is created auto-
poietically only at the moment of its actual sounding. Two of these sound environments, generated
with the aid of computer programs, present themselves as music in public space: the Lexikon-Sonate
(1992 ff) ["encyclopedic sonata"] installed inside the Kleines Festspielhaus -- a "work-in-progress" for
computer-controlled piano -- is a treatment of the subject "CIaviermusik" (piano music) of my
musical fathers Bach, Beethoven, Brahms, Schoenberg, Boulez, Stockhausen, whereas Amazing Maze
(1996 ff.) creates a multidimensional sound jungle in an overgrown tunnel of Salzburg's Mirabell
gardens. Its sound material again refers to Entsagung and thus creates a relationship between
concert hall (as a symbol of artificial artistic space) and park (as a symbol of tamed nature).

Translation: Roland Hofmann / R. Albert Falesch

In: "NEXT GENERATION - Karlheinz Essl", ed. by Margarethe Lasinger, Salzburger Festspiele 1997
(Salzburg 1997)

Home Works Sounds Bibliography Concerts

Updated: 22 Feb 2005

http://www.essl.at/bibliogr/fathers_spaces.html Página 3 de 3