Mathias Spahlinger (b. 1944) and Nicolaus A. Huber (b. 1939) are two of the most influential composers of the German avant-garde today, but their music is not well known in the English-speaking world. While much has been written about their colleague Helmut Lachenmann (b. 1935), these two tend to be left standing in his shadow. It is true that these three musicians share many aesthetic convictions, most critical of which is an awareness of the achievements of serialism and a refusal to forsake these advances, even while throwing much of the technical apparatus of that heritage overboard. All three are indeed concerned with subverting simple dualistic oppositions of ‘form’ vs. ‘sound’, expression and medium, poiesis and poema. They share an interest in music as a phenomenon inextricably tied up with history and social consciousness. They have come, however, from very different angles, and their compositional endeavors have hence taken highly divergent trajectories. Spahlinger and Huber are different thinkers from Lachenmann, but also different from one another. There is no unified avant-garde ‘school’ of which these three composers are the leading lights.
Rather than extricate these two composers from Lachenmann's considerable influence by manufacturing an ideological distance from him, let us briefly consider how these three composers took up the serial heritage in their own ways.
Lachenmann is rightly associated with the term musique concrète instrumentale, a notion and a set of techniques that regard sound not as an abstract vehicle for musical ideas in the traditional sense of motivic development, but as the by-product of physical work, of the tension and release of human effort. His solo cello piece Pression is certainly the locus classicus, whose score utilizes an elaborately devised notation, through which the actions of the performer are indicated far more precisely than the sounding results (hence the term ‘action notation’, which of course has a history that reaches back to a time long before Pression). Lachenmann's most characteristic achievement is his unparalleled aplomb and imagination in employing these techniques to forge a new, inimitable, and constantly evolving language: here, it is the parameters of sound production, rather than the traditional serial parameters of sound (pitch, timbre, duration, and dynamic), that are responsible for creating material.
In contrast, neither Huber nor Spahlinger are interested in language formation as an end in itself. Each in his own way problematizes the very language character of music, showing this to be an assailable construct, with each individual composition representing a new way of getting caught in the gears of language, finding a material-consciousness that abandons all belief in communicative immediacy. Both cling to a notion of utopia in which the artist and the audience stand side by side to face the problems that are of concern to society.
Time and again, Nicolaus Huber manages to find peculiarities of music-making that in their specificity and irreducible Gestalt capture the ear—then manages to reduce them after all, revealing every captivating sonic object as a composite experience whose component parts are a curious mix of inexplicable and pedestrian. The most emblematic example for this fascination that I can think of is the sine-tone ‘solo’ at the end of Eröffnung und Zertrümmerung, which summarizes the composition by recapitulating, in condensed form, only its dynamic envelope. All of the force and emotional authenticity that dynamics seem to carry throughout the composition is shown to be hollow, a matter no longer of emphatic urgency, but one of pure amplitude. Suddenly one is hearing expressivity in that which has been deliberately robbed of all expression.
It is a pleasure to begin this issue with two of Huber's pivotal essays. The first of these, ‘Critical Composition’, is a plea to composers to engage with the problems of music that are most urgent: those that renew music's promise to address the most pressing concerns of society, which for his purposes are the concerns of the working class and of the victims of oppression and marginalization. ‘On Conceptual Rhythm-Composition’ argues that the various heritages of folk music, especially folk attitudes toward rhythm, are resources capable of addressing the concerns of the proletariat. For a period of some 20 years, beginning with Darabukka for solo piano, Huber's works repeatedly placed rhythm in the foreground, reminding us that music is an art of the body and not just of the mind.
For all of this theory, Cornelius Schwehr provides a practical example. Schwehr's essay on ‘An Hölderlins Umnachtung’ describes some of the historical facts about Hölderlin that inspired the composition, then proceeds to disassemble the technical apparatus of the piece, showing how the musical material itself is designed to depict the dysfunctional psychological state of that poet near the end of his life.
Hannes Seidl, a young composer residing in Germany and a former student of Huber, is gaining a reputation for innovative compositions that often frame everyday events—elevating these into art and simultaneously making them hyper-real. He is uniquely qualified to report on pop culture references in Huber's more recent works. Ian Pace's contribution rolls up the other end by discussing Huber's relatively little-known early works, which have received scarcely any attention even in German-language publications.
From these essays a complex picture will hopefully emerge, one that will pique the interest of some readers, leading to further investigations of this highly insightful composer. There is still much to be said.
Mathias Spahlinger is represented by what will surely prove to be one of his most important texts, a lecture he delivered in October 2006 in Dresden entitled ‘this is the time of conceptive ideologues no longer’. This text summarizes his political and aesthetic concerns, and shows that debates about such matters are as vital today as they ever were. His historic conversations with the musicologist Hans Heinrich Eggebrecht, Geschichte der Musik als Gegenwart[‘Music History as a Facet of the Present’] are also critical, so it seemed appropriate to include a kind of summary in this volume. Petra Music has succinctly collected the main points of the conversation. Though this is by no means a substitute for the original, it might generate enough interest to motivate a translation of the entire set of conversations.
Dorothea Schüle is a musicologist who has specialized in Spahlinger's work, and her article on his piano concerto inter-mezzo is particularly useful because it encapsulates the composer's intentions precisely as if he had written the text himself. Of course, it is up to the individual listener and critic to judge whether the intentions do indeed come through in the work, or whether other perspectives, even contrary ones, could find room in the work's reception.
In my text about the 128 erfüllte Augenblicke, I attempt to develop one of the concepts from Spahlinger's Dresden talk: what can a music look like which is anti-ideological? The 128 provide one of many possible points of departure, but it is a line of inquiry which is still in its infancy, at least with respect to music.
Brian Kane takes the position of the skeptical listener, and, drawing on a vast experience with epistemology and theory of listening, provides a highly original, searching analysis of Spahlinger's éphémère. He provides a context for the skeptical method that is based on the later works of Wittgenstein, but also elaborates on Spahlinger's very Hegelian statement, ‘the as-such is only for us’.
It has been a great pleasure assembling this issue, and I hope it generates much further discussion. I am grateful to all the contributors for making their texts available, and to the editor-in-chief of Contemporary Music Review, Peter Nelson, for agreeing to schedule and supervise this project. I would also like to thank the following colleagues for their support and their ideas: Michael Spencer, Lauren Redhead, Aaron Cassidy, James Bunch, and the Contemporary German Music seminar at the University of Illinois, spring 2007. My greatest debt, however, is to my wife Paula, who showed incredible patience during the long hours and weeks, but also provided critical feedback for my article. Her Photoshop talents are also in evidence in this volume; without her expertise, none of the musical examples cited in the text would have been legible.
Many thanks for your interest in this project.
Philipp Blume
Urbana, Illinois