CARNEGIE HALL PRESENTS
KNM Berlin

Zankel Hall
Saturday, November 10th, 2007 at 7:00 PM

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Ron Winkler, Speaker
Ana Maria Rodriguez, Live Electronics
KNM Berlin
··Rebecca Lenton, Flute
··Gudrun Reschke, Oboe
··Winfried Rager, Clarinet
··Theo Nabicht, Clarinets and Saxophone
··Naama Golan, Trumpet
··Robin Hayward, Tuba
··Benjamin Kobler, Piano
··Dirk Rothbrust, Percussion
··Alexandre Babel, Percussion
··Steffen Tast, Conductor and Violin
··Ekkehard Windrich, Violin
··Kirstin Maria Pientka, Viola
··Ringela Riemke, Cello
··Arnulf Ballhorn, Doublebass

KNM Berlin, acclaimed for its HouseMusik concerts in Berlin—in which private apartments, offices, shops, and cafés are used for a concert on the move—brings its innovative approach to Zankel Hall. In a mini-marathon, KNM presents a survey of today’s avant-garde music scene in Berlin with video, sound installations, and sampling as well as virtuosic music making.

STEFAN BARTLING Mit Namen & RANDNOTIZ
HELMUT OEHRING Philipp
MARC SABAT (Music) / PETER SABAT (Film) AUTOMAT
RODRIGUEZ Telegram from a Sea (words by Ron Winkler)
STEFANO GERVASONI An (Quasi una serenata con la complicità di Schubert)
NONO Post-prae-ludium No.1, "per Donau"
PETER ABLINGER Voices and Piano
HELMUT LACHENMANN Intérieur I
ALESSANDRO BOSETTI The Listeners (video)
WALTER ZIMMERMANN Shadows of Cold Mountain 5
THOMAS MEADOWCROFT Ezra Jack Plot (with video stills from The Snowy Day by Ezra Jack Keats)
STEPHAN WINKLER Vom Durst nach Dasein

The Berlin in Lights festival is made possible by a leadership gift from the Anna-Maria and Stephen Kellen Foundation.

Major funding has also been provided by Mercedes and Sid Bass, and The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, with additional support from Martha and Bob Lipp, Fundación Mercantil (Venezuela), and the National Endowment for the Arts.

Additional funding provided by Axel Springer AG, GWFF USA Inc., and the Jerome Robbins Foundation.

Program Notes:

The Concert At A Glance

Berlin has become a safe haven for musicians everywhere seeking cheap rents in a city with a palpable creative vibe and spirited subculture. Alongside the pounding din of construction sites, underground performance spaces have been carved into the urban landscape. It’s inside this do-it-yourself artistic pressure cooker that Kammerensemble Neue Musik (KNM) fashioned its HouseMusik concept.  During the course of an evening, audiences migrate from private apartments, offices, shops, and cafés to witness new music and hybrid performative installations created with traditional classical instruments and the latest digital technologies. Replicating the HouseMusik experience, albeit with assigned seating, KNM has fashioned a multifaceted approach to this evening’s programming. First comes a quick historical survey of the region’s musical influences, from echoes of Schubert to Nono and Lachenmann, followed by a crash course of new work by composers entrenched in Berlin’s creative hive, revealing unprovoked connections and the inner workings of a city renowned for unabashed artistic splendor.

Notes On The Program
By Randy Nordschow

STEFANO GERVASONI An (Quasi una serenata con la complicità di Schubert)Italian composer Stefano Gervasoni takes Franz Schubert’s lieder “An Laura, als sie Klopstock’s Auferstehungslied sang” and “Die Entzückung an Laura” as his inspiration for An (1989). Immediately after the downbeat, expect to be seduced by Gervasoni’s unique sound world, which the composer shapes and manipulates with surgeon-like precision. Veiled behind the composer’s exquisite attention to timbral details are embedded fragments from the Schubert songs, but nothing recognizable immediately emerges. As the composition progresses, its delicacy and vulnerability builds to a dense filigree punctuated by silence. Eventually, as the piece draws nearer to its conclusion, unaltered snippets from the source materials emerge before everything quietly drifts away.

LUIGI NONO Post-prae-ludium No. 1, “per Donau”Luigi Nono spent a year in residence at the Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst (DAAD) in Berlin, the same year he composed the haunting Post-prae-ludium No. 1, “per Donau” (1987). The oxymoronic title is as enigmatic as the colorful hand-scribbled score. Once the performer parses out the composer’s intentions, a delicate balance of musical utterances, electronic specialization, and near-silence electrifies the performance space, focusing listeners on the tiniest of details. Nono developed his sumptuous use of live electronics in Freiburg, Germany, and the impact of his electroacoustic works from the 1980s is still echoing its influence throughout Europe.

PETER ABLINGER Voices and Piano
Peter Ablinger has forged an eclectic body of work using his own brand of conceptualism. Through his investigations, the composer has forged a unique relationship with both the voice and piano—even creating a work in which a piano speaks the angry words from an inflammatory letter Arnold Schoenberg wrote to a record producer, with the aid of a computer-controlled mechanical devise retrofitted to the piano that plays the keyboard fast enough to produce the necessary frequencies to replicate spoken language. In his ongoing series titled Voices and Piano (began in 1998), the composer takes recorded speeches by well-known figures—such as Marcel Duchamp, Gertrude Stein, and Mao Zedong—and creates an exacting piano accompaniment that reinforces the fundamental pitch found in the particular speaker’s voice.

HELMUT LACHENMANN Intérieur I
Certainly influenced by his teacher Luigi Nono, Helmut Lachenmann has managed to redefine the parameters of music for an entire generation of composers. In Germany at least, it’s very difficult to escape the shadow of his influence. Lachenmann’s music, notable for its unconventional playing techniques, embraces a highly structured sound world encompassing instrumental noise and pitch on equal terms. His percussion piece Intérieur I (1966) is an early attempt to synthesize the elements that would become his signature. Lachenmann’s concept of musique concrète instrumentale solidified the notion that composers needed to push music to its limits, and the younger composers who occupy the remaining portion of the program have heeded this calling.

STEFAN BARTLING Mit Namen und RANDNOTIZ
Taking a cue from Marcel Duchamp’s famous “readymade” sculpture Bicycle Wheel, composer Stefan Bartling creates a clicking cantus firmus for his simultaneously performed works Mit Namen (2002) and RANDNOTIZ (2002). Intermingled with the sound of a turning bicycle wheel, names of historical significance are spoken and whirled through a network of speakers. This sort of conceptual approach, where the sound sources themselves seem to have a metonymic relationship to art history, is closely aligned with strategies typically found inside the visual arts world. The ritualized feeling of the work belies its own absurdity, making for a compelling blend of installation art and performance.

HELMUT OEHRING Philipp
The work of Helmut Oehring seems to encompass an unquantifiable otherness, a unique approach to sound and timbre that manages to relate to classical music’s canonical past, while at the same time seem completely unbeholden to tradition. His childhood experience of growing up with deaf-mute parents continues to impact the sonic qualities of his work, which tends to focus on the linguistic capabilities music may or may not posses. His piece Philipp is a reflection on the babbling sounds and chitchat his then six-year-old son used to make when he retreated into the bathroom. Free from the scrutiny of adult observation, these behind-closed-doors outbursts seem to have an elusive grammar all their own, especially when transferred instrumentally in a musical context. All of this brings into question the audible nature of language and its ability to communicate.

PETER SABAT / MARC SABAT Automat + Duas Quintas
For AUTOMAT (1999/2005), brothers Peter and Marc Sabat combine their individual work into a meta-duo that fuses sound and image. The video combines two slow panning shots superimposed—fixed objects, like the carwash and neighboring gas station, parked cars, and phone booths appear to be inhabited by ghost-like figures as the double exposure catches passersby inside this otherwise banal urban environment. The ambient sound from the film mingles with a live performance of Marc’s Duas Quintas (2004) for two violins, exhibiting the composer’s interest in microtuning and intuitive rhythmic flow.

ANA MARIA RODRIGUEZ Telegram from a Sea
The poetry of Ron Winkler (b. 1973) uses a technical-analytical vocabulary to subtlety convey nature—think of an idyllic forest, for instance, which can be burned onto a DVD-R. The irony of such an approach isn’t lost on Argentine-born composer Ana Maria Rodriguez. Her own relationship to technology is ambivalent insofar as its functionality is merely a tool for her to realize sound installations and performances. Indeed, technology is almost second nature in 21st-century life; perhaps these two artists have discovered a third nature. To simply say that Telegram from a Sea (2007) is poetry set to music is a misnomer—it’s a message from the melding point between our natural and virtual worlds.

ALESSANDRO BOSETTI The Listeners
The Listeners (2005) is a clever commentary on how we encounter music and its inherent ephemerality. Composer and sound artist Alessandro Bosetti enlisted a group of volunteers who agreed to be videotaped while listening to short audio works individually created by Bosetti. Each of the listeners was the first to hear their own respective piece, and the last—the composer permanently deleted the work after each volunteer finished listening. All that remains of the music are the visual responses of the headphone-clad strangers that we watch onscreen in silence.

WALTER ZIMMERMANN Shadows of Cold Mountain 5
Walter Zimmermann typically draws upon a wide range of history and culture in conceiving his work. A mainstay of Berlin’s music scene for decades, the composer reveals a blend of intellectual rigor that seems at odds with his tendency toward stripped-down, simplistic-sounding music. His distinct brand of aesthetics may appear to be out of synch with today’s more dominate musical trends in Europe, but his music makes a bold impact through its cold, calculated clarity. Shadows of Cold Mountain 5 (1997) is from a series of works based on artist Brice Marden’s group of paintings and works on paper titled Cold Mountain, which in turn are inspired by the calligraphy from the Tang Dynasty. Following the contours from the drawings’ networked patterns, Zimmermann translates Marden’s gestures into sliding musical phrases filled with shimmering difference tones that freely collide during performance.


THOMAS MEADOWCROFT Ezra Jack Plot
The video stills that accompany Ezra Jack Plot (2007), composed by Australian native Thomas Meadowcroft, are taken from the book The Snowy Day by the American children’s book author and illustrator Ezra Jack Keats. The images are presented in the same order as they appear in Keats’s original work. The rate at which they are projected no longer correlates with the speed in which a child might view them; instead, they progress in synch to the accompanying musical structure. In turn, the musical structure was created in such a way as to make audible the block-like forms—in particular the juxtaposition of materials such as linoleum, cloth, and paint—that figure so beautifully in Keats’s illustrations.

Ezra Jack Keats (1916–1983), a native of Brooklyn, New York, was an artist and one of the most important children’s literature authors and illustrators of the 20th century. He was one of the first children’s book authors in the English-speaking world to use an urban setting for his stories and he developed the use of collage as a medium for illustration. Keats illustrated over 85 books for children, also writing the stories for 24 of them, and his works have been translated into 19 languages. His book, The Snowy Day, received the prestigious Caldecott Medal for the most distinguished picture book for children in 1963.

Artwork from The Snowy Day by Ezra Jack Keats, copyright © 1963, appears with the permission of the Ezra Jack Keats Foundation.

STEPHAN WINKLER Vom Durst nach Dasein
Vom Durst nach Dasein (“Of the Thirst of Existence,” composed 2000–01), by Stephan Winkler, is a seven-part cycle of “character pieces” for viola, strings, percussion, and sampler. Using sampled rhythms and tropes from the techno scene that permeated fin de siècle Berlin, the composer creates a work that’s always emerging and imploding upon itself. “Berlin is a city condemned forever to becoming and never being,” wrote author Karl Scheffler. Perhaps this composition is Winkler’s succinct response to this sentiment.

Copyright © 2007 by The Carnegie Hall Corporation

Composer Randy Nordschow is Associate Editor of NewMusicBox.org.


ANNA MARIA RODRIGUEZ
Telegram from a Sea
Texts: From Fragmentierte Gewässer by Ron Winkler (b. 1973)

Wolken
im Prinzip nichts. andererseits ein jehovafarbenes Kaum.
das gekonnt einfache Abbild einer Nässe. influenced by water.
im Prinzip nichts. nur unspektakuläre Spektralbereiche,
quer über den Himmel geschmuggelt. vage Sphären
und Sphären an sich. im Prinzip nichts. mitunter
als zyklische Permutation eines vermeintlichen Zusammenhangs.
stille Tracks in der Tabulatorfunktion Wind.
Showrooms wie das, was dazwischen liegt. im Prinzip nichts.
irgendwann endend im Output von etwas
Naheliegendem. Return.

clouds
essentially nothing. otherwise barely, Yahweh-colored.
the skillfully simple artifact of a wetness. influenced by water.
essentially nothing. just unspectacular spectral territory
smuggled across sky. vague spheres and spheres
of spheres. essentially nothing. at times as the cyclic
permutation of a would-be continuity.
quiet tracks in the tabulator function wind.
showrooms like what lies between them. essentially nothing.
at some point ending in output from something
self-evident. return.



Anschauung to go
Wald ist eine schöne Form von Agglutinierung.
die Bäume zum Beispiel verästeln sich in der Regel
perfekt und wirken trotzdem natürlich.
manchmal bewegt sich etwas zwischen den Zweigen.
meist ist es ein Ding oder eine Art
idyllische Information. ein geflügelter Raum
mit dem Potenzial, weitgehend richtig zu sein.
ich kann dir das gern mal brennen.

worldview to-go
forest is a pleasant way to agglutinate.
the trees, for instance, branch off perfectly
as a rule and seem nonetheless natural.
occasionally something will twitch between twigs.
in most cases an object or a form
of idyllic information. a winged space
with potential for extensive correctness.
I’d gladly burn you a copy.



Telegramm von einer See
die Küste: mehr oder weniger
Randgebiet. das Wasser: eher signifikant
die Wellen: freie Radikale.

telegram from a sea
the shoreline: more or less
borderland. the water: stronger significance
the waves: free radicals.



Equadorie
der Regenwald war eine Flüssigkeit.
das Grün eine Substanz. wir träumten von Dehydrierung.
die Moskitos, wir sagten tierisches Chili,
schienen die makrobiologische Auswirkung des Quanten-
stichtheorems.
von den Bäumen tropfte Milde.

wir lernten, das Guanin aus unserem Blick
zu eliminieren (wir träumten von einfacher Dimensionen-
betrachtung).
alles wirkte befreiend nukleotid.

einzelne Photonenbündel
bewegten sich auf dem Boden wie dance fiction.
wir träumten von der Eigenschaft Schnee.

die frei lebenden Ventilatoren erinnerten an
Kolibris.
sie waren die schnellste Stille des Tages.
wir hatten Alpträume von den Kehrseiten des Kohlenstoffs.

stundenlang dasselbe wechselnde Bild
einer sehr polygonen Vegetation. die Hitze war despotisch.
wir träumten lange von ihr.

die genetischen Teile der Landschaft trugen biomorphe
Züge.
im Vergleich dazu wirkten wir nahezu anorganisch.
wir träumten von der Tarzanhaftigkeit unseres Seins.

manchmal änderte die Materie unsere Richtung.
ein Reservoir Raubtier zumeist.
wir träumten von noahschen Aufnahmeapparaturen.

als Wind aufkam, spürten wir den Rückzug des Urknalls.
wir brachen hier ab, nur die Sprache ging weiter.



Ron Winkler
from "Fragmentierte Gewässer", Berlin Verlag 2007


An Equadorial
the rainforest was a liquid.
the green a substance. we dreamt of dehydration.

the mosquitos we called bestial cayenne
seemed like the macrofauna implication of quantum
sting theory.
the trees trickled balminess.

we learned to eliminate guanine
from our sight (dreaming of effortless dimension-
examination)
everything seemed nucleotidal, liberating.

discrete photon wads
glided over the ground like dance fiction.
we dreamt of snowiness.

the wild fans reminded us of hummingbirds.
they were today’s quickest quiet.
we had nightmares about the flip-side of carbon.

for hours the same shifting image
of an intensely polygonal vegetation. the heat was despotic.
we dreamt about it for ages.

the genetic parts of the landscape had biomorphic tendencies.
in comparison we seemed practically inanimate.
we dreamt of the tarzanity of our being.

sometimes matter changed our course.
for the most part a carnivore reservoir.
we dreamt of recording equipment à la Noah.

when wind erupted, we sensed the Big Bang’s withdrawal.
we broke off there. only the language went on.