All articles marked in blue can be read directly on the website by clicking on them. All other content can only be found in the printed edition or in the e-paper.

Boulez au Burger King ? 
Nouvelle musique et consommation de masse
Original text in German: Boulez at Burger King? - New music for quick consumption

New music as a department store
What you can buy in the supermarket of modern sounds

Tendances d'infiltration
Entre nouveauté à tout prix et intérêts mercantiles
Original text in German: Versickerungstendenzen - Neue Musik und Konsum an entgegengesetzten Enden des Kulturbetriebes?

Closed, without company
Why and how New Music should rethink its self-imposed access restrictions.

Image and representation in hybrid space
Stefan Prin‛s Mirror Box Extensions

Sheep on stage and in the media
Contemporary opera in the USA

Sofa or upholstered chair?
Live concert vs. canned music

RESONANCE

Je travaille avec peu d'éléments - Portrait de Jean-Luc Darbellay

In the paradise of composers - Concert series by the Bern Percussion Art Ensemble

Plural positions - Donaueschingen Music Days

How do you build a solo career today? - The Tonhalle debut of Elea Nick

The discovery of beauty - 10th International Arthur Lourié Music Days in Basel

Open the east window - Exchange project From the Alps to the Caucasus

There's a lot to discover from Theodor Fröhlich - Events in Brugg to mark the 180th anniversary of the composer's death

Colossal chatter harmoniese - Tinguely's music machines in Basel

Bern's musical life is getting poorer

From hackathon to blockchain - Conference Most wanted: Music in Berlin

Carte blanche for Gianluigi Bocelli

Reviews - New releases
 

CAMPUS

Willi Renggli has passed away

Défendre encore l'enseignement de la musique en terre vaudoise

Teaching in groups is the subject of a colloquium

"Music initiative top or flop?"  - Conference of the Association of Music Schools of the Canton of Schwyz

klaxon children's page - page des enfants

Reviews of teaching materials - New releases
 

FINAL

Riddle - Michael Kube is looking for

Here you can download the current issue. Please enter the search term "e-paper" in the print archive.

The download is free of charge for subscribers.
All other interested parties will receive the PDF of the current issue (or an earlier issue) by e-mail. Costs: Fr. 8.-.
Click here to order the e-paper.

We are also happy to send you the printed version. Costs: Fr. 10.-
Click here to order the printed edition.

Our current issue contains seven essays on this topic, which may seem somewhat brittle at first glance. They were written for us by graduates of the postgraduate course "DAS Music Journalism 2015/16" at the Hochschule für Musik Basel in cooperation with the International Music Institute Darmstadt. The course was led by Björn Gottstein and Thomas Meyer as well as Stefan Fricke. The titles of the essays alone (in alphabetical order) shed light on diverse aspects of a topic in which one might expect major contradictions. Or not?

Boulez at Burger King?
New music for quick consumption
LINK

New music as a department store
What you can buy in the supermarket of modern sounds
PDF

Closed, without company
Why and how New Music should rethink its self-imposed access restrictions.
PDF

Image and representation in hybrid space
Stefan Prin‛s Mirror Box Extensions
LINK

Sheep on stage and in the media
Contemporary opera in the USA
LINK

Sofa or upholstered chair?
Live concert vs. canned music
LINK

Seepage tendencies
New music and consumption at opposite ends of the cultural spectrum?
LINK

Pierre Boulez, the last great founding figure of New Music, died this January. The obligatory obituaries attempted to do justice to his wide-ranging work. Sometimes the composer Boulez was at the center of interest, sometimes the conductor and sometimes even the cultural functionary. Ultimately, however, all these texts focused on the all-important question: Will he, will his music remain?

Without exaggerating, it can be described as the Gretchen question of art reception. Since the second half of the 18th century, only those who stand up to the judgment of subsequent generations have been declared great composers. This attitude has caused a number of problems for today's classical music scene. Contemporary music has suffered in particular, having been pushed to the margins of social perception in the course of the 20th century. The blame for this is often placed on the music business, the public or other dark forces. However, it is forgotten that not only the recipients but also the producers themselves show little interest in the present. For the composers of our time have also internalized that only those whose music survives really count.

Although many traditional ideas about the art of music have been called into question in New Music, most of its representatives cling to the narrative of masterpieces that transcend time - probably in the hope of making their own contribution to the canon. One could generously overlook this romantic anachronism of the avant-garde by glorifying it as a psychologically necessary part of an artist's existence that is advancing into unknown realms. One could. But fresh approaches are needed to give contemporary music a presence in the third millennium.

Let's try a thought experiment - instead of creating works for eternity, which are then only performed once, one could make a virtue of necessity: write pieces for the moment, for exactly one performance, unrepeatable. Or, to use an analogy: instead of immortalizing their names in dishes like the Filet Wellington, composers should stand behind the grill at McDonalds. Create music with the advantages of a hamburger - to be devoured quickly.

What would there be to gain from this? If you look at the development of the music industry, you can see that the previous business model is steadily disintegrating. The recording industry has been robbed of its sales market by free downloads, and the only way to earn money is from concerts. In pop music, the greats of the genre are therefore demanding ever higher ticket prices for increasingly elaborate live concerts, while in serious music the cult of performers is growing immeasurably. While their guest appearances are usually well attended, the halls otherwise remain half empty. The trend towards the concert as an extraordinary event must be taken up and consistently developed. In times of reproducibility and digital distribution of music, uniqueness and unrepeatability can become a decisive competitive advantage. Anticipating this development is a challenge, but also an opportunity, especially for new music.

There were already several approaches in this direction. The aleatoric style of the late 1950s, as exemplified in Stockhausen's Piano piece XI can be interpreted as an attempt to give a work a different form with each performance. The site-specific pieces by the Canadian R. Murray Schafer (*1933) are even more unique and thus have more of an event character. In the music theater The Princess of the Stars The acoustic conditions of the performance venue, a small lake outside Toronto, were incorporated into the composition. If you want to experience a performance of the work, you will have to travel to North America, for better or worse. It is only a small step from such ideas to conceiving compositions in such a way that they turn a particular concert into a unique, irretrievable event. We would then no longer talk about a "great moment" because keyboard player XY had a good day - but because we were there on the only occasion, the new piece.

Of course, such a concept requires the music to be adapted accordingly. Since the repetition of a piece is excluded, it should be understandable on a single hearing, for example. It should be quickly consumable and not require extensive explanations. But doesn't this contradict the self-image of New Music? Is the idea that experiments need time to be understood not constitutive of a musical attitude committed to progress? Certainly, but a look at the pre-classical past at least shows that it is possible to write sophisticated music even if you are not aiming for repeated performances or a more understanding posterity.

Composers such as Georg Philipp Telemann or Johann Sebastian Bach would never have dreamed that their music would continue to be performed after their death. Dead composers, even the most famous ones, were of historical value at best. Nevertheless, they devoted all their skills to creating works of the highest standard. Even a work like Telemann's Table musicby definition a piece of incidental music, subtly reveals the art of its author. In order not to defeat the purpose of a musique de table, i.e. not to disturb a courtly banquet with excessive expressivity, the score's refinements lie on a different level. It is Telemann's virtuoso mastery of a wide variety of genres and instrumentations that made him hope to achieve fame among his contemporaries with background music.

Bach's more than 200 cantatas can be taken as another example. Not only did he have to write a new one every week, he also had to rehearse it and perform it on Sunday. Nevertheless, the composer managed to capture the specific expressive content of each text and set it to music. He went to such lengths in the knowledge, or from today's perspective rather in the belief, that these works would only be performed once.

Admittedly, these two examples come from a social environment in which music took on functions that it can no longer fulfill today. Representation of power and the praise of God are not among the primary tasks of New Music. Nevertheless, they are able to show that the quality of the music need not suffer from the demands described above. Even quickly written pieces or concepts that can be grasped straight away can satisfy the highest aesthetic demands.

But what about the idea that advanced compositional techniques need time to establish themselves and become commonplace? I believe that the impact of time is overestimated. Here's a short anecdote: years ago, an old lady complained that there were no "great men" like Mozart or Beethoven left today. I replied rather defensively that this was not true, there was Schönberg. A remark that she only acknowledged with a mocking "Oh, the moderns". A composer who had already been dead for 50 years was still labeled as modern by the lady. So half a century was not enough to rob Schönberg's musical language of its neo-tonal nimbus. It therefore seems advisable for the avant-garde composer not to put too much stock in the future. So why not give hamburgers a try? And don't worry, it's not just geared towards consumption. McDonald's burgers may be swallowed quickly, but they stay in your stomach for a long time.
 

An earthworm feeds on soil and decaying plant material. It absorbs useful materials and excretes the crushed remains. This loosens up the soil, helps the plant decomposition process and produces fertile humus. This in turn is needed by the plants, which draw nutrients from it and turn the humus back into ordinary soil. According to the media theorist and philosopher Vilém Flusser, our society today functions in a similar way: as humans, we absorb "nature" and utilize it to create "culture". Over time, the cultural goods produced in this way become waste, they lose their value and decay back into "nature". Or at least to material that has become culturally useless and therefore valueless. This value-free material can now be recycled. An eternal cycle of value-free-utilization-valuable-worthless-value-free etc.

This model can be applied to the relationship between new music and consumption. I understand consumption as a mechanism that tries to sell products as widely as possible. New music is not known for designing its products for broad saleability. It is a type of music that tends to turn away from consumption. Instead, New Music sees itself as the spearhead of Flusser's exploitation process. It is, so to speak, the mouth that appropriates and valorizes things that are considered worthless - in this case, for example, sounds. The European and American music history of the 20th century can tell us a thing or two about the emancipation of dissonance and noise. At the beginning of the century, dissonance was established as a new tonal language by Arnold Schönberg's atonal and twelve-tone music, among others, and thus made valuable. Over the course of the century, mere noise was then culturally valorized as musical material.

But these achievements of New Music seep away over time - like the digestive process of the earthworm - and sink into other areas. The cluster-like dissonances of Stravinsky or Schönberg have become common techniques in film music and the "trademark sound" of terrifying horror scenes. The sampling of hip-hop can be seen as a successor to the tape techniques introduced by musique concrète. And in an SRF program on minimal music (Music of our timein May 2016), composer and conductor Irmin Schmidt explains that he founded the German krautrock band Can after coming into contact with the minimal music of Terry Riley and LaMonte Young in New York in 1966. Mind you, this was after he had studied with Karlheinz Stockhausen and György Ligeti.

New music is therefore not a self-contained area in which high culture is celebrated and consumption has no place. New music techniques and concepts are constantly seeping into other areas that are more inclined towards consumption.

But what about the other way around? Do sounds, methods and techniques from more consumer-oriented areas of music also penetrate the sphere of new music? One example: in 2013, Hannes Seidl composed a piece with the unwieldy title The last 25 years in No. 1 hits of the German annual charts represented by Karlheinz Stockhausen's study 2 5x. The piece can be seen as a "cover" of the Study II by Karlheinz Stockhausen (premiere 1954). The Study II is composed solely of electronically generated sine tones and is considered an early milestone in electronic music. Stockhausen created an elaborate score for it, which enables anyone to "recreate" the piece. Seidl did this for The last 25 years did. However, he didn't use sine tones as the basis for this, but rather the No. 1 hits in the German charts from 1988 to 2013.

On the one hand, Seidl's piece is an example of the fact that sounds from pop music are now also being used in new music, meaning that there is not only a tendency for new music to seep into consumer-oriented music, but also vice versa. On the other hand, the "earthworm" Hannes Seidl not only used pop hits from 1988 to 2013 as "fodder", but also Stockhausen's Study II. One could conclude from this that not only the pop hits of the day before yesterday, but also the Study II von Stockhausen have now become worthless "waste". At this point, however, it should be noted that Flusser's earthworm model is always based on a certain perspective. As far as complexity, striving for renewal, formalism or elitism are concerned, for example, New Music belongs to the spearhead of music. As far as categories such as sales figures or radio suitability are concerned, the pop charts would beat New Music hands down. From this perspective, both Stockhausen's Study II as well as Seidl's The last 25 years pretty worthless.

Hannes Seidl combines in The last 25 years The recycling cycles of new music and pop music in a critical way. By recycling the Stockhausen piece using pop hits, he refers to the classic status of Study IIwhich - according to the mechanisms of pop music - can therefore be covered. At the same time, he ascribes a certain outdated aesthetic to the piece, which he tries to renew in an ironic way by using the already outdated pop hits. Both the No. 1 hits and the Study II are passé. But the half-lives are different.

The parallels go even further. New music is certainly not subject to the mechanisms of the consumer-oriented market in the same way as the music of the latest pop stars, but even noble new music is not entirely free of sales arguments. Although it is largely created in a space protected by subsidies and endowments, promotional aspects also play a role in New Music. However, success manifests itself less in ticket and CD sales than in the interest and willingness of cultural committees, foundations and competition juries to provide funding.

This raises the question of whether New Music should not have the task of addressing and questioning these wishes of jury members, consumers, etc. rather than satisfying them. According to Clement Greenberg's famous essay from 1939 Avant-Garde and Kitsch imitates and thematizes the avant-garde (which may include New Music), which Processes of art, while its counterpart, kitsch, the Effects imitates art. Accordingly, new music that still deserves the "new" in its name must relate to the processes of art and today's artistic landscape. Quoting, questioning and criticizing one's own discipline is therefore a necessary condition for interesting results. This goes hand in hand with Seidl's insight that new music and consumption are not quite as antagonistic as one might think.

Who isn't familiar with that weaker self that tempts you to slip into comfy clothes on a Friday evening after a hard week at work and make yourself comfortable on the sofa with a glass of wine or a cold beer? There's nothing wrong with ringing in the end of the working day in this way. But once you've settled in comfortably, hardly anyone gives a second thought to how such an attitude affects music consumption.

Live concert in an upholstered chair vs. enjoying music on the sofa at home? While some people like to get dressed up and experience the artists up close, others prefer to listen to music from the bathtub, while cooking or on the aforementioned sofa. But do the two forms of music consumption have to be played off against each other?

First of all, it's quite simple. You choose a concert and buy a concert ticket, which is now possible with just a few clicks on the Internet. Now it's just a matter of getting dressed up and arriving at the right place on time - everything else is taken care of. There is staff for every conceivable task - you don't even have to clap yourself, because even that is taken care of by the listeners in case of doubt. So you can sit back and let the music wash over you. Nevertheless, the trend is increasingly moving towards private music consumption within your own four walls. Why is the attendance at many concerts falling, even though it is so easy?

Access to music changed significantly in the 19th century. Concert halls were expanded and the music scene flourished. Focused listening was at the forefront of the musical experience at this time. Since the 20th century, music has undergone, or rather had to undergo, enormous change. The unstoppable development of technology has also left its mark on the cultural and music scene. We have matured into a veritable consumer society that has to deal with the luxury problem of oversupply, a society in which many subcultures exist side by side, in which people increasingly isolate themselves from the environment and view music more as a private and less as a public experience. Thanks to today's numerous technical possibilities, from iTunes and Spotify to private CD collections and high-tech systems, we no longer have to go out in public to enjoy music. We can also bring it into our own homes. We are just as isolated even within society, sealed off by small earplugs that allow music to reach our ears. Is this the consumer of today? We can speak here of a veritable deconcentration of music. At this point, however, it is necessary to once again clarify the two types of music listening: On the one hand, "consciously turning to music" (in the sense of actively attending concerts), and on the other, "divided attention, in which music is merely experienced in the background and other activities are usually in the foreground", to quote Klaus-Ernst Behne, the former president of the Hanover University of Music, Drama and Media.

Nevertheless, technical progress naturally also brings numerous advantages. The practical and convenient aspect alone. We can listen to music anytime and anywhere. Without restriction. It surrounds us in numerous everyday situations and rains down on our end devices incessantly. Played back using the latest technology, the music may sound clear, but it is not authentic, unique or original. Consuming music as a live experience becomes an unrepeatable moment in our lives. You experience something that cannot be exactly repeated in this form. You experience the artists and the sounds up close, you can observe their dexterity or breathing skills and technique. You are there when they communicate wordlessly with each other, get involved with each other, see the beads of sweat that form on their foreheads through exertion and the hot spotlight and glisten in the light. Simply being carried away by the pull of live music and allowing the atmosphere that builds up in the audience to flow over you - that is what makes music in concert a tangible and original moment.

Studies show that music consumption has risen considerably in recent years due to the numerous ways in which it can be accessed. But does this answer the question of why people prefer listening to music in isolation to attending concerts together? According to the Forsa survey conducted by the Hamburg-based Körber Foundation, 88% of Germans consider classical music to be an important cultural heritage, but only one in five has attended a classical concert in the past year. Of those under 30, only one in ten did. That's just the way it is: If you don't have to be active, you are generally enthusiastic about many things, but as soon as you have to do something yourself, your enthusiasm wanes. This fact is even more of a problem for contemporary music, which is also tainted by the cliché that it generally only appeals to the few. However, attending a concert is particularly important for the consumption of contemporary music, as it often works not only with sounds and melodies, but often also incorporates elements such as images or objects that cannot be captured on a CD. Even musical elements such as sounds or new playing techniques do not have the same effect on a CD as they can have in a concert. Only in concert does the audience experience the original essence of this music. So is it perhaps worth considering sharing your weekend with the upholstered chair in the concert hall?

Both forms of consumption are important approaches to music. They do not have to be played off against each other, nor are they mutually dependent. They can simply enrich and complement each other. It will be interesting to see how they develop in the future and what this means for the music scene. Perhaps one day it will be commonplace to broadcast a live concert virtually on a screen in our own four walls? This would actually make it possible to combine both: the concert experience on the sofa at home - and for the feeling of community with the other concert-goers, you could sit on the upholstered chair from time to time.

 At the end of March, in New York, sheep were bleating on the opera stage. Their almost omnipresent presence in the newspapers, on social networks, even in everyday conversations of all kinds, made it almost impossible to avoid them. As they only played a small role in the production of Louis Andriessen's De Matter their dominance in the New York media seemed surprising. However, this example is indicative of the American approach to new music.

The fact that sheep wandered across the stage should not have been so remarkable. However, the occasion was the reopening of the recently renovated Armory. The acting animals appeared in Heiner Goebbels' production of the anti-opera, which was created for the Ruhrtriennale in 2014. De Matter is a piece by the composer Andriessen, often performed in the USA, which had its American premiere ten years earlier. At that time, however, the New York Philharmonic performed it in concert, which made the new production of the piece, written between 1985 and 1988, an exciting happening. The New York Park Avenue Armory acquired the production - the second staged performance of the play since Robert Wilson premiered it at Amsterdam's Muziektheater in 1989. Goebbels had conceived his production for the Kraftzentrale Duisburg with the Ensemble Modern Orchestra and the ChorWerk Ruhr under the direction of Peter Rundel. Now it was time to consider how the production from the Ruhr could be staged in the Armory and adapted to New York and the New York audience.

ChorWerk Ruhr and the conductor also performed in New York. However, the young International Contemporary Ensemble, which was also heard in Darmstadt this year, replaced the Ensemble Modern Orchestra. Goebbels' static, visually rich production and Andriessen's equally static four-part work lent themselves to a spectacular advertising campaign, a perfect union of the powerful symbolism of Goebbels' work with the magnificent grandeur of the Armory built in the 19th century. The Gilded Age is expressed in 2016 in the form of highly educated New York hipsters, for whose need for bourgeois showmanship the east side of New York is better suited than the Met, located on the other side of the park. In this regard, a review of the performance in the Wall Street Journal explicitly: "The Park Avenue Armory has also become a home of the hot ticket, offering buzz-worthy productions that are often imported from generously funded European arts festivals."1 A basic building block of the American opera world is new European works that are in demand and whose marketability has already been successfully tested. However, another crucial element plays a role in such performances: artistic creations have very often already received financial support in Europe.

Shortly before the performance of De Matter various New York newspapers published a series of announcements about the future event. What was remarkable was their almost exclusive focus on the 100 sheep that could be admired on stage in the last act of the play. What kind of sheep were they? Where exactly did they come from? (The program booklet simply stated: "100 sheep from the Pennyslvanian countryside.") How was it logistically possible to bring the sheep to New York? How do you rehearse with sheep? Are sheep the latest prima donnas of the opera world? Supposed answers to all these questions could be found in abundance in the many portraits of these new "stars" - sometimes even in the New York Times and the New Yorker. With such urgent questions, the music must of course be left to one side for the first time.

The other image that dominated the advertising campaign was a tableau from the second part of the play, in which Andriessen set a vision of the beguine Hadewijch to music. Hadewijch, dressed in a black and white costume resembling a nun's habit, stands in front of the foremost bench, while a group of beguines dressed entirely in black lie collapsed on the other benches scattered around the room. The hall has been transformed into a cathedral, and Hadewijch stands in the center, facing the audience, her arms wide open in a sign of revelation and union. The audience has become the altar, the god of her mystical-erotic vision. Above this sparse image is the name of the anti-opera in capital letters: "DE MATERIE": a transcendental union of the strong visual material of the production with the marketing department of the Armory.

The power of such an association should by no means be underestimated, as it is unimaginable in the USA to receive state support for artistic projects. This is especially true for opera projects, of course. The constant search for money is an everyday affliction of a musician's life that is imperceptible to the consumer, but no less serious for that. Hence the ease with which it is made fun of. Basically, however, respect and appreciation would be appropriate: without the tasteless, bold and seemingly bottomless marketing of a production, it might not exist - a bitter truth that one learns to swallow quickly.
In the case of the Andriessen-Goebbels production, the spectacle of the marketing was adapted to the spectacle of the production. If that is the price to be paid for the performance of a late 20th century work of musical theater that is particularly important in the USA, there is almost nothing wrong with it. However, when every performance of a 20th century opera (not to mention the 21st) at an established institution is habitually described with a self-congratulatory tone as a gamble, one quickly tires of this description and the accompanying publicity spectacle. This is especially the case when the author of this work is a permanent guest at Ivy League universities - Andriessen was a visiting professor at Princeton in the winter semester of 2015/16 - and has a long list of composition students in the USA. Andriessen's music is, after all, an already consumed, established product among us Americans.
 

Then you have to think like the previously quoted author of the Wall Street Journals ask why it takes the import of a European production to see the first staged performance of a nearly 30-year-old opera on this side of the Atlantic. Not that there are no world premieres of new music in the USA, but they are rarely seen in established institutions. In the coming season, one could argue, Kaija Saariaho's 2000 Salzburg premiere of L'amour de loin at the Met in a new production by Robert Lepage. However, in the wake of the announcement in the New York Times did not lead to any serious discussion of Saariaho's music. Instead, there was merely talk of the fact that now, in 2016, it was the first performance of the opera by a female composer since 1903. "Met to Stage Its First Opera by a Woman Since 1903" was the title. 2 This is undoubtedly cause for celebration! However, the self-congratulatory tone that proclaims that two birds have been killed with one stone: a female composer and a 21st century opera, is anything but contemporary. With this soft-core contemporary music, whose constantly recurring, exotic-sounding vocal riffs float in waves above a buzzing, coloristic orchestral sound carpet, this "glimpse into the future" - according to Met director Peter Gelb - can still be described as tame and restrained.
This ultimately leads to the well-known question of money. Even if the power of the Republicans were to diminish at some point, state funding for the arts would still not be a point of discussion in the Senate. What could be demanded, however, despite the eternally precarious state of the opera institutions and the media that announce and discuss their offerings, would be a serious and critical or self-critical examination of their content. This would first and foremost require the abandonment of such sheep portraits, which only serve to fill the concert halls. Instead, the sheep could be exposed and described as a failed attempt to find a stopgap. However, this was also Goebbels' attempt to entertain the audience with his staging in the 15-minute first half of the fourth part, during which two chords in the tunable percussion instruments (glockenspiel, vibraphone), piano and harp are played in slow alternation. One could ask whether the static imagery of the staging supports or questions the fetishization of the erotic-mystical writing of the Beguine Hadewijch in Andriessen's score. Finally, one could even ask whether and how Goebbels' examination of Andriessen's opera teaches the audience something new about the piece. In any case, the one hundred sheep on the stage of the Armory were not the only impressive event to marvel at.