RADU MALFATTI darenootodesuka

The pureness of sounds can be easily clouded by a musician’s individuality, which can overshadow the music with a strong statement or emotion or tendency. When this happens, the world of music is narrowed and limited to the musician’s own small sphere, which can fade as time goes by due to its narrowness. What Malfatti seems to want to achieve is to clear this cloud away. By attempting to minimize the performers’ expressions or tendencies, his goal is to create the clearest air or the environment for the sounds to be born in the purest form. This approach can be seen in his 2012 release darenootodesuka. The CD title darenootodesuka means ‘whose sound is it?’ In fact, the borders between all the performers’ sounds in this piece are very ambiguous. The listener is suggested to play the CD ‘very quietly’ according to the liner notes. Here, the six performers – Antoine Beuger (flute), Jürg Frey (clarinet), Marcus Kaiser (cello), Michael Pisaro (guitar), Burkhard Schlothauer (violin) and Malfatti (trombone), play sounds very quietly and very slowly, as if they were trying to dissolve their individualities into the environment. Their sounds are all unified in a simple, similar tone color – like pale gray, evoking in me a calm wind blowing through an uninhabited landscape. This simplicity, where no performer’s strong individualities are demonstrated, imparts a serene beauty to this piece. (Yuko Zama)

duo Contour FREY - BEUGER duos

"Two sets of pieces written for the duo Contour (Stephen Altoff-trumpet, Lee Forrest Ferguson-percussion), a potentially unwieldy combination. Frey's "22 sachelchen" (small things) is rather just that, 22 miniatures lasting 32 1/2 minutes that vary from quiet reductionism to outright fanfares. I guess some of the latter sort are a bit...shocking, at least in a Wandelweiser context. But there are also oblique references to jazz (the mute in no. 11), processional music (the tympani in no. 13) and much else. For me, however, that resulted in something of a grab bag effect, a series of disconnected bagatelles, some attractive (no. 17, a lovely quasi-scale, and the closing section), some bland (all finely played, I should say), some annoyingly blaring, that added up to a cabinet drawer of odds and ends. Beuger takes his time and the results bear him out. Five sections in his "dedicated duos" (the dedicatee being the mathematician Julius Dedekind, an associate of Cantor), and they don't stray all that far from one another--quiet, considered, the instruments often creating parallel lines of sound, not so different from what label-mate Michael Pisaro does with sine tone and acoustic instruments. Indeed, I was often reminded of some of the quieter moments from Greg Kelley over the past years. Very pure, very calm, each tone or duo of tones shimmering in its own space, receding, allowing the next to surface. Lovely work, worth it on its own." (Brian Olewnick)

Jürg Frey BEUGER - CAGE

Clarinetist Jürg Frey performs two works, one composed by Antoine Beuger and one by John Cage, both related to time, or of becoming and of unceasing becoming, pieces using silence in powerful sound structures, contrasting empty moments with the complexity of individual sound. 

 "The movement which occurs throughout the program played here by Jürg Frey, is one of becoming, of unceasing becoming; that means: of time. Becoming has no starting point and no desire to reach a close. lt cannot be localized. lt is unseizable, even in the smallest interval between two points in time. lt occurs imperceptibly, in the simultaneity of "not yet" and "already gone". Becoming is never presence. That is why becoming occurs in silence. lt appears as though nothing takes place - then, as it turns out, something irreversible has happened.

In "dialogues (silence)" by Antoine Beuger; this concept is made perceptible. Each sound structure is preceded and followed by silence. Between the silence after a sound structure and the silence before the next one, one hears the sound of a page being turned: the sound of silence between the silences.

When music abandons itself to complexity, tapping into the infinity of possible differences in sound, becoming also occurs, as it were, while one's back is turned. lt is never equal to what is going on, but merely passes through.

"Music for One" by John Cage is characterized by the presence of both directions: infinite extension of the moment in silence; infinite diminution of the time-space in complexity. lt is however not the diversity which distinguishes this music, but its equanimity." (Editions Wandelweiser)

SUIDOBASHI CHAMBER ENSEMBLE

Suidobashi Chamber Ensemble (SCE), formed in spring 2016 on the initiative of flute player Wakana Ikeda, is a chamber group which periodically performs contemporary / experimental music concerts. The five members are Wakana Ikeda, Yoko Ikeda (viola), Aya Naito (bassoon), Masahiko Okura (clarinet, bass clarinet), and Taku Sugimoto (guitar). In concerts held at Ftarri, Tokyo, in May and July 2016, SCE performed works by the composers of the Wandelweiser group. The five tracks on this album include performances from those two concerts, plus pieces recorded at Ftarri with no audience in attendance. Consisting of works composed by Jürg Frey, Michael Pisaro and Antoine Beuger, this album is a Wandelweiser group collection.

ANTOINE BEUGER Ockeghem Octets

1996-1998 I had been focusing on solo music or, as i would call it now: music for solo situations, exploring in what ways solitude (as opposed to loneliness) can be reflected and experienced meaningfully in a musical situation.

1998 my musical exploration of  “being two”, of the duo, started and is still continuing. you certainly noticed, that a lot of my music is duo music, or: music about “being two”, or, more radically, about love. I strongly believe, that of all the arts, music, the art of sounds appearing and disappearing, the art of approximation (in tuning, timing, sound balancing …), can be the most reminiscent, commemorative, resonant of the single most important event, that human beings may experience in their lives: love. And if music can be this, it should be this. Especially in the constellation that is by itself closest to a love relationship: the duo. 

2003, very much inspired by Alain Badiou’s book Number and Numbers, a study of number with a very strong political subtext, it occurred to me, that the number of people, which constitute a group, might have an essential impact on what can happen, which kind of interactions, of sub-groupings etc. may emerge in such a group.

In other words: that going from 1 to 2, or from 2 to 3, etc. is not just adding one, but shifting from one situation to another, different one. Badiou’s book encouraged me to think of each number as having its own “ontology”, constituting its own special “world”, as it were.

My idea then was to create a series of musical situations in which all players do the same: play very long, very soft tones. So it is not their being different from each other, that primarily shapes the musical situation, but their number, their “being two”, their “being five”, …

Of course, the shifts are more overtly dramatic with the smaller numbers, as in real life. But continuing my search I was really surprised, how even situations like “being eleven” or “being seventeen” may induce very specific worlds. 

Since 2010 Johnny Chang has been putting the series into practice in Berlin, this way allowing the ensemble Konzert Minimal to gradually emerge along the growing number of players involved in the pieces.

Last year ‘van riel tunings for fifteen’ was performed. (Antoine Beuger)