Shanna Pranaitis / Frauke Albert CLAUS-STEFFEN MAHNKOPF Flute Music

FLUTE MUSIC

Österreichisches Ensemble für Neue Musik / Rüdiger Bohn / Claudia Barainsky GYÖRGY KURTÁG Botschaften des verstorbenen Fräuleins R.V. Trussowa JÖRG WIDMANN … umdüstert …

In different ways the music of György Kurtág and Jörg Widmann can be described as an individual, productive dialogue with musical stimulations of the past. This is evidenced in Kurtág’s works by the great breadth of musical forms that he references, extending from the traditional triad by way of highly diverse canonic techniques onto the use of noise – mostly articulated in fragment-like miniatures or in cyclical compositions consisting of such miniatures. In contrast, Widmann is gravitated to the musical expressions of Romanticism and tends to connect their possibilities to his personal ways of sound exploration. 

Kurtág’s cycle Messages of the Late Miss R.V. Troussova for soprano and chamber orchestra, op. 17 (1976–1980), which treats of the failure of human relations, is based on the poems by the Russian poet Rimma Dalos. In language as grotesque as it is drastic and at the limits of self-respect, it lays out one woman’s ideas about loneliness, exhibitionism, and deprivation. 

Widmann focuses on the sculpting of sounds: individual instrumental textures of variable density alternate and thereby initiate a process of slipping in and out of different tonal qualities that grows ever thinner toward the end until it finally dissolves into quiet fragments. The word “umdüstert” occurred frequently in Romantic literature, and this fading out of the composition can certainly be read as an indication of an existential point of reference of the music.

ICI Ensemble OLGA NEUWIRTH Who am I? - No more

The title ‘Composer in Dialogue’ stands for a biennial cooperation between the ICI Ensemble and a contemporary figure, the aim of which is to create a kind of ‘work in progress’ through composition itself but also by involving improvisational forms. Performances of pieces thus created remain the intention. The present recording documents an ICI concert with the composer Olga Neuwirth. 

Olga Neuwirth began her musical career on the trumpet, before she embraced composition as her favoured means of expression. She remains one of today’s most important protagonists in the field. She can thank exchanges with Adriana Hölszky and Luigi Nono, studies with Tristan Murail, and a befriended author, Elfriede Jelinek, for the path her professional life took. 

Olga Neuwirth meets an ICI Ensemble whose calling card is a kind of improvised music that draws on Afro-American roots. Here we must look to Vinko Globokar, Barry Guy, Giancarlo Schiaffini, and George E. Lewis for any explanation. NEOS will now release, after the duo CD JOMO (Johanna Varner & Mary Oliver), the second recording in the ICI Edition. 

The most exciting thing about this meeting of musical minds is the feeling that opposites impinge on each other. Here, that which is composed comes into head-on conflict with what has been – or can be – improvised. This simultaneity of determination and random coincidence, the inherent paradox of which is something that especially interests Olga Neuwirth, guarantees friction. As for the medium of live electronics and the use of samples, which have such an important bearing on the way instruments actually sound, these too point in this direction. 

Olga Neuwirth likes to describe her music as ‘music for catastrophes’, because just beneath the surface with its confusing patterns of sound – ones which resemble a series of labyrinths – there is a dark undertow that suddenly takes the music in new and unexpected directions. This is how she enables the listener to take part in a virtuosic deconstruction, and experience how sounds are perceived. What are called into question are our aural habits. And what is born is the impingement of possible associations. 

Two works emerged as joint projects and were premiered: the first, Who Am I?, is a composition that uses musically heterogeneous material and fragments of Kafka’s Letter to his Father, these excerpts read, however, by a woman. In the second work, No More, Olga Neuwirth incorporates her own writings with lines from the songs of Frank Zappa as well as providing us with an instrumental song, one that “continues to return and which is ‘worked through’, as in the process of Psychoanalysis”, to quote the composer. At the end, only vague reminiscences of The Long Rain remain. (Gunnar Geisse)

PHACE / ensemble recherche ARTURO FUENTES Space Factory

The Mexican composer Arturo Fuentes (born in 1975) arrived in Europe in 1997; his musical path led him from Milan, Paris and Vienna to his current home in Innsbruck. He has studied with Franco Donatoni in Milan and Horacio Vaggione in Paris. Arturo Fuentes composes instrumental music, electronic music and conceives new musical theater projects that combine dance, video and electronics. His music is characterized as a meticulously organized kaleidoscopic chaos that explores the frontiers of dynamics, color, texture and virtuosity. This music unveils a constantly evolving sculptural design; you perceive a sonic space occupied by constant agitation – it’s research into an aerial tonality.

Regardless of the form, the creative process for the piece is always “ongoing”. Arturo Fuentes likes to define his work as an “emerging form”. In a paraphrase of the painter Paul Klee who claimed to “take a walk with a line”, Fuentes writes: “I select a sonorous line and walk with it. The breaks in the line, changes in speed, suspended moments, etc. – all of these things lead to the emergence of a sonorous form and musical context.”

His reference to painting is no coincidence. Arturo Fuentes proposes that you listen to his music like a “fusion of colors within a dome full of grain”. The sonorous texture and the instrumental synthesis are the elements that correspond to this idea of color in his music. For him, you rediscover another form of emergence in his work; as in a tableau, the forms emerge from the mix of colors.

However, even if Arturo Fuentes sees the form of his works like a labyrinthine path in which he loses the discursive musical line in order to regain it after several detours, it seems very important to him that a logical dramaturgy appears in the work – a veritable guideline that steers the listener to a discovery of a sonorous world. Textures, colors and labyrinths are all abstract ideas that enable you to grasp his music.

Neos presents a collection of music from Mexican composer Arturo Fuentes, performed by the PHACE Ensemble and Ensemble Recherche. "I ran into Arturo Fuentes for the first time at IRCAM, in the late '90s. He talked to me for a long time about his passion for logic and analytic philosophy, quoting Quine and Wittgenstein. His music, which I discovered later on, did surprisingly contradict the expectations that were arisen from those discussions. Instead of the crystal-clear development and the rational see-throughness I was waiting for, I got lost in a charmingly chaotic and obsessive sound world, whose rich, frenetic textures seemed to dwell in the shadow cast by language, in the 'ineffable' evoked by Wittgenstein, that region, quoting Giorgio Agamben, where 'the language stops and the matter of words begins.'" (Mauro Lanza)