Description
Kammermusik V marks the end of a series of ensemble pieces that have not insignificantly contributed or marked various stations of my compositorical development. It was only after “Kammermusik IV” that I became aware of a certain logic of succession and an inherent type of compositorical problem in all five pieces. In other words, the series was never been planned like this from the beginning in 1989. Furthermore, “Kammermusik
II” from 1991 is, from my point of view, a kind of premonition of musical but also expressive features that – because of various reasons – I did not go into more deeply until the early years of the new millenium. I revised “Kammermusik I” completely in 2006. A revision of my own works had never been done before, except certain changes in instrumentation or dynamics which cannot be regarded as real revisions (read: change in
real substance). Rather I would have withdrawn a piece that I could not accept anymore. So far, this has happened in only two cases.
With “Kammermusik I”, a withdrawal seemed inconvinient because the basic substance of the compositi was still ideal for the opening of the series, and even a substantial revision would not change the main idea too much. So for me, it still is a piece from 1989, revised in 2006!
While “Kammermusik I and III” are mainly signified by musical-technical aspects or problems of psychoacoustic perception, “Kammermusik II, IV and V” also contain increasingly personal “issues” of mine as a human being and a concerned artist. But as in all similar cases, these elements are transformed in such a way that they are a kind of “private and hidden heritage” and only represent a certain catalytic function for the composition.
Seen in terms of its instrumentation, “Kammermusik V” is the biggest composition of the series with 27 players and therefore may be better called a chamber orchestra piece. However, the peculiar way of composition – the individual approach to every instrument or instrumental groups – urged me to keep the title “Kammermusik”.
In “Kammermusik V”, mainly psychological elements within groups, including aspects of hierarchy, play an important role. Musical “individuals” (who could also be manifested by groups) are in a discourse of “soundspacial” conflicts. Between the extremes of “complete melting together” and “complete isolation”, the music moves in a constant flow of different stadiums of the respective relationships or non-relationships.
In this way, the composition is last but not least a mirror of our actual inter-human and inter-cultural conflict of communication that moves equally between such extremes like speechlessness, falling silent, superficiality, and arbitrariness all the way up to an overload of information or overstimulation, which perhaps are in fact the sources of that speechlessness.
This is where the circle completes itself. I do not want to paint a dark picture of the final Armageddon. However I would like to point to the urgent necessity of the ongoing cultivation of direct human contact and interrelationships as something too fundamental
to mankind to be forgotten, far beyond any text messages, mobile phones, e-mail and other disturbing tools of mutual alienation. During the finalisation of this piece, one of my closed friends and joint “fighter” for Contemporary Music, the pianist Hansjörg Koch, died much too soon after a long fight. This piece is dedicated in remembrance of one of the
most honest people I ever met in my life.
