Saturday, February 9, 2013
The Group Photo
Every school trip, I learned some time in Elementary School, is incomplete without a wonderful group photo - its participants tired and in varying states of smiling ability, but nevertheless thrilled to be there. This photo was taken at Sanssouci Park in Potsdam on the second to last full day in Germany - perhaps you can see on our faces the full impact of the absolutely fascinating experience we were almost done with.
L-R: Kevin Dee, Sivan Silver-Swartz, Jessie Downs, Doug Farrand, Dan Gostelow, Tony Risotto, Elise Moltz.
Friday, February 1, 2013
Recollections- day 13
Tuesday January 29th: last full day in Berlin. Initially intended as a free day for packing we found ourselves at noon attending a lecture given by musicologist and performer Bob Gilmore on the music of Horatiu Radulescu at the UdK.
Good currywurst for lunch.
Later that evening a final dinner with all 8 of us along with Mark Barden, Wolfgang Heiniger, Seth Josel and Ashley Fure (another Oberlin alum who had taught private lessons and a seminar in Oberlin during the Spring 2012 semester).
Good currywurst for lunch.
Later that evening a final dinner with all 8 of us along with Mark Barden, Wolfgang Heiniger, Seth Josel and Ashley Fure (another Oberlin alum who had taught private lessons and a seminar in Oberlin during the Spring 2012 semester).
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| Last Berlin Breakfast |
Recollections- day 12
Monday January 28th: Day trip to Potsdam. Morning spent walking around the grounds of the Sanssouci palaces, afternoon spent talking with a professor at the film music university in Babelsburg.
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| Elise, Jessie, Sivan, Josh, Kevin, Daniel (distance) |
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| Mushroom |
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| Ubahn back to Berlin; Daniel, Elise, Sivan, Josh (reflection), Tony, Kevin |
Recollections: day 11
Sunday January 27th: Many different activities today. Jessie, Elise, Tony, Sivan and I had an extensive conversation on the practicalities of sitting down to compose over breakfast at a favourite turkish coffee shop on Friedrichstraße. In the afternoon Jessie, Kevin and Daniel went to see Der Rosenkavelier at the komische oper while Elise, Tony and Sivan headed to Neukölln to catch a performance of pieces by Michael Pisaro, Stefan Thut and Alvin Lucier (a recording of which is available here). Intending also to see the latter but having had my efforts thwarted by a succession of closed S-bahn stations, getting hopelessly lost, and late trains, I spent my afternoon walking through the increasingly rain-like snow getting a sense for tiergarten's many nested spaces.
Recollections- day 10
Saturday January 26th: Last full concert day today. Very long afternoon, three "piano+" concerts featuring trio catch- an impressive and very young piano cello clarinet ensemble, and one of several all or mostly female ensembles represented in the festival.
piano+ 1, 3pm: Only managed to catch the second half of the concert, featuring two works by Xenakis and one by Jörg Widmann. I have little to no memory of Widmann's piece, other than that I enjoyed it quite a bit. The two Xenakis pieces were thrilling to hear live. Paille in the wind from 1992 is a striking miniature, belongs to a certain category of Xenakis works that maintain the visceral intensity that he is so well known for despite being materially seemingly quite distant from his most well known works. Simple in both form and material, large block chords in the piano and a strained, plaintive line in the cello, simple enough that it doesn't quite come across as solo and accompaniment. Something quite brutal about its bareness. Charisma for clarinet and cello I remember as moving through a series of durations of various grains and consistencies.
piano+ 2, 5pm: A challenging marathon of listening, Arnold Schönberg's complete solo piano repertoire, each set of pieces interspersed with a selection from Lei Liang's My Windows. At points totally compelling, particularly the beginning of Fünf Klavierstücke op. 23, but inevitably draining and largely characterised by struggling to maintain the attention these pieces require, regardless of how compelling the performance was. This was followed by a very quiet clarinet cello piano piece by Beat Furrer and a strange set of two miniatures by Franco Donatoni.
piano+ 3, 7pm: By this point totally drained and very hungry. What I'm sure was quite a beautiful song by Aribert Reimann slipped by, at which point my hunger developed into a tangible hatred for the long, subtle and incredibly quiet trio ... als 1... by Mark Andre, before turning into a neutral apathy- waiting for food- during the final Aperghis piece. Alas.
Definitely a more stomachable presentation of so much music than had it been lumped into a single 6 hour concert. Very much enjoyed hearing trio catch play, and the Schönberg marathon was an interesting listening experience- but ultimately proved to be too much at the end of 10 days of almost constant live music listening.
piano+ 1, 3pm: Only managed to catch the second half of the concert, featuring two works by Xenakis and one by Jörg Widmann. I have little to no memory of Widmann's piece, other than that I enjoyed it quite a bit. The two Xenakis pieces were thrilling to hear live. Paille in the wind from 1992 is a striking miniature, belongs to a certain category of Xenakis works that maintain the visceral intensity that he is so well known for despite being materially seemingly quite distant from his most well known works. Simple in both form and material, large block chords in the piano and a strained, plaintive line in the cello, simple enough that it doesn't quite come across as solo and accompaniment. Something quite brutal about its bareness. Charisma for clarinet and cello I remember as moving through a series of durations of various grains and consistencies.
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| Paille in the wind; trio catch |
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| Charisma; trio catch |
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| View outside the venue, Radialsystem V |
piano+ 3, 7pm: By this point totally drained and very hungry. What I'm sure was quite a beautiful song by Aribert Reimann slipped by, at which point my hunger developed into a tangible hatred for the long, subtle and incredibly quiet trio ... als 1... by Mark Andre, before turning into a neutral apathy- waiting for food- during the final Aperghis piece. Alas.
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| preparing the piano for Mark Andre's ...als 1.... |
Definitely a more stomachable presentation of so much music than had it been lumped into a single 6 hour concert. Very much enjoyed hearing trio catch play, and the Schönberg marathon was an interesting listening experience- but ultimately proved to be too much at the end of 10 days of almost constant live music listening.
Recollections- day 9
Friday January 25th: A few of us up and out for a morning walk by about 9:30am. S-Bahn up to Brandenburger Tor and then a walk back down to the hostel through Tiergarten- a park situated in the middle of Berlin featuring some imposing monuments and statues, lots of trees, canals and small ponds, and supposedly a wild boar population. Coming out of the bottom of Tiergarten we walked past the back of the Philharmonie, home of the Berlin Philharmonic, and stumbled across a Richard Serra sculpture close to the site of a planned Aktion T4 memorial (Aktion T4 was a Nazi euthanasia programme focused primarily on those with physical and mental disabilities).
Full afternoon of Richard Barrett. First a two hour presentation on his recent work CONSTRUCTION (score pdf here, essay about the piece here), a mammoth evening long cycle of 20 pieces for voices, instruments and electronics. The presentation, lasting roughly as long as the piece itself, was a sort of guided tour of the trajectories arching over the entire piece, in terms of material transformations, following the evolution of the main themes of the piece- those of utopian visions on one hand and their confrontation with the realities of social and political organisation and change on the other- and the changing balance between composed music, improvised music and the various notation strategies used to access places imbetween. Following a break for coffee we returned to the Hans Eisler hochschüle for masterclasses, in which Kevin, Elise and I presented our pieces again.
Friday evening presented somewhat of a dilemma, on the one hand a 140 minute late Stockhausen solo piano cycle (itself from the larger cycle KLANG, a series of 24 chamber compositions that I think contains a lot of Stockhausen's most striking work) or a non-Ultraschall improvisation concert featuring Jonas Kocher, an accordion player who had played in Oberlin earlier during the Fall 2012 semester. We ultimately opted for the improv concert. The first and last sets, a solo cello realisation of a graphic score and a song, both performed by Nathan Bontrager (American musician recently relocated to Köln) and a cello and percussion duet by Noid and Michael Vorfeld were lively and engaging pieces of music. Nathan's playing covered an incredibly wide range of material, eventually coming together nicely as the quick shifts and changes of the cello improvisation functioned as a compellingly turbulent canvas for the more continuous song. Noid and Vorfeld played a good 30 minutes of hyperactive, scribbly improvisation, a beautifully balanced set with a subtle drive to it, that managed to hold this rattling, scratchy almost featureless landscape together. The real highlight, however, was Jonas Kocher's duet with electronics musician Gaudenz Badrutt- an intense and at times genuinely aggressive sound world was navigated with striking nuance and compositional subtlety- a real sense of construction to the piece that is rarely found (and perhaps rarely needed) in improvised music but that was pulled off superbly in this instance. Over a substantial duration (30 minutes? 40 minutes?) the piece was very much a series of swells between low-energy passages of sustained, grainy textures and high-energy plateaus of loud, complex, drones- but within this somewhat cliche'd schema the two musicians managed to maintain a series of complex, nested trajectories that meant there was always some sense of a forward momentum to hold onto- further more each plateau was situated in a slightly different space, each type of section moving along its own path as the piece progressed.
Its perhaps also worth pointing out that the Stockhausen and this improv concert were not the only things going on in Berlin this Friday. There were on the echzeit calendar alone 4 or 5 other gigs. This is another quite baffling fact about Berlin- that there can be so many composers, musicians, etc. and that, frequently, the various 'scenes' seem to be in many ways quite discrete. Even within concerts at Ultraschall, some evenings attract a certain crowd, certain faces that you remember, many of whom are themselves composers or musicians, and other evenings attract entirely different crowds, also mostly consisting of artists of various kinds- but an entirely different subset.
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| Herbert von Karajan Straße, behind the Philharmonie (yellow buildings) |
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| statue in Tiergarten |
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| Brandenburger Tor |
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| Richard Serra sculpture, Tiergarten trees in background |
Full afternoon of Richard Barrett. First a two hour presentation on his recent work CONSTRUCTION (score pdf here, essay about the piece here), a mammoth evening long cycle of 20 pieces for voices, instruments and electronics. The presentation, lasting roughly as long as the piece itself, was a sort of guided tour of the trajectories arching over the entire piece, in terms of material transformations, following the evolution of the main themes of the piece- those of utopian visions on one hand and their confrontation with the realities of social and political organisation and change on the other- and the changing balance between composed music, improvised music and the various notation strategies used to access places imbetween. Following a break for coffee we returned to the Hans Eisler hochschüle for masterclasses, in which Kevin, Elise and I presented our pieces again.
 |
| Richard Barrett, Elise Moltz, Kevin Dee |
Friday evening presented somewhat of a dilemma, on the one hand a 140 minute late Stockhausen solo piano cycle (itself from the larger cycle KLANG, a series of 24 chamber compositions that I think contains a lot of Stockhausen's most striking work) or a non-Ultraschall improvisation concert featuring Jonas Kocher, an accordion player who had played in Oberlin earlier during the Fall 2012 semester. We ultimately opted for the improv concert. The first and last sets, a solo cello realisation of a graphic score and a song, both performed by Nathan Bontrager (American musician recently relocated to Köln) and a cello and percussion duet by Noid and Michael Vorfeld were lively and engaging pieces of music. Nathan's playing covered an incredibly wide range of material, eventually coming together nicely as the quick shifts and changes of the cello improvisation functioned as a compellingly turbulent canvas for the more continuous song. Noid and Vorfeld played a good 30 minutes of hyperactive, scribbly improvisation, a beautifully balanced set with a subtle drive to it, that managed to hold this rattling, scratchy almost featureless landscape together. The real highlight, however, was Jonas Kocher's duet with electronics musician Gaudenz Badrutt- an intense and at times genuinely aggressive sound world was navigated with striking nuance and compositional subtlety- a real sense of construction to the piece that is rarely found (and perhaps rarely needed) in improvised music but that was pulled off superbly in this instance. Over a substantial duration (30 minutes? 40 minutes?) the piece was very much a series of swells between low-energy passages of sustained, grainy textures and high-energy plateaus of loud, complex, drones- but within this somewhat cliche'd schema the two musicians managed to maintain a series of complex, nested trajectories that meant there was always some sense of a forward momentum to hold onto- further more each plateau was situated in a slightly different space, each type of section moving along its own path as the piece progressed.
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| Noid, Michael Vorfeld |
Its perhaps also worth pointing out that the Stockhausen and this improv concert were not the only things going on in Berlin this Friday. There were on the echzeit calendar alone 4 or 5 other gigs. This is another quite baffling fact about Berlin- that there can be so many composers, musicians, etc. and that, frequently, the various 'scenes' seem to be in many ways quite discrete. Even within concerts at Ultraschall, some evenings attract a certain crowd, certain faces that you remember, many of whom are themselves composers or musicians, and other evenings attract entirely different crowds, also mostly consisting of artists of various kinds- but an entirely different subset.
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