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).

Herbert von Karajan Straße, behind the Philharmonie (yellow buildings)

statue in Tiergarten

Brandenburger Tor

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.

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.