Making New Waves 2007

A person tells a story. For himself, for someone else. It's not important. What's important is the desire to tell the story. The necessity! Itself a fairy-tale too... The text of PASAKA is based on different parts of Indian mythology - creation of the world, creation of the night, born of the death, ...

(Vykintas Baltakas)

"Kosmos" for piano solo was written by the seventeen year old Peter Eötvös under the impression of the Gargarins space flight, being the first human traveling around the earth in a space ship, giving the composer the idea, that "suddenly the world was without limits". The piece starts with a musical version of the "big bang", representing hit by hit the following episodes of the history of the universe, expansion, comets, asteroids. A space ship navigating between the solar systems passes by, and the music finally enters a cloud of meteorites. In the end of the piece the certitude of perishability even arises in the view of cosmic dimensions: the piece ends 1/4 second before another "big bang".

(Björn Gottstein)

"Rituality is part of my nature. Actually I would describe all my compositions as "ritual", since this is the original way of letting gestures and sounds appear if perfect unity."

(Péter Eötvös)

Here the piano is confronted with its own shadow, which is provided by the electronics, delaying the pianists play by 24 seconds, creating a kind of canonic echo. But this shadow acts slightly unusual, since it plays back a tiny bit faster than the pianists original playing, resulting in a micro-tonal pitch shift of a quarter tone, which creates fascinating unexpected pitch relations. During the whole piece this setup stays the same. But, as the playback of the electronics is faster than recording, the original time distance of 24 seconds is gradually reduced until the piano and its shadow almost meet at the end of the piece. Therefore the space spanned by them develops from extreme wideness in the beginning to a very close entanglement at the end.

(Johannes Kretz)

comissioned by Florian Hoelscher, world premiere

"KlangLogBuch" is a still unfinished cycle of pieces for piano and electronics, which will present ideas and rituals in form of sound, taken from all continents, from extremely different cultures and societies. The aim is not to create an objective or complete ethno-musical catalog. The work should rather be seen as an extended self experiment of the composer, putting himself into almost randomly chosen, unusual conditions and interactions with quite diverse cultures in order to condense these cultural interactions into compositions, which would not have been possible otherwise.
"ponso no tao", the first piece of the cycle, is the result of research travel of several weeks – generously supported by the Taipei economic and cultural office – to various indigenous tribes in Taiwan (Yami, Paiwan, Peinan, Bunun, Toroko and Ami).
These small ethnic groups of austronesian origin all have very specific independent musical styles. Singing is not a cultural or folkloristic activity there, but an integrated element of life per se, always closely connected to rituals or aspects of every day life.
The scientific part of the project started with recording the different styles of singing, with particular focus on the subtle ways of tone articulation, shaping of sound and connecting pitches. Interviews with the singers were also important to get the essence of their view on life and music. These recordings were later analyzed with the help of software particularly designed for the project.
The artistic part of the project was then to develop a pallet of computer models from these recordings to form a new sound language, which connects and juxtaposes the richness of Asian ways of sound articulation with the characteristics of the piano, one of the most european instruments with its quite contrasting – well tempered – tuning. Besides, the concepts of time and space of these tribes are quite different to western concepts and strongly influenced the dealing with form and spatial sound projection in this piece.
The second piece of the cycle, "plenty o' nothing" focusses on north american phenomena and musical treasures. The title quotes a song from George Gershwin's "Porgy and Bess", where the question of values and wealth is "discussed" in a dense but still humorous way. Fragments of what could be called "north american exemplary paradigms of sound articulation" are dispersed in interaction and confrontation with the piano and create a set of topologies of sound in space.

(Johannes Kretz)

A well-formed piano work produces physical pleasure. A rich source of such acoustic/motor pleasures is to be found in the music of many sub-Saharan African cultures. The polyphonic ensemble playing of several musicians on the xylophone—in Uganda, the central Africa Republic, Malawi and other places—as well as the playing of a single performer on a lamellophone in Zimbabwe, the Cameroon, and many other regions, led me to search for similar technical possibilities on the piano keys. Two insights were important to me: one was the way of thinking in terms of patterns of motion (independent of European metric notions); the other was the possibility of gleaning illusory melodic/rhythmic configurations—heard, but not played—from the combinations of two or more real voices (analogous to Maurits Escher's "impossible" perspectives).
But I am using only an idea from African notions of movement, not the music itself. (...)
Further influences that enriched me come from the field of geometry (pattern deformation from topology and self-similar forms from fractal geometry), whereby I am indebted to Benoît Mandelbrot and Heinz-Otto Peitgen for vital stimulus.
And then my admiration for Conlon Nancarrow! From his Studies for Player Piano I learned rhythmic and metric complexity. He showed that there were entire worlds of rhythmic-melodic subtleties that lay far beyond the limits that we had recognized in "modern music" until then.
Jazz pianism also played a big role for me, above all the poetry of Thelonious Monk and Bill Evans. The étude Arc-en-ciel is almost a jazz piece. Fém is the Hungarian word for metal, but it has a "brighter" connotation, as the Hungarian word for light is fény.

(György Ligeti)

Karlheinz  Stockhausen wrote his piano pieces I to XIl, his "drawings", as he once called them, between his 24th and 33rd year of life. Topics like "electronic music", "punctual music", "music in space", "aleatorics", "silence", "noise" dominated his thinking during this time. The years could be described as the pioneer era of Stockhausen, years between studies and fame, in which he – influenced by Schoenberg's dodecaphony, Messiaen's organization of material and Webern's example of consequent structuring – gained a fundamental redefinition of musical elements and relations between them.
Particularly capturing them into measurable parameters, number and tables allowed him to develop a system of composition with a degree of rationality, which was unknown before. The aim was to create works of art, which are in all levels of material and form fully pervaded by a unifying series of proportions and its derivations, works forming a whole in highest harmonic coherence.

(Herbert Henk)