There are various ways of doing a composer portrait. We have decided on the principie of the interview, starting from a question common to everybody: What do you feel when you confront a blank sheet of paper?
I don't ordinarily have paper in front of me. My ideas originate in my imagination. I may be struck by a musical gesture or discover something on the viola, an approach I'd like to capture in music; form or atmosphere may also come into it. But the way a piece looks in the end needn't have anything to do with this original point of departure, which may gradually vanish during the working process.
You've created a series of eight pieces for solo viola which only you perform. Would you describe them as notated improvisations?
Although I have formulated some of the pieces in words, as a sort of memory aid, I don't generally set anything down on paper. But the concept in my head is very precise, even if notes don't come into it. I know exactly what has to happen at every moment – no less so than if it were a Bach Prelude. That comes, on the one hand, from being both the composer and the performer; but l'd also have to go to enormous lengths to develop forms of notation and description for the unusual playing techniques involved. My pieces don't stop at notatable parameters. Take the reciprocal relationship between propulsive energy and stasis, between something that breathes and something that opposes that breathing, or the nuances of tone colour that play such a central role – those are aspects I wouldn't know how to notate.
Do these pieces sound the same at every performance?
Essentially, yes. What changes has to do mainly with the space where the music is being played, which may affect the articulation, tempo and dynamics slightly, but that's all.
I'm surprised, considering how free they sound.
That should actually be the aim of every musical interpretation. It's just a little easier for me, because I can eliminate the divide between composer and performer. And yet, even in my case, there's often a route that will take me to the 'place' where a piece is, especially if I haven't played it for a while. However, as soon as l'm 'there', the inner logic of the music is absolutely clear and virtually no questions remain.
Mightn't a piece of this kind change radically after a period of, say, three years?
It's certainly been known to happen, and there are also pieces I don't play anymore.
So we're dealing with something totally different here from your improvisations, where you want to retain total freedom.
When I improvise, it's very important for the music to remain processual and for me not to have any ground rules to follow.
For instance, when you join Hansjürgen Wäldele and Peter K Frey as the third member of the Trio Adesso, don't the three of you set out any kind of framework?
I can remember two instances when we decided before the start of a concert that we were going to do miniatures. But we didn't specify what they'd be like. And those were the exceptions. The exciting thing about improvising is being able to achieve complexity and compelling logic purely via musical communication with others – with people one gets on with musically and who feel comfortable in a similar 'space'. But whether I'm playing with the Trio Adesso or teaching improvisation, my aim is to achieve polyphony and an independent identity for each of the various strands, with the musicians hearing everything going on around them and coming together on that basis. This acute listening and mental participation is what ultimately grants the music its inner stability.
Your musical installations often use pre-recorded layers of sound. Do you at least fix limits in the studio?
I know exactly what I can expect from the musicians I work with - what I have to say, play them, rehearse or set down on paper in order to get the results I want. But I only plan as much as is absolutely necessary, which makes for a high degree of immediacy and intensity. By working directly with the musicians, I can realize my intentions very precisely.
Many of your pieces are electronic.
Much of the electronic work is notated in detail, though often as sequences of numbers and names of notes rather than in the form of actual musical notation. I only write down exactly what I need for the realization. I may spend weeks on the timbres and envelopes of individual sounds, until they have just the right shape. As tedious as this can be, it's fascinating too, since dealing with electronic music teaches you to listen very carefully.
Have you ever created any traditional scores?
Not many. And the few there are, date from my student years and right afterwards.
A key concept in your work is space - something musicians have always been aware of, but that you work with very consciously and selectively.
In the nineteenth century the similarity of music to lanuage, in other words, its literary quality, was increasingly emphasized: the fact that music, like speech, was narrative. But this has not always been the case. Throughout history you can find music with no story to tell, music that simply tries to make a space palpable. Be it in animistic cultures or Gregorian chant, there is a pause in the daily routine to move into what might be termed a different space, a space for contemplation or mental exercise. We can find so many examples in Bach, Schubert, Schumann, Bruckner, Debussy or Varèse, not to mention Morton Feldman, of spaces being shaped or unfolding. The speech character and dramaturgic development of music holds less interest for me. I see every single note, every single motif, in terms of movement in space; every musical gesture opens up a new space (for movement), and that gives it a certain consistency. As soon as I realized this, I began looking in that direction.
Then I went a step further and started creating music for specific sites. I try to capture all the properties of a space and translate that into music. The idea is to develop music that makes it seem as if the Sounds were emanating from the site or space. So the aim is not deposit something alien in a space but to try and make a space perceptible to the ear.
Do you always take the same approach? There must be a difference between music intended to be heard at a specific time of day - for instance, at twilight - and music permanently playing in a museum, where you walk around.
That depends on the outward circumstances. As a rule, there's a long process involved: getting to know the space, measuring it, visiting it again and again, and considering what I want to hear in this space. What sort of music might give it greater plasticity?
The spatial aspect of music is my primary concern. Hence the title 'MUSIC FOR SPACES' - even where only one space is involved. But beyond the concrete spatial situation, this music is also an impulse for the generation of imaginary, interior spaces. That's why there's a sense in making a CD of it and listening to the music without being at the concrete site. Naturally, people who have heard the music on the spot have a different point of departure: they remember a specific situation. But I'm convinced that almost all of these projects work in terms of the music alone, without the concrete space. The situation is different where the music is devised to be heard, for example, at a specific place at twilight, broadcast over ten channels in a 360-degree radius. That's virtually impossible to simulate on CD; it belongs to precisely this spot.
With an installation you accept that visitors to an exhibition won't always hear the whole cycle from start to finish. That works...
Yes, because it's not music consisting of parts that prepare for what's to come, but music made up solaly – as Karlheinz Stockhausen put it in describing 'Kontakte' – of primary elements, from which everything or not can be expected at any given moment. And that precludes predictability or prefiguration. Thanks to the self-contained quality of every sound at every moment, it doesn't matter where you start or stop listening.
Every element of the music is important, almost like a mobile. Which would explain why it's valid, in certain installations, for the computer to resequence the sounds every evening.
But always in a clearly defined framework marking the boundaries for the fifteen-minute sequence. It's basically always the same music – what you might call an excerpt of infinite music made audible. And there's no way of predicting which of the possible notes will come next, when it will come, where the silences will fall, whether one, two or three notes will sound simultaneously, etc. – all that remains unpredictable. However, I've only employed this technique in 'MUSIC FOR TWILIGHT', for instance in Brissago or Dürnstein. lt doesn't come into play in other installations.
Your music requires a degree of tranquillity. You've already spoken about the mental spaces ev listener develops - in memory, in his or her imagination...
It's very important to take the time to this interior auditory space form, so you can discover how the musical space is structured and that it c tains different areas and identities. That requires time and concentration, as with all music that makes certain demands on.
Some of your pleces are geared to exactly the time of day when peopie find peace and tranquillity: for instance sunset, when day turns into night.
I chose the period of astronomical sunset, not because of its tranquillity, but because of the twilight. This is a time of heightened exchange between what one really sees and what one projects or imagines. At twilight, colours, contours and perspectives become 'indistinct'. That's the exciting thing: the encounter between what one imagines and what is actually there. It's the intermingling that creates a space for movement, a space in which one gains freedom.
And you highlight this with your music.
I add an additional level to what's happening visually by providing musical accompaniment as darkness gradually descends on day.
Might someone hearing it think of ghostly voices?
Possibly. But I cannot, and will not, tell people what to hear - although I try to make the message as clear as possible to myself. When a high degree of musical clarity and precision is associated with a concrete space, the result is what might be termed a 'field'. This field exceeds the quantifiable dimensions of a sculpture or an architectonic space; it sets off a process, continues working in the imagination and has something to do with altering or expanding perception - and perhaps even with insight and knowledge. Those who take the time and create the inner repose to listen, who begin inwardly to sing and let their imaginations roam, will perceive things they don't otherwise perceive and have never known before. That is how spaces materialize.
* from contemporary swiss composers by PRO HELVETIA (Arts Council of Switzerland)