Zeit im Grund - Von wachsender Gegenwart | Nikolaus Brass | NEOS – your online music store for contemporary music and special classics

REASONS AND ABYSSES OF HUMAN EXISTENCE
The Music of the Composer Nikolaus Brass

“There is music which one cannot hear enough. Nikolaus Brass writes music of this kind.” The music journalist Reinhard Schulz, who died in 2009 and was one of the most sensitive observers of contemporary music, encountered few composers with the enthusiasm and empathy that he showed for Nikolaus Brass. “It is certainly not possible to establish, by decree, which composers are indispensible for a certain period. At the same time, one believes to directly sense, of certain composers, that they are essential. Nikolaus Brass, born in Lindau on Lake Constance in 1949, is such a composer.”

Nikolaus Brass is a careful and attentive composer who acts with caution. He is one who hears and listens. And one who, with his own reserve and sense of responsibility, understands art to be a fragile commodity that must be protected from usurpation and functionalisation. Nonetheless, Nikolaus Brass has repeatedly argued a case for a music that should “signify” and “mean” something. He thus writes music that is placed at the service of nothing other than itself, whilst always confronting social and political questions and, at the same time, projecting far into history. Nikolaus Brass is a composer of soft tones. His music trusts silence and concentration on what is essential. It takes time to come to fruition. This applies most concretely to the two works on this CD, which are closely interrelated. Both are concerned with the phenomenon of time and timelessness or, rather, with being relieved from time.

The present that has been and is expected: “Zeit im Grund”

Nikolaus Brass has written about Zeit im Grund (Time in the Reason) for two clarinets and strings as follows: “One cannot compose without intentions. And yet, for me, a certain attentiveness – as free of intentions as possible – towards the inner potential of the ‘musical material’ for transformation, growth and death has increasingly become the central perspective for my compositional activities over the past few years. If we understand ‘development’ not as a technically irreversible process, but as ‘growth’, then we understand all dynamics (including the dynamics of our existence) to be a cyclic process. For, with each conception for growth, the ‘programme’ for its ‘exhaustion’ is always already activated as well. Each organic growth process grows specifically towards its end, its apoptosis (the death of a cell).”

When Nikolaus Brass speaks about his music and composing, the active moment during creation recedes into the background in an almost unsettling way. He senses his composing to be “more a tracking-down and disclosure than making or placing something”, as he says. One would be deceiving oneself, however, if one were to understand him to be merely a collector of what lies by the wayside, and would underestimate the original creativity in his music. “Modular composition” plays an important role in this, with individual set pieces appearing rather inconspicuous as such, but which, as Brass says, “have a high potential for inertia as well as for transformation”, an “inexhaustible reservoir of musical life-forms” that can develop in the compositional context. The perception of time also plays a central role in this connection. “The conception of depth is frequently connected to the conception of ‘another’ time, or even timelessness. Time in the reason, in the reason of time: an ‘always’. An intertwining of before and after, an overlapping of event areas instead of a succession of event points. This may have been the initial imagination concerning this piece. Owed to the experience that what we hear and experience consecutively forms layers in recalled perception, creating a conglomerate of the present that has been and is expected.”

Liberation from time, farewell from the ego: “Von wachsender Gegenwart”

The fact that consecutive hearing and experience becomes “presence that has been and is expected” also applies to Von wachsender Gegenwart (Of Growing Presence) for 18 strings. The title of this work is by Carl Dahlhaus. In his book on Beethoven, this important musicologist described, with reference to that composer’s late works, the classical syntax of the correspondence principle as a suspension of the linear course of time: “The fact that the principle realises itself in constantly growing dimensions implies that the course of time neither leaves the past behind it nor is orientated towards the future, but, quite the contrary, that it serves to allow the aesthetic present – which is present to the listener as ‘sounding architecture’ – to appear ever more comprehensive. The musical time of the ‘rhythm on the whole’ is one with the dimensions of the growing presence of the correspondence principle.”

Nikolaus Brass has very consciously adopted these metaphors, connected with a reference to (and reverence of) Beethoven. With Brass, there is also a ‘correspondence principle’. “This correspondence principle”, says the composer, “does not formulate a teleologically graspable musical path from a ‘here’ to a ‘there’, but has an effect, both in the microscopic tissue of significant musical figures and in the dynamics of various large-scale processes of condensation and emptying, of a gravitational field which allows the whole of the musical occurrence – although spread out in time – to be revealed as an image of ‘always’.”

There is no “developmental dramaturgy” to be heard here, but certainly not any “static sound areas” either. The resultant experience of time is not timelessness; there is no loss of the temporal dimension, which would also be accompanied by a sensual-mental impoverishment. Far more, time is condensed and becomes an internal process – no, not “subjugated” but rather “entrusted” – to a process that brings it to fruition, to the expansion of its energy.

As always, Nikolaus Brass’ music also tells of people here. Of the reasons and abysses of human existence, from being lost and the tender moments of joy that can intensify to the point of ecstasy. “The image of the liberation from time”, according to Brass, “is insolubly linked – in the individual and cultural memory, the memory of our soul – with the condition of the highest ecstasy and the sensation of the most profound distress, for liberation from time always means: farewell to the ego.”

Rainer Pöllmann
Translation from the German: David Babcock