Claus-Steffen Mahnkopf: Pynchon Cycle

PYNCHON CYCLE

In the summer of 1998 I felt a double need. Firstly, I wanted to work on two completely opposite work cycles, in order to be able to expand the range of my music and explore its extremes. One cycle was to be dedicated to the composer György Kurtág. Second, I wanted to pay homage to one of my favorite writers, Thomas Pynchon. I wanted compositionally with a Homage to Thomas Pynchon answer, then what I'm going to do would have to be as exceptional and eccentric as Pynchon's work and some circumstances like that we don't know anything about the author and especially his looks.

So I had to thoroughly rearrange my composing – in terms of material, technique, sonority, the performativity of the performance – at least for this purpose. Simply inventing music that would fit Pynchon in character would have been too simplistic. I had to become fundamental.

First of all, it needed a sonority capable of expressing the destructiveness of today's world society, especially in the mega-metropolises. That was only possible with the music electronics, which I turned to the EXPERIMENTAL STUDIO of the SWR (Freiburg) to learn. Then it needed a hypertrophic form. I decided on a poly work, which consists of several works that fulfill different functions in the overall form.

The Pynchon Cycle exists, in addition to the parent work Homage to Thomas Pynchon (2003-2005), from:

1. the ensemble piece The Tristero System, whose instrumentation with two pianos, percussionists, bass clarinets, three trombones and four piccolos provides sufficiently repulsive post-urban sound material;

2. the solo cello piece The Courier's Tragedy, which literally represents the tragedy of the soloist musically and, above all, performatively, what it is like when one fails to master an inhuman machine, even wanting to conquer it;

3. the harmonically ugly piece of tape DEATH (for 8 tracks), which literally shows the end state of decomposition of the materials used (DEATH is an acronym of Pynchon: "Don't ever antagonize the horn");

4. finally the piece WASTE for oboe and live electronics, performed during the Homage to Thomas Pynchon does not sound, but its sound material slumbers as an unconscious in the computer memory and now and then, shifted, begins to have an effect (the sister piece WASTE 2 is for oboe and 8-track tape) (WASTE is also an acronym and means »We await silent Tristero's empire«).

The form of this poly work had to be assumed from the outset to be blown up. I chose that Homage to Thomas Pynchon should go on indefinitely - music without a time limit, the greatest possible imposition on the art world, the permanent threat, so to speak the untreatable paranoia.

Strictly speaking, the spatial dimension would also have to be extended to infinity. Not only the place of the performance should be covered with sound, but virtually the whole city, the whole region, the whole globe. For pragmatic, non-artistic reasons, time is limited, and space even more so. A »concert«, an event with a fixed date, will have to be held at a defined location.

The four works mentioned can be performed independently. For the Homage to Thomas Pynchon the first three works are included. Simultaneously ensemble music, musical theater and music installation, it is innovative in this combination in that it uses the latest technologies to do something that was not possible before simply because those technologies were not sufficiently developed: namely, in real time computer-aided composition process that sounds like composed music and not like algorithms.

It wasn't about implementing the "dernier cri" of live electronics, but the other way around: only because live electronics now offer this degree of complexity and differentiation - and that also means: the possibility of polyphony - was I able to play in this genre get creative.

I took Pynchon's text corpus - the basis is the novel The crying of Lot 49 – not just simple narrative strands that I had to translate into music. Above all, the dramaturgy of the cello piece resembles that of the systematic killing of all the protagonists in that »Jacobean Revenge Play« between Faggio and Squamuglia. I tried to take on as many networks as possible on an abstract and therefore musically absurd level: I scanned the entire text of the novel and transformed it into hundreds of thousands of numbers, which, processed into algorithms, determined the flow of sound and music in the Homage to Thomas Pynchon determine with their parallel identities.

Of course, I had to take the absurdity of such an abstract application of material to such an extreme that it could take shape and – paradoxically – become almost as meaningful as Pynchon's novels are, which, like a large Borges-like library, resemble ours make the damn ambivalent world readable and tangible.

The Homage to Thomas Pynchon is extremely performative in character. The ensemble piece begins in the actual concert area (the "concert hall") The Tristero System played as if you were sitting in a normal concert. At the same time, the Pynchon architecture is launched with its computer programs. It creates an »écriture automatique« of the material that is heard on stage.

The sound director fades in this electronically modified music – in an improvisational way – via the loudspeakers in the hall. Since the sound source material is the instruments of the ensemble piece, both sound areas will mix well, so that there is no break when The Tristero System is finished and the musicians leave the stage without applause from the audience. It is now about the conscious simulation of a continuation of this ensemble music with other means.

After a while the solo cellist appears and tries his piece The Courier's Tragedy (in five acts with a prelude and epilogue) to work against electronics, to defeat them. That's where he fails, he has to fail, because the cello piece follows exactly this dramaturgy. Although he is able to manipulate the sound events, he is ultimately “killed” by them. He, too, leaves, exhausted. In the meantime, electronic music has reached maximum intensity.

After an hour, the events change: the hall doors are opened so that from afar the 28 loudspeakers in the four acoustic rooms announce that the music is also “playing” somewhere else. At the same time, the continuation of The Tristero System, and consequently the sound-processed material of »écriture automatique« switched off (it now appears in those four acoustic spaces) and in the concert hall DEATH faded in, which sounds again and again in an endless loop.

Because of the performative nature of the Homage to Thomas Pynchon, which can be heard in five (or more) acoustically separate rooms, a CD documentation is not possible.

The performance of my works poses particular difficulties for the performers. My thanks therefore go first and foremost to the soloists Peter Veale and Franklin Cox, for whom the solo works were written; to the SWR EXPERIMENTAL STUDIO, which I was able to work on for years, its director at the time, André Richard, and the music IT specialist Joachim Haas; most recently to the Ensemble SurPlus and its conductor James Avery for decades of support.

Claus-Steffen Mahnkopf