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CLEMENS VON REUSNER · IDEAL LANDSCAPE Surprisingly, immediately after attending a concert, when asked about the character of the music they hear, people very often speak in visual analogies, namely of landscapes - from the Alps to waving wheat fields to the foaming sea. What can be imagined in front of the inner eye displaces or replaces the sound events that can be remembered. Even composers, whose profession is music itself, do not shy away from imitating their tonal sequences in an imagined ambience, and not only in program music. This procedure, which imitates nature, presupposes that the abstracting analogy is evident to everyone. Another step forward is the relationship between the art of music and the fine arts, whereby – to the extent of their distance from it – the foil of reality remains present for both. It is a mysterious, often delicate undertaking to let the arts correspond with one another. They have different temporalities, signifiers, even the semantics are not comparable. Despite all the »imitation« of reality, the painting, the drawing, remains an artefact. The impossibility of a realistic reproduction and the adventure of artistically transcending reality are already manifested in the first cave drawings. Clemens von Reusner now emancipates himself with his eponymous play Ideal Landscape No. 6 from any image-like notion by referring to an already abstract work and emphasizing that his composition expressly does not intend to be a "setting" of the graphic template. Why does he relate the title and text to Ernst von Hopffgarten's etching? Like every serious composer, von Reusner strives for the sonic sensualization of an artistic idea via the path of abstraction. In this case, it aims at a severe reduction in the means used in both works, in image and sound. Only what is absolutely necessary is put together, composed. As can be read and heard, it is a structural feature that changes media here and translates static linearity into sliding linearity. The course, which is additive despite all superimposition, appears undramatic, tranquil. The carefully worked out timbres alone with the artificial interjections and the iterative character of the noisy internal structures draw a line between the identical beginning and end. For a composer of electro-acoustic music, the enormous noise on construction sites is extremely attractive, because he perceives at the same time the dynamically fluctuating continuity of the machine noise and the contingent eruptions of noise, i.e. the drone and the unpredictable improvisation. Recordings with special microphones and new processing options allow him to recombine the individual elements and to develop his own »Art of Noise«. The joy of staging the pulsating mechanics and the raging noise cascades is communicated to the denaturing sound resolution of the musical spectacle, untouched the rural church bells announce the regained peace. As ciphers of the regional and as inexhaustible sources of sound, these bells also permeate the artificial narrative of the section of the Elbe between Dömitz and Hitzacker (draft) with their mutating colors and spread over the Upper Franconian Jean-Paul-Land (de monstris epistola) like a rotating autumn mist. The landscape radio play, the composition of which not only contains motifs from the 15th Summula from Jean Paul's dr Katzenberger's bathing trip takes up, but creates the landscape acoustically through the interplay and deception with the original sounds and the artefacts derived from it, raises the greatest claim to the richness of the means that the sound transformation artist has at his disposal. The scenic alternation of the acoustic spaces and the sovereign choreography of the sounds in them, as they are in musique concrète play sequence is practiced without exhibiting it in a pretentious way, places these works in the tradition of stage and film art, which against the background of reality can move viewers and listeners to become aware of their own possibilities via an alternative, artistic design. Each of the "ideal landscapes" implicitly poses the philosophical question that is also hidden behind the terms "ideal" and "idealistic" in terms of the history of ideas: What is reality? – That which we can perceive with our senses. Clemens von Reusner adds another dimension to this: what we can invent beyond that – with poetic imagination. dr Bernd Leukert
About the works on the CD For the composer who works directly with the sound itself in electroacoustic music – whether recorded or designed from scratch – it is often not »ideal«, but rather »deficient« in the sense of their own ideas of how the material is changed could, which sound possibilities may be contained in a sound. Often there is a very extensive sound processing with the means of the electronic studio. This tonal metamorphosis can go so far that the original sound is hardly or not at all recognizable after numerous individual processing steps. However, all the sounds in such a series are related in terms of content. They are derivations, variants, compositional motifs. Finally, these variants then find their temporal and spatial, also spectral places in connection with other sounds in the "sound landscape" of a multi-channel acousmatic composition. The title of this compilation of five works from the period 2011 to 2020 – ideal landscape – connects the selected works insofar as they deal with specific real and virtual soundscapes. The titular work Ideal Landscape No. 6 (2020) is inspired by an etching by the artist Ernst von Hopffgarten. This is the 6th sheet of his cycle "Variations in G", which does not have its own title. Although the composition is not about the »setting to music« of a graphic template, there are structural similarities between the two works. The sound material consists of abstract sounds created with the synthesizer and with »Csound«, a programming language for sound synthesis, which were created through additive and subtractive sound synthesis. demolition (2011) works with the sounds of deconstruction, which were recorded in artificial head stereophony during the demolition of a sugar factory not far from the village of Wierthe on the Braunschweig-Hanover railway line. Soundscapes of construction, like soundscapes of demolition, are temporary and an omnipresent part of our industrial culture. The enormous amount of energy required to build such a factory is also used in reverse to tear it down. A part of it determines the acoustic sphere. At the end, the only »sound signal« from the village of Wierthe regains the acoustic space and can be heard again in the distance. Examines the soundscape of the harpsichord play sequence (2019). The composition was created as a commission for the »MusiKKirche« series of events in Wendland, Lower Saxony. Numerous sounds were created in an extended playing practice together with the harpsichordist Alice Humbert and digitally recorded. In addition to the well-known sounds of the harpsichord, the microphones also reveal the noise components in the sound generation through the mechanical processes when a key is struck. The composition emphasizes these noise components and works with their own nature and quality, which is presented again and again in the play of closeness and distance in composed spatial counterpoints in acoustic spaces of different widths and narrowness. For the »Hitzacker Summer Music Days« festival draft (2019) was commissioned in the 30th year after the opening of the Berlin Wall. The work is based on a variety of above and below water sounds on both sides of the Elbe in eastern Lower Saxony between Hitzacker and Dömitz. Sounds derived from this were developed in profound processes of sound formation with different degrees of affinity and abstractness. The motivic-thematic work with heterogeneous sound material occurs here alongside a directionless, sequential flow. In the musical sequence form, the sequence of elements has no purpose. It strives for the unlimited, just as the Elbe strives for the unlimited sea. And with that in mind, shine in draft acoustic episodes that slowly pass like flotsam in a river. Like a series of sketchy snapshots, they accentuate and reflect the constantly changing landscape with its familiar tonal fixed points. The title de monstris epistola (2012) refers to a work by the poet Jean Paul and uses sounds recorded at “Jean Paulian” places of early childhood and adolescence in Upper Franconia. The romantic striving for the synthesis between poetry and reality in Jean Paul's work corresponds in this composition to the synthesis between the audible of today's acoustic reality in the places of childhood and youth, as well as what is acoustically potentially contained therein and what I thought into it there. Familiar and foreign in equal measure and at the same time. There is an interplay between today's acoustic reality and the acoustic sphere derived and imagined from it. The close space of the acoustic perception thus merges with the distant in time and thus creates space for memory as a sensual experience. In 2013 the composition was awarded first prize in the »Radiophonic Klangkunst« category in Bayreuth in an international composition competition marking the poet's 250th birthday. Clemens von Reusner program: [01] Ideal Landscape No. 6 (2020) 11:12 [02] demolition (2011) 04:56 [03] play sequence (2019) 12:41 [04] draft (2019) 22:10 [05] de monstris epistola (2012) 23:45 Total playing time: 75:00
All tracks in 2 channel stereo and 5 channel surround. Press:
What does an ideal landscape look like? In this context, images of natural surroundings usually catch one's eye: lakes surrounded by mountains, a turquoise blue sea next to fine-grained sand, a desert of snow at rest, in short, images that could have sprung from a travel catalogue. Clemens von Reusner's current ideal landscape The titled release with electronic compositions is even reminiscent of the latter example thanks to the reduced black and white artwork. The first piece on the CD, Ideale Landschaft No. 6 (2020), is based on an etching by the artist Ernst von Hopffgarten taken from the 32-part cycle Variations in G. And although, according to Reusner's own statement, “it's not about 'setting' a graphic template to music,” both works of art “do have structural similarities”: One of them is undoubtedly the focus on the geometric shape of the line. […] Ideal soundscape with a difference, without a travel catalogue. Gerardo Sheige
Like flotsam in the river […] This CD with music that is characterized by the unexcited stirring offers consistently good things. No clichés of onomatopoeic landscapes, no assertion of any depictions: the music is self-sufficient and thus opens up perspectives reminiscent of the freshness of Cinquecento art.
15.09.2020 dimensions of hearing by Johannes S. Sistermanns […] Here we are invited to eavesdrop, listen, listen to 'Ideal Landscape' by the contemporary composer Clemens von Reusner. He passes on to us what led him to this composition in the first place: we ultimately listen to him himself when he has already previewed what led to his electro-acoustic composition. What moved him, touched him, put him into action, in and with these sounds and in line with his individual feelings. At the same time, this sound work does not aim at any symbolism he intended, extra-musical imagery or already known intention. Just as he surrendered to these sounds, we are asked to 'only' hear these sounds. Put aside expectation, imagination, taste and an incessant deciding whether or not you like these sounds. Take this acoustic statement from our social present as a form of communication, a mutual correspondence. There is nothing that can now be explained or understood conceptually, intellectually or music-specifically. [...] |
