ERES WOOD TOUCHING UNIVERSES
DO – is the name of a cycle of pieces for solo instruments that Eres Holz began in 2011 with a virtuoso trumpet solo and which now includes nine pieces; since the clarinet piece from 2016, live electronics have been added. DO! – as a request; DO – also as a small homage to the physicist Ernst Mach. The unit of measurement named after him is still used today to indicate the speed of supersonic aircraft - a small indication of the difficulty of the pieces. DO – so it says in the score of the organ piece – is »a kind of invitation to do something that is not trivial«.
All the pieces in the cycle fall back on a repertoire of virtuoso techniques and expressive figures specific to the respective instrument, which have developed over the course of music history: for the harp, for example, there are bell-like deep bass tones and glittering arpeggios, for the cello double stops signaling the greatest intensity, with the accordion a full-voiced playing style that takes the organ sound as a measure. The electronics initially amplify the sound – for example through reverberation effects and discrete discolorations – but then increasingly transform the sound production: you can still hear the typical features of the instrumental sound speech, but now increased to the ecstatic – the instruments speak in foreign tongues, so to speak. The individual, imprisoned within himself, seeks to come out of himself, to communicate with the world using every available means: as the composer puts it, it is “about communication, about the search for empathy”, about “overcoming loneliness”, to get out by "yelling" if necessary.
Certainly, these plays deal with the »loneliness of life« as a human condition: the knowledge, as Arthur Schnitzler put it, »that two people always, always have to remain strangers to each other, that you can never really look into each other, that you can never really see each other really understands.« But it is certainly no coincidence that five of these pieces were created during the corona pandemic 2020/21 with its contact restrictions. Loneliness suddenly became a daily experience and a topic of debate, and so these pieces also have a quality that diagnoses the times. Man, even in isolation - be it imposed or self-chosen - remains an "animal sociale" in relation to a counterpart. In this sense, the sentence of the philosopher Byung-Chul Han, which Eres Holz takes from the harp piece by the DO- Cycle added: "Resonance is not an echo of the self. You indwell the dimension of the other. It means harmony.«
Within the DOcycle, the organ piece has a special status. It was created in 2016 as a commissioned work by Deutschlandfunk for the »Organ for New Music« in the Kunst-Station Sankt Peter in Cologne. An important experience flowed into the composition: choral singing, which Eres Holz had actively practiced for many years. He observed that the cadences in particular, the dissolution of one interval constellation into another, had an immediate physical effect on him. Certain harmonic progressions are traditionally associated with certain affects: in other words, they encode and abstract emotional content. Clauses and cadences punctuate this process, completing a harmonic progression, but perhaps opening or enabling a new one. This is exactly where Eres Holz' composition comes in: "The affects, the expressive moments that create these dissolving intervals are in a way the heart of this piece."
The harmonic progression thus has a similar function to the bass line and the chord structure of a baroque passacaglia. In Eres Holz, too, the changing episodes are integrated into a constant musical flow in this way. This process is basically an analogue of creation: an incessant process of becoming that only ends on the day of its downfall. The composition also strives »in effigy« towards this cathartic finale (solemnly sealed by the striking of the church tower clock, which can be operated from the organ console in the Sankt Peter art station).
A chord progression as the core idea of a piece: this model has kept Eres Holz busy. The question was: Can perceptual patterns of tonal music – such as fundamental tone, tension and resolution – be transferred to non-tonally organized music? To this end, he had dealt with the history of European polyphony from its beginnings (Pérotin) to the Baroque, with the rules of voice leading, for example, which not only regulate how to deal with dissonances, but also fundamentally determine how one chord should be resolved into another . For Eres Holz, this made it necessary to formulate such rules himself, which are no longer related to modal or tonal contexts, but instead guarantee the coherence of the music under newly defined framework conditions. In order to set up such rules, he also uses the computer: “I try to predict certain mechanisms or certain types of musical processes” – as he described it in an interview in 2016. “How would it sound now, if I think like this? How would that sound if I let this continue, with certain interval resolution rules?”
The intensive examination of the parameter harmony - namely as Harmony, not as the result of linearly independent movements – is unusual in New Music. Harmony is essential as a frame of reference for the melodic: “I work harmoniously so that the melodies also have a 'sense'. As Bach does. And that is precisely why I allow myself melodic freedom, because it is harmonically well-founded.«
The melodic freedom: This means in particular the inclusion of microtones, which play a very important role in his music. Human language, but also crying, laughing and all other affective vocalizations: none of this happens in the regulated mediocrity of the tempered system with its twelve even semitones. Of course, one can at least get closer to human sounds with microtones: For Eres Holz, microtones stand »as a sign of the imperfection of the human being – the human being as a biological being, and not a sterile, not a 'well-tempered' machine. Microtones as an expression of pain, but also of passion and eroticism«.
Only under this condition can the music be entrusted with something personal: In two pieces, Eres Holz deals with the death of his mother from Alzheimer's disease and her death in 2019: It's the string quartet Dark cracks and ensemble composition Touching Universes and Ends.
The string quartet was created for the Deutschlandfunk 2021 »Forum of New Music« festival, which had the motto: »Do we want to overcome death?«. The quartet is in turn based on a chord progression: “Like a kind of endless loop, and it pulls the listener along” – the composer said in an interview with Hanno Ehrler on the occasion of the first broadcast in November 2021. In fact, the harmonic element dominates for long stretches in this piece, which, as it were, entrains the melodic and in the third movement crushes it in the destructive machinery of armored chords with two stops: A triumph of death. On the other hand, there are delicate and also powerful, "talking" melodic gestures in which life seems to be temporarily restored. At irregular intervals, undeveloped passages with high harmonics appear, distant, strange and unavailable: "The harmonics are the hereafter, light, God - if you will," says the composer. However, they do not formulate any certainty, but rather a question, a groping search and anticipation.
A year after the string quartet, the composition of the ensemble changes Touching Universes and Ends takes up the subject of death and loss once again: unlike the string quartet, which, as classically outlined chamber music, largely manages without extended playing techniques, it grips Touching Universes and Ends towards all imaginable color values and noises that can be demanded of a seven-piece ensemble: a music that reaches into symphonic dimensions.
It begins as a piece of remembrance, of remembrance: calm piano chords, in which tonal reminiscences resonate - "Beauty, the miracle of birth," the composer notes. At the same time, however, also melancholy, a suggested funeral march rhythm, a beginning that knows about the end. It is the viola, playing long stretches in microtones, that enlivens this event with erratic melodic figures; it sweeps the cello along, and later the other instruments as well: the ensemble movement becomes fast, even hectic as it progresses, and so dense that the composer has to use the symbols introduced by Schönberg to mark the main and secondary voices: It is »the long, desperate, daily resistance to the incessantly advancing death” (Marcel Proust). At the end of
Collapse: The instrumental sound, signum of the speaking, expressing individual, dissolves into noise sounds that are generated on and with the instruments. In the piano, electronically generated sound impulses are sent directly to the strings of the piano by means of a so-called »transducer«. It's an acoustic and musical crossing of borders, into another dimension. At the very end, the return of the beginning - new life, always dead.
The composition seems like a sequel to these pieces that open up existential dimensions Die Frau from 2020 – a grotesque impromptu. A piece based on a text by the Romanian poet Constantin Virgil Bănescu: Here it is the fear of the live, which prompts a man to create a mate, "flesh of his flesh" - literally, since he sabers it off his own body for this purpose: A mate who, in the literal interpretation of the biblical account of creation, is "equal to him " should be. Of course will this Companion not to be a human being, but a horrible homunculus, dead flesh that makes no demands ... This is implemented with syllabically declaiming vocals, which literally have sharp recorder staccatos, glissando effects and percussive double bass accents in scene is set.
Harmony as a necessary frame of reference for the melodic: This basic assumption in the music of Eres Holz represents the quintet composition jackal head (2016) again in a most exciting way. Harmony and melody are articulated as opposites (“restless, mysterious” vs. “rhythmic, dance-like”). Their eventual meeting in the closing section does not lead to synthesis, but neutralizes all energy, and a coda of exhaustion (scattered notes, "calm but disturbed") closes the piece. The title refers to the ancient Egyptian god of death, Anubis, who was depicted with a jackal head. "The austerity of ancient Egyptian art" inspired his work, the composer notes. »The music sounds archaic and mystical due to the very clear formation of phrases, almost ›sharp-edged‹ in a way. The tireless tremolo of the strings somehow bewitched..."
Ingo Dorfmuller
For Eres Holz, the microtones stand »as a sign of the imperfection of man – man as a biological being, and not a sterile, not a 'well-tempered' machine. Microtones as an expression of pain, but also of passion and eroticism«.
