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CONSTRUCTED CHAOS 'Who himself not goes into danger, perishes in it.« This is the motto that Marcus Wesselmann adheres to NONETT - a tongue-in-cheek reference to the insane, almost impossible to achieve tempo, which - stated laconically as "512 bpm" - actually only leaves the musicians the risky "escape to the front". From the very first second, the piece rushes forward as if there were no tomorrow. Even if not all of his works have such a "potential for danger" in store, there is something typical of Wesselmann's music in this beginning: for example the uncompromising nature and the sober consistency with which he repeatedly plunges himself into the most complex compositional structures and seemingly chaotically escalating processes, but also the immediate, sometimes harsh and aggressive sonority of his works, which do not want to leave any room for emotionality or a sense of security in the well-known that pushes the listener. With mostly jazz-typical ensembles, corresponding harmonies and an irregular and intricate rhythm, but ultimately based on consistent impulse patterns, Wesselmann seems to be doing everything possible to keep away from the academic soundscapes of »New Music«, which are often frozen into clichés. At the same time, his music is also based on structural arrangements, on a complex organization of the material that cannot be decoded by the listener but is latently perceptible, as is known to a similar extent from serial music. The tension between strict construction and seemingly chaotic, disorganized structures is always noticeable - as one of the central aesthetic motifs in Wesselmann's work. Fundamental for him is the idea of both formal developments and the compositional integration of individual musical parameters (such as pitch, tone duration, dynamics) as well as harmonic constellations, density of events, instrumentation and sometimes even playing techniques via predefined numerical formulas or binary code rows that permute or be further developed combinatorially. Again and again Wesselmann resorts to repetitive, slightly varied »patterns« which, in their repetition and superimposition, suggest a picture-puzzle-like state. All of this makes one think of minimal music or repetitive music, even if, unlike this, Wesselmann aims at processes that are non-linear and can turn into unpredictable structural patterns at their culmination points. While such processes NONETT can hardly be understood individually, since they are layered simultaneously, as competing and mutually influencing musical levels, they appear in the seven movements of the SEPTETS downright exemplary. With the number 7, the title and size of the cast provide a standard from which almost everything is derived. So put in the 1st sentence (Construction), which is conceived as a non-linear instrumentation crescendo, the seven instruments enter one after the other, with the seven initially “vacant” eighth positions of the bar being successively “filled in” with each additional voice from back to front. Shortly before the end, everything turns into a chordal structure that leads to the 2nd movement (Singing) ends. Conversely, this is designed as a fully composed »decrescendo«, starting with seven chords up to seven rests in the last of the 128 passages of the underlying 7-part grid. While in the 3rd movement (scherzo, lento) harmonic shifts and changes in timbre are controlled by an ostinato movement in the piano bass (with each oscillating movement in the bass, a new event occurs in the chordal structure above), forms the ensemble sound in the 4th movement, relief (almost round), through sections of harmonic swinging back and forth as well as ostinato chord chains with dynamics differentiated by voices, seemingly plastic »harmonic reliefs« emerge. This movement was also inspired by the changing timbres in Schönberg's Orchestral Piece op. 16,3. On its title Colors (summer morning at the lake) and the fact that his own work lacks any romantic tinge, Wesselmann plays with the subtitle summer evening on a ring road In the 5th movement, split (lamento), a 7-tone model is gradually »split« in that more and more tones are released from an up and down moving tone scale and remain at their pitch, which finally leads to the chordal layering of the initially melodic scale. Exactly the opposite of the 6th sentence (form a chain)!: A chord repeated seven times is followed by further tones with each bar, so that the chordal structure increasingly transitions into melodic patterns. concealment (or: the singer's silence) is the title of the 7th movement, which can be understood as a kind of vocal accompaniment to an imagined singing voice. In addition to the process of a decreasing density of events, this movement is characterized by the idea of covering up musical structures, which is realized here by overlaying several different formative principles in a kind of material multiplication. The OCTET, the oldest piece on this CD, was the conceptual starting point for all subsequent solo and ensemble works. Here, too, mathematical calculation generates a complex, nested formal structure. Various musical building blocks are introduced one after the other, which are characterized by their own compositional characteristics and whose duration increases exponentially in the course of the piece. Before a new structural model is heard, all models used up to that point are interposed in a combinatorially further developed form - an expansion of the form driven from within, which allows the piece to seemingly grow into infinity, as if from a germ cell. Toward the end, this process reverses and all models appear once in reverse order. The youngest work on the CD, the SEXTET, Wesselmann used a kind of material film as a basis, which – essentially consisting of a chord progression and a simple, circling melody – is valid for the entire piece on an abstract level, but only gradually and in a wide variety of forms and colors appears in the sound. The constant variation and recoloring of the material is ensured not only by the superimposed structures that shift relative to each other because of their different “period lengths”, but also by the strictly regulated instrumentation of the individual sections, with each instrument combination appearing only once in the piece. The more instruments playing together, the longer not only the respective formal section, but also the clearer the basic material of the piece emerges. Here, too, Wesselmann controls the necessary filtering processes via a strictly applied binary code combinatorics, which meticulously regulates almost everything underground, but in no way detracts from the piece's astonishing, almost "musical" mood. Andreas Gunther program:
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