infotext:
NICOLAUS A. HUBER AION
When I compose, I always think of the listener. I myself am my first and frequent listener. But first of all I always think of sounds. They confront me, also in their enriched forms as sounds, noises, positions. In this piece there are some tones whose volumes are not their own, but with which they ask us listeners for attention, even beg them. Her main self, I think, is her length. Only when these lengths are received with an open ear do you experience character, perspective, longings, tonal worlds. There are also a lot of elegant, fleeting tones, a kind of frequency hopper: »Angel Dust«. I encountered this term just before beginning my compositional work in Naomi Klein's terrifying book The shock strategy, in which the psycho-shock attempts (CIA / USA and Dr. E. Cameron / Montreal) for the total destruction of personality are described at the beginning. A drug cocktail with LSD and PCP (phenyl-cyclidine-piperidine) also belonged to these attempts at decoupling. This PCP is also known as "Angel Dust". It turned out that de-coining followed by re-coining and re-coining was not possible. Just catastrophic personality destruction. However, this has made a key contribution to the development of today's American (only?) torture techniques. In contrast, music is a piece of cake! It has a different realism than reality. That includes their freedom! All the events of the play are locked into an 80 x 13 scale structure, yet constantly move in renewed division. The basic harmonic structure does not always coincide with the syntactic structure. Sounds lose their clarity as a result. You gain delocalized mobility. And a confinement model in which an event (A) is clutched at the beginning and end (B1/B2) becomes the polyphonic movement process of slipping and escaping. Reality as an impetus for musical realism. dialectic? Contact person?? Your witness, dear listener!!! White and green for flute and clarinet (2018) White and green is written for flute and clarinet in B flat without any instrument change. The title itself comes from Carmen Herrera, who painted several large-format pictures in the late 1950s. They are all architecturally abstract painting styles with two colors - in this case white and green. Both colors have fascinated me for a long time! White was Mallarmé's color in which he wrote words, just as Satie later wrote his grades. And green - »le rayon vert« - is the color of an enigmatic installation by Marcel Duchamp for a surrealism exhibition in Paris in 1947. The crazy thing about the color green is the possibility of relating it to music, because we only see green when 5 photons per second enter our eyes. That's a simple quintuplet on 1 quarter = 60. That's why the »5« plays a special role in my piece – not just per second! And there is something else strange in this piece - the proportion 1:2 or 1:4 or 1:8. It is the octave that doubles the tones in such a way that they can both merge and show independence or even independence, even stretching and bending the octave microtonally. Hermann Pfrogner verifies this enigmatic relationship as the »I-interval par excellence«, »the inner upright movement«, before the division of the strings progresses to fifth and fourth. So my duo contains a duality of a special kind. Every duality can become a »1«, a new unit, to which a new »2« falls. Actually a free, even infinite growth structure. In it, some tones look back, as if quantum entangled, and our organ of perception wonders about distances and stretches that are at the same time instantaneous, without distances and stretches, and still have to cope with the probability wave of place. Quantum colors – blanco y verde? Without Holderlin for double bass and piano (1992) Without Holderlin was created for the Saarbrücken festival »Music in the 20th Century«. The diverse possibilities of sound mixing and sound fusion between the two instruments are in the foreground, until a »back of the table coda« concludes the work »with extreme violence«. In contrast to several compositions of recent years (autumn festival, Go Ahead, Open Fragment, Of Hölderlin's derangement) this piece manages »without Hölderlin« and also distances itself from a kind of Hölderlin fashion. My problem was of a much smaller nature, namely to treat two such different bodies of sound, such as double bass and piano, in such a way that a sound whole is created in which the respective sound components mutually justify each other in a meaningful way. Of course, the structure of the sound also belongs to it. All structures derive their authority from the bar structure, the directly recognizable rhythms, the number of beats, etc. The piece is clearly based on the musical thought of an organically developing context. However, this is composed so transparently that the individual can be experienced on an equal footing, like the intervals in a melody, the tones in the interval, its sound in the tone, its volume in the sound, its curve in the volume, its duration in the curve, etc. Only at the end, in the back of the table coda, does transparency intensify to extreme violence, to a bang. En face d'en face for large orchestra and tapes (1994) The title of my orchestra piece En face d'en face, meaning "opposite of opposite", goes back to a representational principle of ancient Egyptian painting and relief art. Their density of representation is obtained by avoiding the accidental, uniform impression of the moment. The linking of the individual parts, for example a human body, happens in a special way. The picture does not reflect what the eye sees, but – through the technique of shifting a group of body parts (eyes, upper body, navel) by 90° compared to the other parts – expects the viewer to see more complexly. This simultaneous profile and frontal view allows for greater completeness that does not adhere to the time limits of one-time gaze capture. The artists of Cubism reused these processes and pushed them further to maximum possibilities of fragmentation and multiplication (in the service of their artistic concerns, of course). A face in the face as a face is a wonderful conception. In music, however, the most obvious means of repetition as something recognizable would be too primitive and short-sighted. The technique with which the musical and orchestral complexity is organized in my piece can probably best be described with the term "multiple representation" of a thought / train of thought. This principle is intertwined, intertwined, separated, temporally spread out, in different degrees of approximation and distance, etc., easily imaginable, which means it is also comprehensible. If you can no longer make out any main or secondary things, nothing that merges, nothing that tells a story, etc., then a new listening emerges: what is otherwise coherent is suddenly only opposed to one another. Such strangeness requires: the opposite sees himself opposite the opposite. A tape-recorded performance is the most elementary way of imagining this. The entire piece is separated into 16 parts and these are layered on top of each other. This simultaneous pressing of the piece is again divided into two halves, which precede and follow the actual (live) piece like two shrugs (pieces of »shrugging the shoulders«), like two giant fermatas, so to speak. SOMETHING Postlude to AION for piano [with air drawing and jaw harp] (2019) For quite some time I have been dealing with possibilities of analogies between quantum behavior and harmonic sound concepts. In 1968 I composed the tape piece AION, whose thematic basis was C. G. Jung's theory of archetypes, i. H. everything that is based on archetypal energy processes is »tonal«. For Nono, tonality, conceived as overarching, was the "problem of unity." This radical criticism of self and composition was long ago. I was all the more electrified when I recently read the correspondence between Wolfgang Pauli and C. G. Jung (1932-58). The quantum physicist Pauli viewed Jungian archetypes from the world of quantum physics. He even coined the term "background physics," archetypically generated thinking. The non-locality and the probability wave, no specific location, synchronicity thought to be acausal but meaningful, no detached observer in measurements etc. - worlds suddenly intertwined! The name "Algol" also appears in this book. Coming from the Arabic al-gul (= the demon), this describes a double star system of different brightness around which a third star orbits. Located in the constellation Perseus, one sees a variable star whose brightness fluctuates periodically, a "devil star". In this bubbling world of energy, which suddenly and completely unexpectedly erupted in me, I have the piece for piano as an epilogue to mine AION composed. I knew even then that archetypes cannot be overcome, but that consciousness can create a kind of distance. Now a solo flight game like with VR goggles... Rose Selavy for ensemble and tapes (2000) »Rose Sélavy«, a second identity of Marcel Duchamp (only from 1920-41), was also »Rrose Sélavy«. This comes from a signature of Duchamp on Picabias L'Oil Cacodylate, which hung in the bar »Le Bœuf sur le Toit« and originally read: »Pi Qu'habilla Rrose Sélavy« (same as: Picabia l'arrose c'est la vie). According to Duchamp, one could also understand: french, fresh, widow, window... The eight square panes are covered with black leather and »should actually be waxed every morning like a pair of shoes so that they shine like window panes«. (Duchamp in an interview with P. Cabanne) I'm really interested in this!! AION for four-channel tape and smells (1968 / 72) With very few exceptions, each acoustic event only appears once in AION. Their context of meaning bundles them into certain layers and into thematic tension controls of archetypal energy processes. How is AION listen? In any case, the composition, already drafted in 1968, was intended as an acoustic working paper. Nicolaus A Huber program: CD 1 [01] angel dust for trombone and accordion (2007/08) 15:39 Mike Svoboda, trombone Live recording of the premiere
live recording [03] Without Holderlin for double bass and piano (1992) 15:47 Michinori Bunya, double bass [04] En face d'en face for large orchestra and tapes (1994) 18:38 Frankfurt Radio Symphony Orchestra
CD 2 [01] SOMETHING Postlude to AION for piano [with air drawing and jaw harp] (2019) 14:45 [02] Rose Selavy for ensemble and tapes (2000) 19:25 Live recording of the premiere [03] AION for four-channel tape and smells (1968/72) 37:23 WDR Electronic Music Studio
first recordings Press:
Enigmatic constellations “We only see green when 5 photons per second enter our eyes. “That’s a simple quintuplet on 1 quarter = 60. That’s why the ‘5’ plays a special role in my piece,” writes Nicolaus A. Huber in the commentary on his flute-clarinet duo “Blanco y verde” from 2018. A typical sentence of the composer. He seeks inspiration from the most remote areas with insatiable curiosity. In the pieces on the present double album he finds them in the surrealism of a Duchamp, in the ancient Egyptians, in CG Jung or in the favorite enemies of left-wing artists, the evil Americans. As here, it is mostly extra-musical impulses that he sharply translates into musical structures. The high degree of abstraction of his considerations transforms the realities that flow into the works into enigmatic sound constellations and thus prevents any association with program music. This does not affect the concrete sound appearance - on the contrary, the figures are of a precisely calculated plasticity and colourfulness, which they identify as the result of autonomous musical processes. The compositions in the current new release, which were created between 1968 and 2019 and thus represent a cross-section of Huber's work, provide rich illustrative material. For example, the orchestral piece “En face d'en face”: The tense stretches of time and brutal eruptions combine to create a sound dramaturgy that only follows its own laws. Or the piano piece “ALGOL”: Here, the speculative combination of quantum physics and archetype theory creates a complex interweaving of key sounds and sounds from inside the piano, which leads to ghostly-looking reverberations. Huber's sound universe seems to be constantly expanding. Max Nyffeler
13.07.2022 Quanta and other archetypes Aion in the zodiac Composing literally means 'putting together', 'putting together'. One wonders, however, where composers of contemporary art music, who do not like to repeat what has already been heard, get their tones from. Every composer will answer the question differently with every piece. In the case of Nicolaus A. Huber (b. 1939), some of whose works were published on the 'AION' CD, the sound sources are not necessarily audible, but Ernst August Klötzke describes them. The title of this double CD is borrowed from the oldest of the compositions by Nicolaus A. Huber recorded on it. "Aion" is not only the title, but also the motto and coda of the compilation of works with different casts that were created between 1968 and 2019. In the early 1990s, the musicologist Ulrich Dibelius said that Huber had a "coda compulsion". With this statement he alludes to the fact that in Huber's oeuvre there is a summation of the piece's inherent material at the end, not only to conclude it, but also to open up new perspectives as Musil's "sense of possibility". This double occupancy of a formal section can be - and this is where "Aion" comes into play again as the last (coda) and at the same time oldest (motto) work on the double CD - transferred to Huber's fundamental view, in which the phenomena to be examined never viewed in isolation, but always contextualized in sometimes surprising connections. The deity Aion represented a non-linear conception of time. If you start from our experiences, i.e. the linear sequence of temporal events, then a non-linear time model allows all causalities to be detached from their familiar and immediate contexts. This way of thinking characterizes Huber's music as superstructure and substructure of the sound, the effects of which are audible and can be felt and experienced in a physical sense. In this way he creates close ranges between large distances (such as enharmonic reinterpreted notes on the piano represent the greatest possible proximity (because of the identical key) and at the same time the greatest possible harmonic distance). Huber's "themes" revolve around people, whose actions, feelings, thoughts and knowledge become possible starting points for music. The first of the seven compositions "Angel Dust" (2007/08) for trombone and accordion is the result of a reading of what Huber composed under the term "decognization". As he writes in the accompanying work commentary, he was interested in psycho-shock experiments carried out by the CIA, among others, in order to bring about the total destruction of a personality. The composer translates such themes in such a way that in "Angel Dust" with "...tone(s) whose volume is not their own, but with which they ask us listeners for attention, even beg them", exemplarily a change of perspective is required, through which every acoustic event can be dissected and its individual parts detached from their familiar surroundings and traditional hierarchy. This becomes audible in an outstanding and joyful exclusivity in dealing with the instruments and their typologies and with time as an interplay of the presence and absence of sound: the music seems familiar and strange at the same time in its individual events. Ten years later, Huber wrote the duo for flute and clarinet "Blanco y Verde" (2018), in which he sees a "possible relationship" to music in the color green and writes in the booklet: "... because we only see green when 5 photons per second enter our eyes. That's a simple quintuplet on 1 quarter = 60." He goes on to explain that the number "5" plays a special role in his piece and derives a growth structure from its possible distribution, which is one of the design principles of "Blanco y Verde “ represents. An interplay of timbres and pauses becomes audible, of identities that energetically drift apart and are repeatedly brought together in transformed qualities. This is reminiscent of querying the microphone status in video conferences. Usually we say something when the screen asks us if we can hear our own voice. However, this answer then reverberates strongly changed and distorted, the characteristics of one's own voice are alienated and mixed up beyond recognition. We could call this delocalized partial spectra of the voice, Huber calls it “quantum entangled” in “Blanco y Verde”. In the 80s and 90s of the 20th century (perhaps as a reaction to Nono's quartet "Fragmente - Stille, an Diotima") a number of Hölderlin settings were written. Huber, in his own way, also dealt with Hölderlin in several compositions, including a duo for double bass and piano that he titled “Without Hölderlin” (1992). This third piece on the first CD is characterized not only by the fact that a special coda (“back of the table coda”) concludes the composition, but also that the bodily rhythmic figures familiar from Huber’s music up until the 90s (er calls this "conceptual rhythm composition") as structural carriers and bundles of rays for other parameters are at the very center. In 1994 Huber composed the piece for large orchestra and tapes "En face d'en face", which is placed at the end of the first CD. Again there is a special starting position that led to the creation of the piece and is reflected in the title. According to Huber, this goes back “to a representational principle of ancient Egyptian painting and relief art”, in which he is interested in the fact that the picture does not reflect what the eye sees. He understands the simultaneity of profile and frontal view as "higher completeness that does not adhere to the time limits of a one-time glance." He composes this as an audible "multiple representation" of a thought, which results in an interweaving of different tonal qualities. The virtuosity of the colors stands for perspective and emotional flexibility. And the code? There it is, this time (a look at the score reveals it) as a one-minute one: “A celebration of fading to be arranged by the conductor. The fading of the sound should not simply be a "conclusion", but should acquire the meaning of a structure through the length (quantitative toughness)" - according to the composer. Huber wrote the most recent piece that begins the second CD ("ALGOL Nachspiel zu AION for piano with air drawings and Jew's harp") in 2019. The reference to AION makes it clear that Nicolaus A. Huber's "thematic" range can be represented as waves in which the jump from the respective greatest expansion to the beginning of the expansion is always possible, perhaps even necessary. This results in music whose energetic charge is not only revealed in “fff” outbursts, as would be expected, but also as a concentrated discharge in “ppp”. Sounds and sound connections become perceptible as spatial distances through the parameters that embed them. ALGOL, the “postlude” (coda?) to AION, in which the then eighty-year-old composer confronts himself when he was about thirty, turns out to be “anti-Dorian Gray”. The tension lies in the temporal distance, which results in skill and also a certain liberated serenity. Again, as in AION, language plays a role; unlike in AION, it now appears more as a carrier of sound than as a carrier of meaning. In the ensemble piece (with playback) “Rose Sélavy” from 2000, which follows as the second piece, Huber deals with Marcel Duchamp, whose unusual/peculiar art fascinates him again and again. The piece impresses with the immense openness of the musical connections and the finely and rebelliously polished out sounds. It's a piece of music that won't leave you alone and doesn't want to be left alone by it. The unexpected lurks behind every tone, which unfolds more and more as an intentionally loose connection in a breathtaking density, whereby both the density and the degree of expansion can lead to the delicate individual color. A coda? It's worth listening to and looking for. Well, finally, AION (1968/72), which can undoubtedly be identified as an early work in relation to the other compositions on the CDs. It was written and produced for four-channel tape and smells, dealing with the archetypes of CG Jung as a starting point. Huber names AION as an intended “acoustic working paper”. However, in the context of such terms denoting what is supposedly unfinished, which can often be found in the late 60s, AION presents itself as – in Huber's open sense – a closed piece. The great distance between the time in which it was created and of the present is particularly evident in the “unprotected” use of language. At the same time, however, and this also makes the compilation on the two CDs commendable, the later Huber, who is present with a multi-layered network of human relationships extending to unimagined distances. Huber's music lives from the clever and understanding interpreters who make it audible with their own heads and hearts. Without exception, the recordings and recordings with Catherine Vickers (piano), Michinori Bunya (double bass), Mike Svoboda (trombone), Stefan Hussong (accordion), Erik Drescher (flute), Matthias Badczong (clarinet), the Ensemble Musikfabrik (conductor Jacques Mercier) and the HR Orchestra (directed by Friedrich Goldmann) are of outstanding quality, which more than do justice to the value of the music and are on par with the compositions! The booklet, in which only the composer's work comments can be found, is helpful because – as always – the aim is to expand the listening space with words. When listening to the "AION" CDs, a sentence from Christa Wolf's "Kassandra" comes to mind, which is varied as an informal coda: "and opened my ears to happiness". Ernst August Klotzke |
