Nikolaus Brass: Time in the Ground - Of the Growing Present

REASONS AND GROUNDS OF HUMAN EXISTENCE
The music of the composer Nikolaus Brass

»There is music, you can't get enough of it. Nikolaus Brass writes music of this kind.« The music journalist Reinhard Schulz, who died in 2009 and was one of the most sensitive observers of contemporary music, met few composers with such enthusiasm and empathy as Nikolaus Brass. »Certainly it cannot be determined by decree which composers are indispensable for a certain period of time. Nevertheless, there are those from whom one feels immediately that they are in need. Nikolaus Brass, born in Lindau on Lake Constance in 1949, is such a composer.«

Nikolaus Brass was an outsider in contemporary music for many years. And even today, since the number of commissions and performances of his works has been increasing for several years, he largely withdraws from the 'business'. He doesn't put himself in the foreground, self-portrayal as an 'artist' is completely foreign to him. Nikolaus Brass is a (in the Buddhist sense) careful, attentive and cautious composer. One who hears and listens. And who, with his characteristic reserve and sense of responsibility, sees art as a fragile commodity that needs to be protected from being appropriated and functionalised.

Nonetheless, Nikolaus Brass has repeatedly pleaded for music that 'means' and 'means' something. And so he writes music that does not serve any service outside itself, but which always deals with social and political issues and thus extends far into history. His artistic motive is the "processing of this historical reality," says Brass, an attempt "to spin the inner and historical resonances. There is no consciousness without the precipitation of history.«

In doing so, Brass allows himself the intellectual independence of staying true to the ›old-fashioned‹ of psychoanalysis or the horrors of Auschwitz as artistic driving forces. landscape of the past was the name of the orchestral work with which he met with widespread incomprehension in 1988 in Donaueschingen. According to Brass, what was meant was the landscape of 1945 with all its inner and outer devastation. In the piano piece VOID and the triple concerto based on it VOID II Brass deals with the murder of the European Jews through the architecture of Daniel Libeskind's Jewish Museum. It is, says Brass, "on the one hand an individual mental past, but on the other hand also a collective mental past" that shines through in such works. It is precisely this combination of individual psychological introspection and collective emotional state that makes his music so special.

›Presence‹ is a keyword here. ›Presence‹ means what is immediately present, not just abstractly imagined. The self-experienced, not just the ›experience‹ congealed into abstraction. ›Presence‹ is an eminently emotional and psychological category. 'Presence,' Brass writes, 'it seems, is the mode most hidden from us. We don't tolerate presence. Even pain is dispossessed. We quantify and measure it on scales, make it comparable.«

Pain and grief are also very present in Nikolaus Brass's music. It is a sorrow that knows the impossibility of real consolation. And which is nonetheless far removed from despair, which – on the contrary – is philanthropic through and through.

Nikolaus Brass is a composer of soft tones. His music relies on silence and concentration on the essentials. It develops its own order and develops out of it. And she takes the time she needs to develop. This also applies specifically to the two works on this CD, which are closely interrelated. Both deal with the phenomenon of time and timelessness, better: with the liberation of time. And both works are confrontations with the conventional development dramaturgy that still shapes our thinking.

Past and expected present: »Time in the Ground«

About time in the ground writes Nikolaus Brass: »One cannot compose without intention. And yet, in recent years, a mindfulness that is as unintentional as possible towards the inner potential for transformation, growth and death of the 'musical material' has increasingly become the central perspective for my compositional work. If we understand 'development' not as a technically irreversible process, but as 'growth', then we understand all dynamics (including the dynamics of our existence) as cyclical. Because with every investment for growth, the 'program' for its 'exhaustion' is always activated. Every organic growth process grows towards its end, its apoptosis (cell death).«

Brass calls his work for two clarinets and strings a »piece of transition«. According to Brass, the inspiration was »the desire for music that gives every gesture, every sound its own time.« And again he makes the connection to nature: »Giving time here means, as always: giving space for growth, metamorphosis, transcendence. «

When Nikolaus Brass talks about his music and his composing, the active moment in creating recedes into the background in an almost disturbing way. He feels that his composition is “more than a search and discovery than a making or setting,” he says. But one would be mistaken if one understood him only as a collector of what lay by the wayside and underestimated the self-creative element in his music. An important role is played by ›modular composing‹ with individual set pieces that appear rather inconspicuous as such, but, as Brass says, »have a high potential both for persistence and for transformation«, an »inexhaustible reservoir of musical life forms«, which they can unfold in the compositional context.

In this context, the perception of time also plays a central role in time in the ground. “The idea of ​​depth is often associated with the idea of ​​an 'other' time, or even timelessness. Time at the bottom, at the bottom of time: always. A merging of before and after, a superimposition of event surfaces instead of a sequence of event points. That may have been the initial imagination for this piece. Due to the experience that what we consecutively hear and experience is layered in remembering perception to form a conglomerate of past and future present.«

Liberation from time, farewell to the self: »Of the growing present«

The fact that consecutive listening and experiencing becomes »the present that has been and is expected« does not only apply to the double concerto time in the ground, for .... As well Of growing present for 18 strings. The title of this work comes from Carl Dahlhaus. In his Beethoven book, the important musicologist described the classical syntax of the principle of correspondence as a suspension of the linear course of time with reference to the late work: »The fact that the principle is realized in constantly increasing dimensions means that the course of time does not leave the past behind and begins is oriented towards the future, but rather that it serves to make the aesthetic present, which is present to the listener as 'sounding architecture', appear more and more comprehensive. The musical era of ›rhythm on a large scale‹ is a present that is growing with the dimensions of the principle of correspondence.«

Nikolaus Brass deliberately adopted this metaphor, combined with a reference (and reverence) to Beethoven. There is also a ›principle of correspondence‹ in Brass. "This principle of correspondence," says the composer, "does not formulate a teleologically comprehensible musical path from a here to a there, but acts as a gravitational field both in the microscopic tissue of significant musical figures and in the dynamics of various large-scale compression and emptying processes, which whole of the musical happenings - although spread out in time - as an image of 'Always'.

So no ›developmental dramaturgy‹ can be heard here, but certainly no ›static sound surfaces‹ either. The resulting experience of time is not a lack of time, no loss of the temporal dimension, which would also be accompanied by a sensual and spiritual impoverishment. Rather, time is condensed, it is subjected to an inner process – no, not 'subject', but rather 'entrusted'. A process that brings them to develop, to fan out their energy.
As always, Nikolaus Brass' music tells a story about people. About the reasons and abysses of human existence, about being lost and about the tender moments of happiness that can increase to ecstasy. There is no need for fortissimo cascades or excited accelerandi. Just hear the dramatic apex in Of growing present. The direct physicality of the string sound has something overwhelming, immediately noticeable.

"The image of the liberation of time," says Brass, "is inseparably linked in the individual and cultural memory, the memory of our soul, with the state of highest ecstasy and the feeling of deepest distress, since liberation from time always means: farewell to the ego."

"The greatest happiness in life is when time seems to stand still," wrote Reinhard Schulz in his last diary entry.

Rainer Pöllmann