York Höller: Topic - Horizon - Myth - Black Peninsulas

Music as sound speech
A portrait of the poet in music: York Höller

York Höller's breakthrough came in 1967 with the premiere of Topic by the orchestra of the Cologne Music Academy in the large broadcasting hall of the WDR in Cologne. A representative of the Schott publishing house then signed the young composer, and at the instigation of the music editor Otto Tomek, the WDR Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Michael Gielen, played the revised version of the piece in 1970 at the Warsaw Autumn, the Darmstadt Summer Courses and again in Cologne. Through these subsequent performances, Höller found important interpreters in Pierre Boulez, Daniel Barenboim and Hans Zender. In addition, he was invited by Karlheinz Stockhausen, head of the studio for electronic music at WDR, to realize his first and only pure tape composition, Horizon.

Topic (1967) is Höller's first of many other orchestral works and is still under the influence of his studies with Bernd Alois Zimmermann and the impressive premiere of his main work The Soldiers at the Cologne Opera in 1965. The nine sections are different in character, dynamics, tempo and instrumentation sometimes extremely different and form a superordinate unit precisely in their contrast. The sovereign talent of the then 23-year-old in dealing with the large symphonic apparatus and in creating dramatic arcs of tension is unmistakable. Zimmermann is reminiscent of fanfare attacks on the trumpets and a certain stylistic openness with occasional echoes of baroque and jazz music. At the same time, despite all the unruly wildness, sometimes escalating to catastrophic levels, it is a very well-planned music. The English title of the work means something like topic or object of discussion and emphasizes the central ideas that determine Höller's entire oeuvre: clear construction, expressive speech, poetic content and the idea of ​​music as sound speech. Instead of unilaterally rejecting the serial post-war avant-garde like other composers of his generation, Höller found an individual combination of structural thinking with spontaneous invention and "effective auditory impression" taking into account perception-psychological findings. He was always inspired by non-musical impressions, by spatial, pictorial, literary, philosophical or scientific ideas that open up wide spaces of association and experience for the listener.

From an early stage, Höller orientated himself towards the ideal of music as a living organism, all of whose components are contained in every cell as well as in the structure of the whole, like in a genetic code. Similarly, in his 4-channel tape composition Horizon (1971/72) he wanted to create a stylistically uniform, process-like unfolding and, above all, »own, very personal world of sound« without a prefabricated formal plan and using relatively limited, purely electronically generated and transformed material. With the intersection of the finite and the infinite, the title of the work describes the intended combination of mathematical construction with musical expression and the form of the piece as an »imaginary circle that represents closedness and openness at the same time«. The subtitle Electronic Music in the Form of an Essay on Logarithmic Feelings, on the other hand, alludes to the »Essay on Feelings« that the main character Ulrich intends to write in Robert Musil's novel The Man Without Qualities. He also mentions the psychophysical fact that the human sensory organs' ability to differentiate works according to logarithmic gradations, which also determine the timing of the piece.

At the end of the 1970s, Höller dealt with Wagner's music dramas as well as with the psychoanalytic writings of Carl Gustav Jung and the Dialectics of Enlightenment written jointly by Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno. This exploration gave him the insight that music has mimetic powers and can help express the nature of the subject. In the ensemble work Mythos (1979/80, rev. 1995) he did not aim at a specific mythological tradition, but at the original meaning of the term in general as speech or story. In fact, Höller calls his piece "sound poem", which describes the double character of his music well: on the one hand, it is a rationally constructed structure with a great richness of sound and direct, spontaneous, impulsive expression; on the other hand, it is music that has been shaped linguistically in micro and macro form, meter, verses and stanzas. Mythos became groundbreaking for Höller insofar as he created "archetypal experiences" and "primal experiences" here for the first time using profiled musical-language gestures, symphonic design characters and instrumental topoi, which, however, are only encountered here in a very stylized form: "The work is partly based on familiar poetic images and expressive characters, such as E.g.: Of wind, water and the nymph Syrinx, horn call and echo, threatening gestures, culminating in a kind of Marche Funèbre, silver colored nocturne, Dionysian round dance, night black hymn etc.« Höller used a continuum between instrumental and taped electronic ones Sounds that partly contrast, partly merge seamlessly or imperceptibly merge into one another. The constructive germ cell for the harmonic, rhythmic and grand formal structures is a sound form which Höller has based on almost all of his compositions since his string quartet Antiphon (1976). In this case it is a 34-note melody, beginning and ending on the same note E flat and going through all 17 chromatic notes in two differently phrased XNUMX-note halves. The result is dense, chromatically colored chord complexes beyond tonal structures or clusters.

In Black Peninsula (1982) Höller draws a large tableau of oceanic-atmospheric soundscapes with dark shades of color. He orientates himself on the rhythmic structures of language, expressive gestures and poetic images of the poem Die Nacht (1911) by the expressionist poet Georg Heym. Above a cluster-like pedal point of electronics and low strings lies the poem, whispered by a woman's voice and modified to the point of incomprehensibility, complete with ghostly female choirs and unreal bell sounds as if from distant islands. The language material of the text is consistently musicalized into a "sound poem" and only becomes comprehensible towards the end. In a letter to Höller, Karlheinz Stockhausen, the work's dedicatee, was impressed by the "rich color scheme" and "wide-ranging chronology".

Rainer Nonnenmann