A mental exercise ... without denying the sound
On Dietrich Mast's piano works
“Interlocked” in the sense of an interlocking structure is an extremely important metaphor for describing Dietrich Mast's music. Its content, its intellectual aspect, is closely interwoven with musical structure.
“Interlocked” means “polymorphic,” but then again not, because not all musical constituents, such as articulatory parameters or texture, are consistently integrated into Mast's interlocking structures, but rather the harmonics are all the more so at the micro level. The melodic, generating harmonies, is always interlocked with the rhythm via polyphony. In Mast's music, interlocking means the close, spiritual connection between the elements that constitute the music.
The polyphonic nature of the melody gives rise to harmony, which, in its tendency toward whole-tone scales, produces synthetic chords reminiscent of early 20th-century futurism, such as that of Alexander Scriabin or Nikolai A. Roslavets. This is one of the reasons why Dietrich Mast wrote a profoundly analytical musicological dissertation based on the fundamentals of Skrjabin's music many years ago.
However, Mast's music follows its own logic, which, being autonomous, goes far beyond this. For example, a second layer of harmony formation: delicately hinted at twelve-tone structures, but always in a melodic context that appeals to the listener, form this layer.
Ernst Helmuth Flammer
This CD presents a wide spectrum of solo piano works by Dietrich Mast, composed between 1959 and 2016 and recorded by pianist and composer Irina Emeliantseva. She is the dedicatee of the four most recent piano pieces, Op. 38 and Op. 39.