Art-Oliver Simon, like Klaus K. Hübler in terms of his thinking and musical creativity, is a composer of exceptionally high aesthetic integrity and straightforwardness. As a musician, he is someone who consistently fights against the zeitgeist in an uncomfortable way. This is reflected in his compositions, which are unmistakable and cannot really be assigned to any particular stylistic direction. He eludes all conceivable clichés of New Music. This, combined with his rigorous radicalism in composition, similar to that of the Frenchman Claude Ballif, is what makes him so unique. His music is fascinating, arousing curiosity as one listens to it and discovers what many rightly believe they have never heard before.
Art-Oliver's music is permeated, sometimes more so than his talk about music, by a strict relationship between all its constituent parts, from which proportionality and polymorphism emanate, along with a lucid passacaglia-like variation technique, but even more than that: He has a very rational, complexly constructive, form-building approach to polytonal, non-atonal, and at the same time highly emotional harmonic material, which points to a delicate, fragile soul. Moreover, such music is unsentimental, radically free of kitsch, that denial of reality, free of fashionable sprinklings, free of ideocratic-pseudo-aesthetic layers of clay. This makes this music as unpretentious and unassuming as Art-Oliver Simon himself appears as a personality. This emotionality of composing is characterized by a deep melancholy, sublime, mostly hidden, but also sometimes very direct and comprehensible.
In his monumental string quartet Passagen – gestört , which is considered one of his major works, the third movement, “Der große Wechsel” (The Great Change), features an ironic waltz passage in bar 117 that is consistently composed against the meter (4/4 time) and at the same time derives self-generatively from the musical context. It is imbued with Thomas Bernhard's sarcasm, stands out with its black humor, almost perceptible as an extraterritorial element, yet free of cynicism and marked by deep pain. Art-Oliver Simon is an incorruptible outsider, rebellious. He never curries favor. This has earned him unfair exclusion from the business early on. And just like Thomas Bernhard in his writing, his feelings, his struggle with existing social conditions, are the decisive driving force behind his composing and writing. Like Jonathan Meese (Dictatorship of Art), he felt the urge to shout out this reality for a long time. The all-determining subject of his work appears as a consistent and unadulterated “aesthetics of resistance” (Peter Weiss).
This radicalization of his resistance took place chronologically in his music as well as in his daily interactions, comparable to the composer Galina Ustvolskaya in the form of a sometimes berserk, convention-breaking, bursting homelessness. However, even in the late phase of his artistic career, before his life-threatening illness, this never led him to musical indiscipline. This attitude of integrity, autonomously fueled by inner necessity, never aesthetically “freaking out,” gives the music of both Ustwolskaja and Simons its unspoiled power. Although similarly consistent in composition, the early works of both composers were certainly tamer, less wounded by the personal injuries that both had to endure to a great extent. Art-Oliver Simons' string trio Fantasie-Variation is paradigmatic of this. Art-Oliver Simons' work is free and untouched by the furor of everyday life. It is precisely this objectifying clarity between everyday reality and artistic reality that makes this music so great and significant.
Art-Oliver Simon's music cannot be called atonal in the conventional sense; it is based on whole-tone layers, which sometimes become apparent in his late work from the time of his illness onwards. The basic model is a four-tone cluster enclosing a tritone. Since Art-Oliver Simon's composing is always multi-layered, a “neighboring” cluster is always in sharp dissonance, usually structurally arranged at the interval of a minor second. Two further structures of this kind, derived from the two whole-tone chords described above, at a tritone interval from these, extract the chromatic total. From this, Simon develops the basic harmonic framework of his composing and at the same time gives himself the opportunity to flexibly control the degree of consonance or dissonance. Polytonal melodies, in contrapuntal relation to each other, quickly expand the tonal language into more dissonant realms, enriching it with their eminent timbre. Polymorphic shifts, possible in a seemingly infinite range of variations according to Simon's approach, used as a form-building element, open up a boundless cosmos of structural and tonal configurations.