In 1978, a composer's groundbreaking opus caused a sensation at the Warsaw Autumn Festival. It bore the matter-of-fact title Music on Open Strings: music played on empty, i.e., unfretted strings. At that time, being a woman still made a significant difference to an artist's career. When Gloria Coates appeared in Munich in 1980 with this work on the program of musica viva, it was the first work by a female composer to be performed in this concert series, which was founded in 1946. Music on Open Strings is a particularly successful example of the radical path taken by the American composer and remains one of her best-known works to this day. […]
The two vocal works completed in 1988, Wir tönen allein and Cette blanche agonie, also have a historical model: the orchestral song. The Mallarmé setting takes on a concertante character through the inclusion of a wind soloist who is required to perform with almost constant virtuosity. For her orchestral songs, Coates chose texts from posthumously published late poems by Paul Celan (1920–1970) and Stéphane Mallarmé (1842–1898), two poets who were considered radical in their time and whose sometimes cryptic content invites a wide range of interpretations. […]
Coates' “16th Symphony” was initially outside the series of her symphonies. As “Time Frozen” for chamber orchestra, it was written for the 25th anniversary of the Hamburg concert series “das neue werk.” After later revisions, which included new movement titles, the piece became her last contribution to the genre. Even though music, as a temporal art form, ultimately eludes the idea of freezing, i.e., of standing still, it is still possible to play musically with different concepts of time in a meaningful way. […]
Michael Zwenzner