Deutschland Uber Alles

[Mandryka]

Listening to some Enno Poppe I thought to myself that this music sounds like no one else I know. So I looked at his wiki page and it turns out that one of his teachers was Friedrich Goldmann. Fortunately Friedrich Goldmann has some CDs on Spotify, at first listen this one is  interesting, I mean, it has a personality.

[Mandryka]

.   

Very much enjoying these two recordings of music by Walter Zimmermann. I started to explore this composer after finding that he was a big influence on Christopher Fox, and indeed the common points seem clear - whose music interests me. There's an article by Fox on Zimmermann here

https://core.ac.uk/reader/234136749



Somewhere behind all of this is the sort of process music James Tenney worked on, at least, that's how it seems in my head.

[Mandryka]

Christopher Fox on walter Zimmermann

Walter Zimmermann's 'Vom Nutzen des Lassens'

THE 1985 MusICA series began with what may well be its most substantial event, a concert
by Circle juxtaposing British premieres of recent work by two of Cologne's leading not-soyoung composers, Walter Zimmermann (b.1949) and Klarenz Barlow (b.1945). For the 1985
concerts MusICA's director, Adrian Jack, has discarded the 'portrait' format of previous
years, where a whole evening was given over to one composer's work; instead, this year's featured composers-Barlow, Zimmermann and Vic Hoyland-have works in a number of
concerts. This seems to me to be a mistake: in general, because MusICA's past successes in
promoting composers unfamiliar to London, such as Scelsi, Radulescu, Grisey, and Gerald
Barry, have been achieved through just this sort of concentrated exposure; in particular,
because the five Zimmermann pieces presented in the first two concerts of this series are
part of a single cycle, Vom Nutzen des Lassens, which should ideally be heard complete. As in Zimmermann's earlier cycle, Lokale Musik, there is a progressive development
through Vom Nutzen des Lassens. Where Lokale Musik gradually dissolves the Franconian folk
melodies on which it is initially based beyond the point at which they can still be recognised,
Vom Nutzen des Lassens seeks to approach ever closer a musical equivalent of the teaching of
the 13th-century mystic, Meister Eckhart. 'I tried to penetrate the thinking of Meister
Eckhart so that it would take over my thoughts on music', writes Zimmermann; and he
prefaces Garten des Vergessens (the third work in the cycle) with a text from Eckhart that
goes some way towards expressing his aims for Vom Nutzen des Lassens as a whole: 'The
more you are able to concentrate all of your powers into oneness and into the forgetting of
all things and their images, and the more you are able to distance yourself from creatures
and their images, the closer you will come to this work (Peace) and the more you will
become receptive to it'. (Barbara Thornton's translation.)
Compositionally, this involves Zimmermann in an attempt to make image-less music,
music whose sounds never quite coalesce with one another. A favourite device used to this
end is a kind of variable repetition, either with a phrase being repeated in an always
changing context (as in Garten des Vergessens, where the violin, cello, and piano all have
repeating material, yet their repeats never synchronize); or with the internal elements of a
repeated phrase undergoing slight modification at each repeat. The latter technique
predominates in In der Welt sein, Abgeschiedenheit, and Ldsung, the three pieces given in Circle's
programme (two further pieces from the cycle, Garten des Vergessens and Ephemer-a new
version of a piece originally included in Lokale Musik-were played in the Clementi Trio's
MusICA appearance on July 14).
In each of these three pieces, the use of repetition becomes more and more prevalent
towards the end of the piece, with the result that one's attention is drawn away from the
organization of the sounds and towards the sonority of the instruments themselves. In der
Welt sein has some splendid moments where the solo tenor saxophonist, Michael Riessler,
must make prodigious leaps across the whole range of the instrument, each repeat yielding
slightly different harmonics; Losung ends with a repeated unison for the viola, cello, and
double bass, the unison subtly coloured by each instrument taking it as a harmonic on a
different tuned string.
This is demanding music, both for performers and listeners, and the separate
programming of Garten des Vergessens meant that we were deprived of the contrast which its
quicker, more densely textured music could have provided to these, the three most austere
pieces in the cycle. Performances ranged in quality from the sublime-Yvar Mikhashoffin
Abgeschiedenheit-to the uneasy-the three string players in Losung.

[Mandryka]

Very impressive pieces on this CD - e.g. Ursach und Worwitz and Shadows of Cold Mountain III 



https://moderecords.com/catalog/111zimmermann/

[steve ridgway]

Nobody mentioned Herbert Eimert. Epitaph Für Aikichi Kuboyama (1962) is a fantastic and lengthy piece of tape manipulation.

[Mandryka]

Listening to some Enno Poppe I thought to myself that this music sounds like no one else I know. So I looked at his wiki page and it turns out that one of his teachers was Friedrich Goldmann. Fortunately Friedrich Goldmann has some CDs on Spotify, at first listen this one is  interesting, I mean, it has a personality.

I like this duo for cello and violin

https://www.youtube.com/v/pTSZ5GU7PxI&ab_channel=444u4

[Mandryka]

It should also be taken into consideration that Western composers drew a lot of inspiration from Asian cultures: what you call "German values" are perhaps ultimately Japanese as well !   

Personally, I am thinking in particular of the case of Helmut Lachenmann who drew a lot of inspiration from Japanese tradition and philosophy ...
His closeness to pianist Yukiko Sugawara has certainly not been negligible in his work either.

But I think we can still find a lot of other examples like this ...

This comment prompted me to look for Yukiko Sugawara's recordings, and one of them, the one in the picture, is by a composer who I hadn't heard of before. Hans Thomalla was born in Germany but has lives in the States, after studying worn Ferneyhough - the lyricism of his bagatelles makes me think slightly of Walter Zimmermann. I like it very much.

[Mandryka]

I picked up, on a whim, a copy of the Wergo recording of Volker Staub's Suarogate.


I think it is really good!


Does anyone know anything about this composer?

https://www.discogs.com/artist/734401-Volker-Staub

[Mandryka]

I picked up, on a whim, a copy of the Wergo recording of Volker Staub's Suarogate.


I think it is really good!


Does anyone know anything about this composer?

https://www.discogs.com/artist/734401-Volker-Staub

https://de.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volker_Staub