KM28, Berlin. 13.09.23

The pieces presented in this programme move through different modes of stillness, be these remembrance, meditation, perseverance, or incantation. They force a pianist’s gaze inwards, where she sits with and admires each unfolding sound. She encounters fragility, prolonged sustainment, as well as tales of princesses, wolves, and spirits. She sinks and fully submerges into this stillness. 

Eva Maria Houben, Keyboard Music 1 (2002)

“As composer I want to create situations which may open a wide space of possibilities. Listening I want to find a location where nearly nothing is fixed, where nearly everything is possible. Not yet vanished, not yet a new attack: but within ‘between’ there may be the chance that I am aware of something I don’t know.
 
“I want to continue observing decay, listening which ways things vanish, sound fades. I hear nearly nothing, and I continue listening nearly nothing – continue after the end and further on – even if really nothing can be heard. I continue to finish my own work.” EMH

Taken from Presence – Silence – Disappearance: Some thoughts on the perception of “nearly nothing”. https://www.wandelweiser.de/_eva-maria-houben/texts-e.html

Lucio Tasca, Jeux de vagues (2022) WP

“Jeux de Vagues is the name of a painting by Dan Hays. Like much of Hays's recent work, this painting is a pixel-by-pixel translation of a low-resolution photo onto oil on canvas. Here, orderly sequences of blue, red, and green microscopic dots depict the elegant and seemingly regular wave patterns of the Eastbourn's sea (the same sea that Debussy once anecdotally described as a polite and orderly procession of waves). 

Like the homonymous painting, this piece is a collection of seemingly identical dots, and wave patterns. It is about gradually getting a blurred image in focus and highlighting the humanity of the handmade through repetition.” LT

Christopher Fox, Es war einmal (2022)

“Es war einmal was written for Kate Ledger, to whom it is dedicated. The music is based on 21 German folk-tales – all the ones that begin ‘es war einmal’ (‘once upon a time’) – from the first, hand-written collection made by Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm in 1810. I love how these first transcriptions of the stories plunge us straight into extraordinary situations: ‘Once upon a time there was a little girl and every time she was given flax to spin she could only spin it into gold threads’; ‘once upon a time there was a man who had three sons and the youngest was stupid.’ I have tried to make music that has the same immediacy. 

“It’s not important to know what the stories are, just to know that stories are being told, and in the musical retelling each one begins with a direct transcription of the original German text. In other words, the letters of the words become musical notes, played according to the rhythm of the words, and the letters of each story’s title become notes held with the sostenuto pedal, creating a sonic aura. Gradually the music begins to develop its own way of telling the stories and perhaps this is similar to the way in which we, as we hear these stories, start to populate our imaginations not just with words but with images too.” CF

Federico Pozzer, One, Two, Three, or Four Sequences (2021-22) – WP

“One, Two, Three, or Four Sequences is the third piece I wrote for Kate Ledger. It is inspired by Kundalini Yoga, a practice where repetitive and rhythmic physical movements aim to foster practitioners’ endurance and mental focus. I’ve always been fascinated by how movements and breathing can shape timing and awareness, and how I could explore these relations in music. In this piece, Kate constantly repeats the same sequences of chords while navigating through a set of instructions that invites her to question her playing, to notice tiny and bigger changes in her body and respond to these by gauging her physical movements. The resulting alterations in the sequences of chords are not decided in advance. Rather, they emerge as by-products of the process of moving and questioning parts of her body which welcomes different levels of indeterminacy in sounds”

Morton Feldman, Intermission 5 (1952)

"I recall an occasion of my performance of Feldman’s Intermission 5 which provoked the Swiss composer, Klaus Huber, to make a piquant observation. At the very end of the piece there is a short phrase which is repeated nine times. I tried to make each repetition the same as the preceding one. Huber observed that they were not only the same, but that they were even more the same than the preceding one! I suppose he was saying that they exceeded the listener’s expectations of what ‘sameness’ means. In trying to exceed those expectations, one is acknowledging that everything is different.”

(Notes on Playing Feldman, 2016, by John Tilbury)

https://www.cnvill.net/mftilbury-notes.pdf

Ben Isaacs, Too Expanding (2011)

“Too expanding is a modular composition occupying somewhere between 5 and 70 minutes. The pianist contructs their realisation from the score’s seven pages, with order, tempo and repetition (any page can be played up to twice) all flexible. The extremely quiet accompanying electronic tones have their audibility constantly threatened by the delicately flickering pian material, whose own volume remains strenuously low.” BI

Bunita Marcus, …but to fashion a lullaby for you… For Morton Feldman and Aki Takahashi (1998, rev. 2000)

“The opening is just pages and pages of something that pretty much is the same thing repeating itself, but it’s not the same thing, because there are tiny little things that change. Sometimes there’s a grace note and sometimes there isn’t a grace note, and sometimes a note will go up and sometimes it’ll go down, but basically it’s just a little cell of notes that repeats. But while you’re hearing this cell of notes, if the pianist is playing it right, you go deeper and deeper and deeper into something. And you don’t know what the heck it is, but you can feel yourself sinking into it. I had to feel myself sinking into it in order to write it, and it was very difficult to write because it’s so long, and I had to hang onto that sinking feeling and stay with it as long as possible. Essentially it’s depression. It was my depression over losing Morty. And then all of a sudden out of the top of the piano comes this crazy little theme, twittering around like a little bird flying in the room. And the scene ends, and I bring back the love theme from Adam and Eve. I present it in its most stark fashion on the piano, just very straight-forward and simple. At that point, the minute that ends, you are in another world, because all of a sudden the piece just blossoms. It’s this romantic music and all the feelings that I’ve been holding back are coming out, all the emotions. At the very end I wrote a lullaby, because the piece is called …but to fashion a lullaby for you…. That is actually a quote from him. I dedicated it “to Moichecal,” which was Morton Feldman’s Yiddish name when he was a baby. That’s what his grandmother called him. And the lullaby can stand on its own as a piece. It’s a very beautiful piece. It’s very simple, but it takes you somewhere.” BM

Taken from a conversation between Bunita Marcus and Frank J. Oteri for New Music USA. https://newmusicusa.org/nmbx/who-is-bunita-marcus/