Kagels Zyklus Rrrrrrr… besteht nicht nur aus diesen fünf Stücken, sondern aus insgesamt 41, in sechs Zyklen für verschiedene Besetzungen (Orgel; Chor und Klavier; Schlagzeugduo; Bläser, Kontrabässe und Schlagzeug; Stimme und Klavier; und dieses als „Jazz-Ensemble“ bezeichnete Trio), das 1982 als „Radiophantasie“ für den WDR konzipiert wurde, in der Kagel sich vorstellt, dass ein Radiohörer einen Sender nach dem anderen einschaltet. Über den gesamten Zyklus hinweg haben die Stücke über ihre ähnliche Länge (oder besser: Kürze) und den Anfangsbuchstaben ihrer Titel nicht viel gemeinsam:

Als ich über dieses Stück nachzudenken begann, stellte ich mir D’Alembert während der langwierigen Arbeit an der berühmten ‚Enzyklopädie’ vor, häufig über jenen Manuskriptseiten einnickend, auf denen ausschließlich Begriffe mit dem Anfangsbuchstaben ‚R’ vorkamen. In seinem Halbschlaf überlappten sich die präzisen Bedeutungen der Definitionen recht unwissenschaftlich mit der Möglichkeit, sie assoziativ folgerichtig oder aber Sinn verwirrend zu kombinieren.

Abgesehen von dem einleitenden Rackett (dessen Titel vom Renaissance-Blasinstrument stammt, obwohl Kagel in seiner Programmnotiz auch das gleichnamige Orgelregister erwähnt), haben die Titel dieser fünf Stücke alle eine Art Jazzbezug, sei es direkt oder eher schwach.

Carl Rosman, November 2020

I Can’t Breathe:  A Virtual Dialogue

George E. Lewis, with Georg Friedrich Haas and Marco Blaauw

This Article has been published at NewMusicBox.

In 2016 I first heard I Can’t Breathe, Georg Friedrich Haas’s haunting work for solo trumpet, performed by Marco Blaauw at the Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival.   Haas’s work, written just after the birth of the Black Lives Matter organization, and well before the concept of Black Lives Matter came to international prominence, raises a number of important questions about the response of the international new music community to the increasingly multicultural and multiracial. i.e., creolized, societies in which its performances, curatorial directions, and critical and philosophical inquiries are being presented.

I Can’t Breathe was conceived and written in 2014 as a response to the police execution of an African American citizen, Eric Garner, on a New York City street.  Garner’s “crime” was selling “loosies,” single cigarettes from a pack. This was said to be technically a form of tax evasion, which is not a capital crime in the statute books.  However, a bystander filmed a police officer restraining Garner bodily with an illegal chokehold. On the video, Garner was heard to repeat the words “I can’t breathe” eleven times, before passing out and lying on the ground for seven minutes.  While the authorities waited for an ambulance, Garner passed away; the autopsy cited “[compression] of neck, compression of chest and prone position during physical restraint by police” as cause of death.  Despite nationwide protests, charges were never brought against the officers involved, although one of them was eventually terminated in 2019.

It seemed clear that Haas’s piece took on renewed relevance with the May 2020 police murder of George Floyd, who before passing away, interspersed urgent pleas to be allowed to breathe with plaintive calls to his deceased mother. In the wake of the much larger, worldwide protests over Floyd’s killing, the widest range of individuals and institutions, including those in the field of new music, are being called to account for their actions regarding race.

I have always been intrigued with the questions raised by I Can’t Breathe, so I decided to talk to both Marco and Georg about the piece. The method I am using here to combine our respective dialogues is similar to the penultimate chapter in my 2008 book, A Power Stronger Than Itself:  The AACM and American Experimental Music (University of Chicago Press), in which I selected quotes from nearly one hundred interviews with AACM members to fashion an imagined intergenerational dialogue about overarching social, cultural, and aesthetic issues that the organization and its individual members faced over the decades. I blend this new imagined dialogue with critiques of scholarly writing about the piece.

I begin with Georg’s understanding of the motivation for the work.

GFH:  Well, it was a spontaneous activity. It happened when we looked out of the window at our house and we saw some demonstrations, Black Lives Matter, below us, and I said, OK, we have to go down there to join this. And suddenly this anecdote popped up about Chopin, when he heard about the revolution in Russia and decided, instead of going to Paris, to fight in this revolution. But he changed again and decided to go to Paris and work for the idea. And it is clear that this actually helped the revolution in Poland much more than he could have done by being part of the military activity. In the same way, I decided it’s not my job to protest in the streets.  It’s my job to protest in the arts.  And this is maybe one of of a few pieces [of mine] which had some nonmusical connotation.

At the time, Georg was already quite late with another, much larger commission, but as he recalled, “Because it was such a spontaneous idea, there was no time for me to make a large, huge internal discussion about what is the right way to discuss this. Just do it. Do it now. And I think this idea is one of the possibilities to go to work as an artist.”

The present essay was prompted by a discussion I had with Marco Blaauw this past summer about the frequent negative responses to a Facebook announcement that his new-music group, Ensemble Musikfabrik, posted about this forthcoming release. Indeed, a number of the comments around the Facebook posting indicated that white new music people really had no business even speaking about the topic.  One commenter suggested that Haas had “appropriated the words of a dying black man to become his anodyne aesthetic plaything.”

That such an apparently non-confrontational work could generate such heated debate seems ironic at first hearing.  However, I read a number of these responses as exemplifying the growing pains that the field of new music is undergoing as its composers, performers, listeners, curators, scholars, critics, and educational institutions gradually awaken, now certainly fitfully, to the need to develop a far more refined and trenchant discourse around the location of the field in a creolized creative environment.

Despite the shocking nature of its subject matter, I Can’t Breathe is anything but sensationalistic.  Rather than a wailing lament, Haas produces a restrained elegy.

GFH: The piece starts like a sentimental twelve-tone Kaddish. What I do technically, the process is, that this Kaddish is taking away the space to breathe.  You are singing freely and the space gets closer and closer.  And what I did technically is just to transcribe and transform the melodic elements into smaller intervals. As I reduce it, the melody is squeezed into 16th tones. The music is really very difficult, and Marco in this performance really is able to sing emotionally within these small intervals. There exists a cantabile in these 16th tones.  And I still have this very traditional translation of a huge range of intervals describing the entity of the free world, and therefore it starts with the spaces between the lowest pitches of the trumpet and the highest, soft.

Marco Blaauw’s perspective on Georg’s technique evokes the blues:

MB: A blues player colors the notes, so to notate that, Haas uses what he has always been using, microtonal intonations.  In the beginning, it’s like more and more colors to the melody, and then it becomes more and more strict as the melody goes from the big trumpet range to the tiniest interval, interrupted all the time by these single notes that are held for a very long time and pull you in.

GL:  I feel that the piece as a whole can be usefully contextualized as a form of pranayama, the study of the breath: a meditation on breath and life. We are asked to feel ourselves inside the breath, following its every nuance.  The piece has a timeless quality about it, although it’s only thirteen minutes long.

MB: I do think it’s very, very meditative. And in that way, I think the brain starts listening more and more for details so that when you come towards the middle of the piece, you actually hear all the microtonality, the tiniest steps. You can actually listen to them because you’ve been trained during this short duration of the piece to all these little things [sings], this blues melody, like a variation on two notes.

GL: I’d also say that with its emphasis on depiction, I Can’t Breathe is very much in the American tradition expressed in Duke Ellington’s concept of the “tone parallel,” which includes Charles Ives, Louis Moreau Gottschalk, and Thomas “Blind Tom” Wiggins. The use of the harmon mute is of course related to the African American tradition, very effectively through Miles Davis. And then there are those super-high “squeeze” notes, an innovation in technique that is closely associated with the Ellington Orchestra’s altissimo specialist, trumpeter Cat Anderson.

GFH: And it was you who said to me that this is a specific technique of jazz, these very high pitches.  It’s very rarely used in new music.  For me the association is more to Luigi Nono, for whom high melodic gestures are a symbol of utopia—for example, the beginning of his string quartet, Fragmente-Stille.

GL: The piece is about aspiration in the literal sense, and with regard to the conceptual context, for me the squeeze notes depict severe restrictions on the breath, while the hesitations in the tone production refer to the fragility of life as the breath is strangled.  The breath becomes rougher and more fragile as the life force goes out.

MB: The association with suffocation comes in when that becomes softer and softer and longer and longer and you get literally out of breath. But I don’t think it’s really meant that way. And then the piece falls apart after that. It loses structure also by the use of softer and softer mutes. And then, in the end, it’s just the silences and the single notes which are, as in the beginning, very, very long. Don’t you think that when you listen to a piece and you see somebody play a very long phrase, it’s almost like you stop breathing? I think when you have long silences, the same thing can happen.  I feel that sometimes in the audience, people do not dare to breathe anymore.

GL: It’s like the audience can’t breathe.  And you, the trumpeter, evoke a sense of empathy via a kind of transubstantiation.

In a 2016 essay, musicologist Max Erwin positions I Can’t Breathe as program music, which from the foregoing conversation seems evident enough; indeed, Haas appears to find no substantive moral imperative on either side of classical music’s traditional debate over programmatic versus absolute music. However, the author provocatively characterizes the nature of the program as “more accurately, western art music snuff” (Erwin 2016, 10).  However, rather than a criminal’s recording of an actual murder for macabre or prurient interest, one can summarize Haas’s origin narrative for I Can’t Breathe as a determined response to an atrocity (in this case, musically) by a concerned citizen.

However, when the deformation of race becomes involved, an atrocity is no longer just an atrocity, and music becomes more than just music.  Erwin sees Haas’s approach as exemplifying “a pervasive self-satisfied attitude and concomitant mode of production within the New Music apparatus. Under these auspices, the ‘politically engaged’ composer writes ‘protest music’ which laments the fate of this or that marginalised group” (Erwin 2016, 9).  Thus portraying Haas’s move to assert humanistic values as simple political posturing, Erwin maintains that the statement in Haas’s program note—“I leave no notes to the perpetrators”

identifies an object of political critique–‚the perpetrators‘ – whilst simultaneously extricating the subject (composer/artwork/audience) from the object of critique…The object of critique is exactly that; it remains fundamentally over there, safely removed from composer and audience to observe and lament (Erwin, 10).

Erwin’s critique would have greater currency and credibility if new music as a field could demonstrate an ongoing concern with black lives, including those of its own Afrodiasporic composers and performers.  However, this lack of engagement with issues of race is precisely what Haas is pointing to with his program note.  Bringing this level of engagement from “over there” to “right here”–to himself as composer, to his audience, to the performer, and to the historians, critics, and institutions of new music–was exactly the goal of the piece.

In an influential essay, theorist Sylvia Wynter pointed out the consequences of the routine use of the acronym N.H.I. (No Humans Involved) by Los Angeles juridical and enforcement institutions “to refer to any case involving a breach of the rights of young Black males who belong to the jobless category of the inner city ghettoes” (Wynter 1994, 42).

By classifying this category as N.H.I. these public officials would have given the police of Los Angeles the green light to deal with its members in any way they pleased. You may remember too that in the earlier case of the numerous deaths of young Black males caused by a specific chokehold used by Los Angeles police officers to arrest young Black males, the police chief Darryl Gates explained away these judicial murders by arguing that Black males had something abnormal with their windpipes (Wynter 1994, 42).

Indeed, this image of the deformation of the Black windpipe is central to the iconography of I Can’t Breathe. The remainder of Wynter’s “open letter to my colleagues” attempts to answer her own pointed question:  Where did this classification come from?

GL: In both the title and the content of the piece, there’s a conceptual aspect which is very important. It’s not just an exercise. It’s designed to make people think.  And I was telling Marco that for this sort of white audience for new music, it should make these people think.

GFH: Thank you. That’s very good. And in the end, in fact, this is what I also can prove. In interviews, I’m very often asked about this.  And of course, this gives us a chance to speak about this, within surroundings in which, additionally, nobody is speaking about it.  This is a way in which, in my opinion, political music does work.

Mostly staying in the softer and more difficult-to-sustain regions of the trumpet, I Can’t Breathe is zurückhaltend (reserved), and not only by the composer’s choice.  Rather, the situation forces the composer’s writerly hand.  Here, I find that the piece’s intensity depicts both a fragility and a Stoic nobility, where Eric Garner, George Floyd, Sandra Bland, Rayshard Brooks, and thousands of other black citizens are literally trying to draw upon their reserves of breath in a life-or-death struggle with forces who, backed by a culture in which black lives and liveness do not matter, take no significant notice of the humanity of those lives, while negating their own humanity in the process.

While Erwin’s thesis concludes that “Haas’s piece is at least five degrees removed from even the most rudimentary criteria of effective political protest” (Erwin 10, n16), in this thirteen-minute lament, political protest seems to be no concern whatsoever–unless protesting racialized injustice is now to become merely a political matter. Rather than a reductive rerouting of human values to questions of political efficacy, I Can’t Breathe is simply about black subjectivity, and what it means to be human.

Even so, our virtual conversation took on an ominous tone:

GL: The piece doesn’t have a happy ending; one could play it again and again, and a Sisyphean hell would be evoked.  That accounts for what I find to be the work’s pessimistic quality– in the sense of Afro-pessimism, or how to function in the face of the possibility that Western society might prove permanently unable to shed its preoccupation with anti-blackness as a central part of its identity.

Indeed, it could be that at this late date, a reserved, conceptualist approach may not be enough.  To begin with, Marco Blaauw was concerned about the ethical dimension of this kind of work and these kinds of issues being presented by white institutions, composers, and performers, in the white-majoritarian new music context:

MB: You don’t think that when I go to that festival and I ask my fee and I play that piece, that is somebody profiting from the situation?

GL: I feel that when you play this piece, and other people play it too, it brings those issues to an audience that isn’t often exposed to them, or maybe doesn’t think that those issues are relevant to their lives, or feel that what you are performing is totally antithetical to pure musical expression–what are you doing with this political stuff? Frederic Rzewski went through the same thing, John Coltrane, Bruce Springsteen–anybody doing political stuff is told to just shut up.  But as I see it, you’re bringing a needed message to this public. And if you don’t do it, who’s going to do it?

Sylvia Wynter saw the disclosure of the category of N.H.I. as an opening

from which to spearhead the speech of a new frontier of knowledge able to move us toward a new, correlated human species, and eco-systemic, ethic. Such a new horizon, I propose, will also find itself convergent with other horizons being opened up, at all levels of learning…It is only by this mutation of knowledge that we shall be able to secure, as a species, the full dimensions of our human autonomy with respect to the systemic and always narratively instituted purposes that have hitherto governed us–hitherto outside of our conscious awareness and consensual intentionality (Wynter 1994, 70).

This new awareness bears strong resonances, not only for the understanding of I Can’t Breathe, but for the future of new music itself.  In the end, a creolized work like I Can’t Breathe represents a move toward a new identity for new music.  No longer framing itself as a globalized, pan-European sonic diaspora, the goal of a creolized new music field is less about pursuing diversity than achieving a new complexity that promises far greater creative depth by recognizing the widest range of historical, geographical, political and cultural cross-connections.  As the philosopher Arnold I. Davidson has noted, “Multiplication of perspectives means multiplication of possibilities.”

As Georg Friedrich Haas has declared, “With this piece, I declare my solidarity with the protesters” (Haas 2014).  Indeed, each performance of I Can’t Breathe demands from  contemporary music a further solidarity:  an affirmation that black lives and black liveness do matter, to its history and to its future.

References

https://www.facebook.com/Musikfabrik/
10 June 2020

Erwin, Max. 2016. “Here Comes Newer Despair: An Aesthetic Primer for the New Conceptualism of Johannes Kreidler.” Tempo70, No. 278: 5–15.

Haas, Georg Friedrich. 2014.  “I Give No Sound To The Perpetrators: Ein Kommentar.”

Lewis, George E.  Unpublished videoconferencing interview with Georg Friedrich Haas, 14 June 2020.

Lewis, George E.  Unpublished videoconferencing interview with Marco Blaauw, 14 June 2020.

Wynter, Sylvia.  1994. “’No Humans Involved‘: An Open Letter to my Colleagues.“ Forum N.H.I.: Knowledge for the 21st Century, Vol. 1, no. 1 (Fall): 42-73.

About the author

George E. Lewis, Professor of American Music at Columbia University, is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Letters, a Corresponding Fellow of the British Academy, a MacArthur Fellow, a Guggenheim Fellow, and the recipient of the Doris Duke Artist Award. A member of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians since 1971, Lewis’s compositions, published by Edition Peters, have been performed by ensembles worldwide, and he holds honorary doctorates from the University of Edinburgh, New College of Florida, and Harvard University.  Lewis is the author of A Power Stronger Than Itself:  The AACM and American Experimental Music (University of Chicago Press) and co-editor of the two-volume Oxford Handbook of Critical Improvisation Studies.

Der Alliance-Walzer und die Sonnenschein-Polka für zwei Geigen von Arnold Schönberg, die Hannah Weirich und Sara Cubarsi hier aufgenommen haben, gehören zu den Frühwerken Arnold Schönbergs. Die genaue Entstehungszeit ist unklar: „nach 1882, wahrscheinlich aber später“, heißt es auf der Seite des Arnold Schönberg Center:

„Durch Hans Nachod (1883 – 1966), Cousin Arnold Schönbergs und zugleich erster Interpret des Waldemar aus den »Gurre-Liedern«, haben sich einige frühe Stücke des Komponisten, darunter mehrere Violinduette, erhalten. Ob es sich dabei tatsächlich um Derivate jener ersten Kompositionen handelt, um Musik für den Freundeskreis oder gar eine kommerzielle Arbeit, bleibt ungewiß. Werke wie der »Alliance«-Walzer oder die »Sonnenschein«-Polka lassen jedenfalls keinen Zweifel daran, daß diese Musik als leichte Unterhaltung gedacht war.“

Und Arnold Schönberg schreibt in seinem Essay „My Evolution“ aus dem Jahr 1949:

„Ich begann im Alter von acht Jahren mit dem Violinstudium und begann fast sofort mit dem Komponieren. Man könnte dementsprechend annehmen, dass ich mir schon sehr früh großartige Fähigkeiten im Komponieren angeeignet hätte. […] Alle meine Kompositionen bis etwa zu meinem siebzehnten Lebensjahr waren nicht mehr als Imitationen solcher Musik, mit der ich mich vertraut machen konnte – Violinduette und Duett-Arrangements von Opern und das Repertoire von Militärkapellen, die in öffentlichen Parks spielten.“

Marco Blaauw plays Toru Takemitsu’s trumpet solo Paths (1994) and explains the unique qualities of this „melancholic obituary“.

I can well imagine Toru Takemitsu traveling through Japan, not to capture different aspects of the moon, but let’s say to experience the wind whistling through different trees, and returning to the city with a gift. This gift consists of the transformation of nature into art. (John Cage)

Takemitsu’s music uses a language combining classical Western music (we hear traces of Webern, Messiaen, Debussy, Cage) with a Japanese sound world (using traditional Japanese instruments, elements from traditional music, and incorporating sounds of nature). The result is a music of incredible beauty and originality. It is usually slowly paced and quiet, but also capable of great intensity.

The trumpet never played a significant role in his œuvre, so I was surprised and extremely pleased to learn that Takemitsu had committed to writing a solo for trumpet!

After witnessing the premiere of Paths for trumpet solo at the Warsaw Autumn Festival on September 21, 1994, I better understood his choice.

In February that year, Witold Lutosławski, one of Poland’s most influential composers and conductors, had past away. To honor him, the Warsaw Autumn festival commissioned works from composer friends. Takemitsu was one of them, and he chose to write for the trumpet and nobody less then Hakan Hardenberger.

In many cultures around the world, including Japanese culture and Western classical music tradition, the trumpet often appears at the gate between life and death. The trumpet, or its precursors such as the conch shell, animal horn, or didgeridoo, are often used to call out to the living, honoring the human who passed and announcing the transformation of spirit.

Paths is a melancholic obituary. The slow-developing melody starts off with almost incomprehensible rhythm and harmony in the muted trumpet. The sound of this Harmon mute reminds us immediately of Miles Davis playing a soft jazz ballad, but it also takes us to the traditional music of the shakuhachi, the ancient Japanese end-blown flute made of bamboo. Only when the trumpet suddenly shines forth without the mute, answering its own question, do we get a sense of grounding and harmony. The open sound of the trumpet is more heroic and filled with hope. The following muted passage confirms the structure of this solo piece: The introspective ballad of the muted trumpet is contrasted by the expressive lines of the open trumpet, as if Takemitsu brings his internal dialog to sound, allowing space for sadness and happy memories in one single breath.

Marco Blaauw, October 2020

Julia Wolfes East Broadway ist auch auf unserem Label verfügbar.

“Was mir an Julia Wolfes Musik immer auffiel, ist, dass sie keine großen Erläuterungen braucht, dass sie sich ganz wie von selbst erklärt.
Die Musik erschafft eine poetische Klangwelt, die mich als Zuhörer unmittelbar einnimmt.
Besonders deutlich wird das bei „East Broadway“, einem kurzen, knackigen, rauen, lauten, knapp 4 Minuten langen Musikstück für Toy Piano und Boombox, also Spielzeugklavier und tragbarem Lautsprecher.
Es handelt sich hier übrigens nicht um den berühmten Broadway.  East Broadway ist eine Straße im Süden von New Yorks Stadtteil Manhattan, die von Two Bridges (dem Bezirk oberhalb der Brooklyn und der Manhattan Bridge) in östlicher Richtung quer durch China Town zur Lower East Side führt.”

Ulrich Löffler, April 2020

Georges Aperghis‚ bass clarinet solo Damespiel was commissioned by the Ensemble Musikfabrik, supported by the Ministry of Culture and Science of the State of North Rhine-Westphalia and dedicated to Carl Rosman.

The title comes from the German for the board game which some of us call draughts and some of us call checkers. Perhaps there’s the vaguest hint of a play on words connecting the title to the music in the manner in which the closing minutes have a low-voiced instrument pretending for quite some time to be a high-voiced one. But perhaps not.

The piece first arrived with lots of octave signs for the last couple of pages, which the publisher was kind enough to fix for me: on the one hand I can’t stand octave signs on the clarinet (the fingerings in one octave have nothing to do with the fingerings in another, it’s not like a piano where you just move your hand a bit to the right), on the other the spare leger lines are an excellent home for the shorthand I use to remind me what my fingers need to do.

For once, there isn’t a particularly enlightening story concerning the genesis of this piece. Georges had wanted to write me a solo for a while; the ensemble had the possibility of commissioning a round of solos for all the members; I told Georges; the piece arrived; I played it. He’s been writing solo pieces for the clarinet longer than I’ve been playing it, so he didn’t particularly need me to show him what a clarinet can do. So there’s nothing particularly newsworthy about the collaboration—except perhaps the very fact that it doesn’t consist of copious dialogue about specificities of the instrument. It’s entirely appropriate that I’ve only just become aware of what Georges said two years ago about the process in an interview with Martina Seeber for BR:

“We have a strange sort of collaboration. He receives the music and works on his part… and when he’s ready, he sends me a recording. I leave him to work on his own, and every time the result is perfect.”

Carl Rosman, September 2020

Rebecca Saunders on Blaauw:

Blaauw (2004) for double bell trumpet
blaauw=blauw; Dutch for „blue“

„As it deepens towards black… (blue) becomes like an infinite self-absorption which has, and can have, no end. The brighter it becomes, the more it loses its sound, until it turns into silent stillness and becomes white.“
Kandinsky, On the Spiritual in Art, 1911-12

„We love to contemplate blue, not because it advances to us, but because it draws us after it.“
Goethe, Farbenlehre

„Blue transcends the solemn geography of human limits.
The blood of sensibility. An infinite possibility Becoming tangible.
Pray to be released from image.
To be an astronaut of the void.
Blue is darkness made visible. The darkness comes in with the tide.“
Derek Jarman, excerpts from Chroma – A book of colour, 1994, Vintage

Marco Blaauw on Blaauw:

In her program notes, 3 descriptions of the color blue, Rebecca Saunders wants to guide her listeners into a 10-minute deep listening experience. (The piece always appears shorter to me). She writes 18 gestures, composed out of 2 or 3 breaths, consisting of a constant slow color change, separated by silences. Or perhaps better said, almost silences. The gestures are played into the strings of a grand piano with the pedal held down, the decaying resonance of the strings leading the listener into silences that are charged with anticipation.

The resonance reflects the diverse, unheard, almost electronic sounds coming from the trumpet, which can put the listener in a state of wonder. The silence that follows suspends time, it becomes measureless, a void.

Maybe this void inspired her to the title Blue? Or perhaps it was the colors she composed by the blending of the two bells, notated by a simple graphic line? Or maybe the pitches? In the score, D and Eb dominate, sometimes visiting neighboring pitches, sometimes jumping to A and Ab.

When she finished the score in November 2004, she wrote me an email announcing that the title would be „Blue.“

I had to answer with skepticism: I already had a piece by Richard Ayres called „blue,“ and I was planning a solo CD with both solo works on the program, wouldn’t it be strange to have 2 pieces called „blue“?

Her answer came prompt, her solution was simple, to use the old Dutch version instead of the English.

The development of this piece had been slow and careful. In 2002 we had started to work with the double bell trumpet while she was composing her score for „Insideout,“ music for a choreographic installation, a collaboration with the Sasha Waltz Dance Company. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LAZ2yHKVmbc

This evening-long piece was constructed out of modules of different instrumentations. After the production, it seemed an obvious step to combine all the melodic fragments on the trumpet into one melody. She gave me a score that I tried out in several performances. Every time we managed to get together for rehearsals, she took the chance to polish all the gestures. „Can you play this louder? Can you play this longer? What about this mute? Can you use tremolo with flutter tongue?“ She asked me to play the phrases many times, always weighing the silences after every gesture and trying different timings.

Long after I had performed the final version of the score during the Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival in 2004, she admitted that this piece might have been the first complete melody she had composed since arriving in Germany in 1991 to study with Wolfgang Rihm.

I have played many performances since then. Every performance is different, a unique balance between the precision of Rebecca’s notation and the freedom she gives to the performer.

Carl Rosman about Evan Johnson’s “indolentiae ars”, a medium to be kept:

There has already been plenty of writing about this piece. Its gestation was documented in detail by Emily Payne for her article Repurposing the Past? The Historical Basset Clarinet in Creative Collaboration, including copious interview material with both Evan and me collected while the piece was in progress; Evan’s typically eloquent programme note is here; there’s a fair bit on it in my own PhD research (still in progress); I’ve even already written a little snippet for an Ensemble Musikfabrik blog entry, back in early 2016 on the occasion of the premiere. So I hope you’ll excuse me if I keep this anecdotal.

This is not in any way a showpiece. As Evan’s performance notes point out: “[t]he space of “indolentiae ars”, a medium to be kept is the air directly in front of the performer’s body: it is not a space shared with the audience… Whatever reaches the audience should be as if overheard”. (Perhaps that’s worth emphasising here, since recording such a piece necessarily involves a more intimate kind of eavesdropping than a concert audience has a chance to indulge in.)

The instrument isn’t exactly a standard model, at least not in the orchestral sense: it’s a best-guess historical replica, by Peter van der Poel, of the (lost) instrument on which Anton Stadler performed Mozart’s concerto and quintet. So, neither a standard-issue instrument nor a one-off, but a model with both individual, interesting characteristics and particular historical importance, all of which played a part in Evan’s compositional process. (For historical-clarinet nerds: the low written B is a pitch of particular importance, and Evan being Evan there are multiphonic trills involving the low B hole, which, as this hole does not possess a key, require the shaking of the entire instrument.)

This isn’t an obvious choice for a youtube clip: at 23 minutes it’s anything but bite-sized. On top of that, it requires careful attention—but I think it rewards it as well, and just possibly an advantage of this medium is that gives you a chance to enjoy the piece’s very individual rhetoric (and lack of it) at close quarters, at the time and in the surroundings of your choosing, free from the fidgeting of fellow audience members. In any case, there’s plenty of bite-sized material out there already.

Carl Rosman, September 2020