Program texts

The instrumentation of my composition “Oboe, Violin, Cello” is also the “program”: I create textures in which the instruments come together and then diverge again. In this way, the interaction of the instruments with their acoustic possibilities becomes the focus of my musical observations. Between the poles of tonal fusion on the one hand and extreme individuality on the other, the oboe, violin and cello – despite all their differences – initially function like the arms of an organism. In the formal progression, the instruments then increasingly break away from their mutual interlocking and pursue their own paths, forming independent levels and “subspaces”.
Here I circle around the numerical ratio 2 to 3. Two to three means, among other things: two strings and one woodwind instrument – or two strings versus one woodwind instrument. The trio is a kind of meta-instrument at the beginning. The proportion of 2 to 3 in rhythmic and formal-rhythmic terms also forms a motivic nucleus which, together with melodic “memory paths”, runs through the musical transformations and characterizes my primarily linear approach.
Layering and multiplicities also emerge from the line, which I unfold multidimensionally. This work with linear layering, which I move simultaneously but independently of each other in different directions, allows me confrontation and “sharpening” (I refer to Wolfgang Welsch’s term, Unsere postmoderne Moderne, p.3).
The composition of “Oboe, Violin, Cello” was created for Hannah Weirich, Peter Veale and Dirk Wietheger and was made possible by a grant from the Ministry of Culture and Science of the State of North Rhine-Westphalia.

Sven-Ingo Koch

Klaus Huber’s relationship to the world is occasionally referred to as “poly-directional”, and the composer himself also speaks of it. A glance at the catalog of works and the scores collected therein reveals that the technical term has a profoundly human dimension. It means curiosity, participation, empathy and the will to seek the richness of life in general and musical art in particular, not just on one’s own doorstep. Huber once asked his student Younghi Pagh-Paan to consider her Korean origins and culture and the relationship between “own” and “foreign”, a challenge that he has also asked of himself in the opposite direction: he has explored medieval or Arabic music in composition, sought agreement and disagreement with poets, theologians and philosophers from a wide variety of cultures and times, abandoned the Western scale, which he found all too solid, and composed with third or quarter-tone scales. We also encounter this wealth of perspectives in Huber’s first string trio. The Poet’s Plow is a homage to Ossip Mandelstam. Lines from the Russian’s poems have found their way into the score, some are recited “quietly and unobtrusively” by the cellist, while others lend their rhythm to parts of the work. Fascinated by the power of the persecuted poet to create an ever-growing inner space in “the most oppressed confinement”, Huber creates a musical space in Des Dichters Pflug in which the relationship between inside and outside, foreground and background, “hearing and no-longer-hearing” is in constant fluctuation. The change of perspective is not realized with the conventional means of staggered dynamics, but through the modulation of timbre, rhythm and intonation. Huber derives the tonal material from three third-tone scales.

Raoul Mörchen

Dedicated to my mother on her 70th birthday
It was only at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries that the Korean people were confronted with European music, namely by a German bandmaster. This was mainly military music. Since then, we have been in an ongoing conflict – also in our education – between our traditional Asian musical culture and the European-American one, which has increasingly replaced our own tradition over time. In my piece MAN-NAM I, I tried to create an encounter between the two cultural worlds in order to overcome the culture shock within myself. This piece was inspired by a Korean poem by the poet Sa-Im-Dang Sin (16th century), in which she speaks of her longing for her mother. She wrote it down in Chinese script. I have placed some Chinese characters from it as symbols over the individual parts of the composition. MAN-NAM I is divided into four parts, the third part leads into the last with a cello cadenza. In the first part, I hesitantly try to overcome my fear. The second part is an escape into the protective solitude of the mountains. In the third part, the agonizing struggle triggered in me by the culture shock is carried all the way to the front. The concluding fourth part turns more strongly to the Korean tradition. (The cello, for example, plays only pizzicati, hinting at the sound of two Korean drums). The music gains its own center and calm solidity: reconciliation.

Younghi Pagh-Paan © G. RICORDI & CO

A motorized, mechanically running system of technologically complex, distorted instrumental sounds breaks down due to inherent instabilities and its inevitable wear and tear – initially in gradual processes, then also abruptly changing at tipping points – over several stages until only tempo-stable, highly noisy knocking remains.
More than ever, our time is characterized by a dynamic that distorts and consumes the available resources, by our dependence on the smooth functioning of highly developed, powerful but fragile technologies and at the same time by the challenges posed by their vulnerability and the associated potential threat to our environment and thus to our very existence.
On the one hand, we are trapped in the hamster wheels of the working world, and on the other, in the brightly colored abundance and sensory overload of the leisure world as supposed compensation, which for many people also means working in the hamster wheel.
And then it happens: standstill, like when an engine no longer rattles, but only emits a staggering knock. At the time of the conception of this work, the whole of humanity was stuck in one lockdown or another with a more or less knocking engine. It could have been a salutary experience, a chance to think differently about the future, a catharsis of the collective consciousness.

Matthias Sebasian Krüger

This short work for oboe, clarinet and string trio was composed in 1989 as an In memoriam for the Russian film director Andrei Tarkovsky. Tarkovsky’s films are rich in images of water – rivers, rain, lakes and cascades – of icons, of J. S. Bach’s music.
He described the water as “moving the speed of the film”. In “Zone”, the music moves at the speed of water. There are precise musical transcriptions of the pitches and rhythms of moving water and some distant reflections of Bach’s counterpoint.

Nigel Osborne