German composer Florian Wittenburg here with his latest piece 1- bis 4-stimmig (EWR 2202), which happens to be published by Edition Wandelweiser as was his kranenburg tree from last time…we’ve been hearing Florian’s music in these pages for about ten years, every release presenting a new way of working or particular formal experiment – sonically, he’s worked with e-bows, electronics, electro-acoustic mode, bowing wineglasses, and of course the acoustic piano (which we seem to recall is his favourite instrument). He’s also constantly inventing new ways to think about structure, arrangement, composition, proposing a basic idea with each project and exploring where it may lead.
Which brings us to today’s work, which sets up a certain tension between chance methods and control, and uses the acoustic piano and his own voice, speaking words from the works of a little-known Dutch poet Cees Nooteboom. Well, the starting point was a “page of aleatorically generated core notes” – note the use of aleatory there, a word and a method often associated with John Cage – though how Wittenburg arrived at his chance-generated list of semi-breves is not known. Next step was to combine the notes using the conventional compositional craft of melody and harmony. At some point there’s another layer of system-based control, which was somehow deployed to keep one pair of hands taming the resulting array of polyphony (i.e. lots of notes sounding at once). In my clumsy prose, this already sounds perhaps a bit elaborate, but the audible results are simple, pure, concise, compacted, and … very short. There’s just over ten minutes of actual piano music on the disc, interspersed with the Dutch poetry readings, a simple alternating structure adding yet another layer of compositional interest. The actual piano sections are quite beautiful, but also enigmatic; if you were expecting pleasing harmonic combinations from the above description, you may be given pause by the astringent combinations of notes that emanate forth. I shan’t say that Wittenburg is reinventing Schoenberg, although he himself does claim a certain allegiance to a specific composition of Morton Feldman.
The execution of the piano playing is also not without interest; slow, calm, deliberate, but strangely emphatic at some level, as though the composer were refusing the conventions of a typical classical concert player, who for some reason feels compelled to add intonation, delicacy, and grace notes, even when the score doesn’t call for it. It’s very plain-speaking piano, the player calling them as he sees ‘em. I’d like to say the same about the poetry, which is spake in a toneless manner, but also subjected to a tiny bit of tape-editing malarkey (on the first section at any rate), which allows for overlaid lines of speech and sentences cut off in mid-spiel, thus adding yet another layer of technique or meaning to the work. You begin to see how the simple rules of the work can be exploited and mined for many various outcomes and results, subtle though they be. I’ve had to dwell on the technique and structure here as I can’t understand the poems, the music is fleeting, and the elusive meaning of this riddle remains mysterious. From 3rd January 2023.