Space of Creation

Over a longer duration, we recorded the same period of time, every day, in the composer’s study at his house in the Gesäuse (Styria). The composer was either present or absent. Time goes by, the score calls, comes to maturity, is continued. Documenting this time grid, we participate in the passage of time through the act of creating timeless works.

Peregrinations

Almost daily, the process of composition is accompanied by long uphill walks at a brisk pace. A documentary of moving images, uncut, without comment, shows Furrer, walking along: his gaze, his stride, his breathing.

Flowing Over the Edges.

On Literary Influences and the Kaleidoscopic in Beat Furrer’s Music.

Andreas Karl

Writing about the various materials and developments in Beat Furrer’s music is a bit like attempting to map a river delta as it forms. Developmental channels meander, admit tributaries, accumulate layers of sediment, fork out, and flow onward in ever-new ways. Furrer only allows music to leave his hands once it is rich in substance and potential, manifestly inhabited by the possibility of further, different continuations. Just like a river delta’s forked branches share a common origin, his pieces frequently share basic musical material, literary text sources, and/or formal patterns. Such relationships even span the stark timbral disparities and historical distance between this celebratory boxed set’s earliest and most recent works: the piano trio Retour an Dich of 1986 and the Concerto for Violin and Orchestra of 2020. In both, the instrumental sound gropes in search of vocal qualities – following outcries in the former and speech-like sounds in the latter. In the process, various layers of material are intercut or overlappingly arranged. Each work then concludes with an open-ended gesture: the final lines of Retour an Dich push searchingly into a terrain that extends beyond the music’s conclusion, whereas the melody of the Concerto for Violin and Orchestra – having peeled off from the orchestra’s harmonic flow in this work’s first two parts – reveals its origin story in its own individual language in the third and final part. In both pieces, unstable fields of tension are continually modulated while each cut between layers of material suggests multiple imaginary continuations. The emergent state inhabited by these two pieces is not concluded in any final way.

The main channel of this metaphorical delta originated in early-1980s Vienna. It was there that Furrer encountered the open mobile forms of his composing professor Roman Haubenstock-Ramati, who created scores in which the performers could freely combine graphically distinct modules while adhering to certain rules. Every performance of such a work saw the differing tempi, metres, and colours of these modules come together in ever-new constellations. The result was a music whose circling, probing form exploited the material’s full potential by removing itself somewhat from the control of the composer. The expressivity of this music was spontaneous and contingent. Furrer likewise found his own specific expressivity in this understanding of form. In his early works, independent parts meet with synchronously pulsating ensembles. There arise ephemeral figures of a somatic quality that give a start, collapse inward, reach for something, twitch, or take pause. Furrer began listening to these figures in concerts and rehearsals, notating them and internalising them. They then went on to become those fragile transitions and near-corporeal gestures-in-sound that make Furrer’s music so surprisingly lively and human today.

One of the first pieces in which Furrer used metronome markings to uniformly synchronise all parts was Gaspra of 1988. It marks the transition to those purposeful, continual sonic and linguistic metamorphoses that would soon come to pervade entire pieces and operas.

Over the years, the existing channel of the mobiles was swelled by brisk inflows from sources such as sophisticated mystery novels’ retrograde narrative structures, cubist models, the circling retention of vanishing memories, wistful spiralling motions, palimpsest-like revelations and filters, or the alternating melodies of Inca musics. And in numerous side channels, these – in part combined – formal ideas materialised as new pieces. In the process, beginning with linea dell’-orizzonte (2012) and in subsequent works, there crystalised a formal principle according to which reduced material, already developed in and of itself, is intercut to form ever-new constellations. In order to get a clear mental image of this, one might imagine a kaleidoscope being rotated to the left and the right, at turns quickly and slowly while gliding over soft or glaring light sources. In this way, patterns permeate each other or are abruptly cut to pieces. If one places these momentary states into a temporal sequence, there emerge contrasts, relationships, and variations; short phrases and broad arcs form, associations spring forth, and a dramaturgy begins to coalesce. While it was colourful little images and reflective mirrors that that formed such patterns in the kaleidoscopes of our childhood, in Furrer’s case it is musical ideas: ascending and descending lines, chorale-like microtonal chords, rhythmically beating intervals, or a sung melody. All of them initially undergo linear development, each adhering to its own tempo, metre, and flow. Thereafter, Furrer manoeuvres his music back and forth between the various layers of material. He cuts these to pieces, turns them, reads them from back to front, stretches and compresses them, combines them. He moves over his raw material mul-tiple times to create highly contrasting but still interrelated sequences, as if he were combining fragmented memories to form a new narrative. In this way, material that is thoroughly diverse grows into a piece that does not dissolve the original material’s respective identities into the greater whole but instead remains pluralistic – a metaphor for Furrer’s overall artistic modus operandi.

The now-kaleidoscopic main channel’s most important feeder is literature. The literary works underlying the pieces in this jubilee box include poems, letters, novels, radio plays, myths, and prophecies by James Joyce, Marguerite Duras, Hermann Broch, Günter Eich, Cesare Pavese, Dino Campana, Sibilla Aleramo, Juan de la Cruz, Francesco Petrarca, Händl Klaus, Leta Semadeni, Lucretius, Ovid, and Virgil. Their words are sung, spoken, whispered, or left out, their phonemes and prosody imitated by instruments or modulated by strange resonating bodies.

Furrer’s art is to join musical form and linguistic content in such a way that the two depend upon, substitute, and continue each other, entering places that would have remained unreachable for music or language as isolated arts. His formal approach featuring cuts and layers create a space in which words’ sounds, words’ meanings, and instrumental sound expand one another. It is thus that in invocation VI (2003), Juan de la Cruz’s questions as to the “why” become both desperate insistence and tactile erotic exploration in the urgent flute’s flutter-tonguing, key-sounds, and hectic breathing. In Spazio immergente III (2019), it is Lucretius’ apocalyptic visions that are elevated to an uncanny prophecy by metallically glistening strings and a trombone speaking as if it were at its wits’ end. And in Xenos III (2010/2013), the instrumental ensemble envelops the words of Händl Klaus in the intimate tone of a mode of speech fully reflective of the text’s allusions.

In these semantically loaded realms of sound, Furrer employs abstraction and stylisation such that we experience his protagonists’ feelings in a both aesthetically mediated and directly physical manner. To this end, he dredges up pre-linguistic expressivity from the depths of the psyche and injects it into language using musical means. Words consequently disintegrate into their phonemes, thereupon being recomposed by voices and instruments and polyphonically intoned. Furrer reveals the words’ intent through their analytic rendering as sound. One is thereby seduced into a tactile and mimetic sort of listening – an empathic process.

In the third part of in mia vita da vuolp (2019), the sensibility of the first-person animal narrators is made accessible to our own. Phonemes aspirated into the saxophone modulate raw flutter-tongued textures that call to mind both injured skin and bitter cold. In a near-childlike identificatory process, we associatively sense both the animal’s agitation and its pain at the cold of winter. Never, however, do these sounds shed their musical qualities in the interest of onomatopoetic illustration. Their abstract nature allows them to function both as sounds and as sensitively nuanced cyphers.

Furrer’s music, with all of its forking branches, is drawn to a river mouth that – just like in the final lines at the end of Retour an Dich – always seems to lie just beyond the final notated bar. In this asymptotic movement, where the delta branches out ever-wider and more finely without ever coming to an end, the yearning undertow that sets Furrer’s music apart grows ever more powerful. Infinitesimally small and continuously climbing intervals, shimmering interval beats, and emphatic crescendos tug at the music and at us listeners in La bianca notte(2013), intorno al bianco (2016), and the Concerto for Clarinet (2019). Furrer hence, with every piece, comes closer to that river mouth that opens on multiple possible instances of something else referred to by the sonorous expansions of the prophetic and intimate texts upon which his music is based.