A Conversation

In an extensive conversation with founding members of Klangforum Wien, the long-standing collaboration with the ensemble is explored, and Furrer’s stance as a composer becomes tangible.

Creating a Culture of Sound. Andreas Karl in Conversation with Musicians of Klangforum Wien

Sound and Language

Andreas Karl Beat Furrer and Klangforum share a nearly 40-year mutual history. You’ve played almost all of his ensemble chamber works – of which a large number have, in fact, been composed for and premièred by you to begin with. How does this relationship show up in your sound and in your way of making music?

Gerald Preinfalk When young people form an ensemble, it’s mainly the music that has to be right – and collaboration as an ensemble will go well if you have a common aesthetic vision. Beat had a vision, and he fought to make it possible. We lent our support to these efforts, in the process learning to speak his musical language together with him. He has influenced our ensemble sound like virtually no other composer. In my case, it shows up as extremely soft playing or also the “colouring” we do when working together creatively to achieve a certain timbre. Viewed this way, we’re all Beat’s children – even if we’ve since played lots of other music that’s likewise influenced our sound.

Björn Wilker In turn, Klangforum has also had a strong impact on Beat’s musical language – which we’ve brought to life through our own. So just like he has become part of our sound, we have become part of his music.

Dimitrios Polisoidis Back in the early ’90s, we were all young and veritably soaked up new ideas, techniques, forms, and sounds. Our approach to contemporary music was permanently shaped during those years.

Björn Wilker à un moment de terre perdue was the first ensemble work by Beat that I played with Klangforum. It ended up having a pivotal influence on our sound. Conspicuous in my part are the prominent friction stick, the marimba, and just a few loud accents. This is a piece that listens into the stillness and allows for it. It breathes this sweeping arc, free of everything apart from itself – with no other media, no samples. It’s impressive how much freshness and aesthetic relevance it’s retained to this day.

Olivier Vivarès Beat’s music is a thing of both extreme intensity and fragility. It’s chock full of contradictions, which keeps it aesthetically exciting, relevant. We’veabsorbed its sounds into our own sonic culture.

Gerald Preinfalk Beat has a clearly delineated vocabulary that’s crystallized over a period of decades but remains ever-fresh. Influences of othercomposers are present there, of course, but every piece does indeed speak his language with great clarity. It’s a language with its own very unmistakable “meaty”material. Musically, it’s possessed of an enormous amount of substance.

Olivier Vivarès Indeed, one always does recognise his vocabulary right away. Within its bounds, however, the music renews itself again and again. In Beat’s case, what’s “new” is often inspired by literature or painting, manifested as fine work with textures as well as on the sound and its relationship to the greater whole.

Developments and Turning Points

Andreas Karl How have you experienced his music’s development over the many years of your work together? Where do you now see breaks and continuities?

Annette Bik There’s been deep-reaching development and refinement in terms of how he relates to and writes for the human voice; the voice and language have become increasingly important to him. From the border regions between speaking and singing, he’s conjured up entire musical worlds. In Begehren, you can experience this scene by scene in a way that’s quite direct. His instrumental music has likewise come to sing and speak more, with murmuring intimations and word-like figures. And quite generally, his music has grown far more lush interms of colour.

Olivier Vivarès In Wüstenbuch as well as in the Xenos pieces, he started from spoken language to bring forth something entirely new: these fragmented, abrupt figures conceived to be phrased like words.

Björn Wilker There’ve been several major, significant turning points in his development – like Nuun, for instance, with its stacked layers, repetitive patterns, virtuosically mechanical motivity, and entirely new rhythmic complexity.

Andreas Lindenbaum Yes, he achieved something entirely new in Nuun and also still that he then went on to refine over several years. I reckon that this notion of sound originated in the suggestive events scattered across à un moment de terre perdue.

Björn Wilker Nuun also saw him once again create these islands of stillness that are so uniquely his. The feel for stillness that I mentioned before is something he’s retained to this day.

Benedikt Leitner I’d say that his stillness is now inhabited by even more tension than it used to be; a whole lot happens there.

Gunde Jäch-Micko I view all of Beat’s developments as an interlinked flow, similar to the way a human being develops. I’m speaking of the major aesthetic developments as well as the developments in his individual pieces – like these climaxes that pile up before breaking off abruptly, the repetitive small circular motions, this focus on breath, this stillness. Though the forms taken by such things change constantly, they can be observed in nearly all of his works. What’s more, his old pieces never bore him; he feels this very intense connection with all of them. That’s rare, and it speaks to the consistent development through which he’s gone.

Vera Fischer Recording cold and calm and moving from the ’90s was a surprise for me – realising how he was capable even back then of achieving this depth, this substance, this emotional power in his music using so very few notes.

Andreas Lindenbaum That’s been made all the clearer by the present recordings. One sees the quality of his early works and gets to experience them together with the new ones as an interlaced history of form and of his material’s development. And one hits upon lots of things that reappear later on in different guises.

Benedikt Leitner Like this wistful pull that was already there in Gaspra and Retour an Dich and is even more keenly present in his most recent pieces. He’s now able to formulate it more precisely, but it’s somehow always been there.

Gunde Jäch-Micko Absolutely. At the beginning of intorno al bianco, we strings glide ever so slowly towards a chord – which, the moment we’ve reached it, has already disappeared. This suspended escalation, this“pull”, as you put it: it’s something his music positively bathes in. The forestalled, full of yearning; it’s never entirely there, and he always leaves something open – for us as performers and as listeners. In this respect, his music is very accessible.

Vera Fischer In his works of recent years, I also perceive a harmonic journey of a directionality that can be very clear – which intensifies this feeling.

Benedikt Leitner Yes … this dramatic tension, this friction has been shifting more and more into the harmonic realm as of late. In intorno al bianco, the fundamentals are like phantoms. We strings climb and glide by the smallest successive steps into extremely high overtone chords where you can barely still feel the ground beneath your feet – which creates an incredibly unstable state of searching and pulling that I really enjoy!

Yearning and Being Drawn

Andreas Karl This idea of yearningly being drawn, this pull, is present both in the details and in the form of his pieces – in how he successively transforms his material, sending it into expanding spirals or upward thrusts. How do you experience such formal aspects?

Dimitrios Polisoidis When we perform in concert, we’re all very concentrated on the details. Where the long arcs in his pieces are concerned, you can rely heavily on his formal and structural sense. That’s all been composed.

Vera Fischer Even in his densest and most agitated music, where having to manage fingering, my tongue, and overblowing simultaneously has me extremely challenged as a musician, I can still sense this feeling of yearning; it goes beyond just focusing on each note. Details and forms merge and blend, and the yearning feeling persists even after the concert. One feels downright animated by it, which is an effect that only truly good music can have.

Andreas Lindenbaum It’s only in the concert situation that the actual form is fully realised – with the audience and precisely this tension and concentration that make concerts so lively. In rehearsals, it’s often fragmented.

Benedikt Leitner As a musician, you consistently experience this relationship between form and the moment as a dialectical one that can always change. There’s no “one” way of playing Beat’s works. Even though he has been notating his music more and more precisely, it’s still got this residual bit of openness of which Gunde spoke.

Dimitrios Polisoidis This openness comes from the early pieces, which were inspired by Beat’s teacher Roman Haubenstock-Ramati and his “mobile form”. Beat often has individual parts that are to be played in free tempo, independent of the rest of the ensemble. Like in à un moment de terre perdue, for example. His form, though, has grown clearer and solidified more and more over the years. And for his music theatre works, he’s developed new, longer-breathed dramaturgies and a type of expressivity that have also been gaining an ever-greater presence in his instrumental music.

Notation and Interpretation

Andreas Karl In your work, you’ve engaged in quite some depth with Beat’s notation along with his visual and poetic playing instructions. How do you perceive these today?

Gunde Jäch-Micko Beat notates things far more precisely now than he did back in the ’90s. It used to be, for example, that he’d indicated “pizzicato as high as possible” – while in the new pieces, its precisely written-out notes. In the beginning, it was all a huge challenge. But over the years, we’ve not only grown aesthetically and language-wise in interaction with his and other composers’ music but alsoimproved quite a bit in a technical sense.

Andreas Lindenbaum He has also added numerous new modalities of expression – along with instructions on how to realise them.

Benedikt Leitner We were all young when we first encountered those initial pieces. We joined Beat in searching for solutions, in reshuffling chords. That was a long process where lots of things successively became clear to us as an ensemble and to him as a composer. Like how to notate his very specific notions of sound: the glissandi, the flageolets, this “upward crawling” anchored on a single note. In our work together nowadays, it’s much more about how we allow these sounds to spring forth dynamically and colourfully as an ensemble; everything’s become way more precise. We take the grey zones that he’s deliberately left open and fill them with atmosphere, with energy, with colour. So it’s there that we work on our mutual interpretation. There’s space for our sound, there, for us as an ensemble and as individual musicians – which is something for which his pieces and he as a composer stand out.

Vera Fischer Particularly in the flute’s air sounds. There are so many possibilities, there – technically and in terms of colour.

Dimitrios Polisoidis In the wake of his successes with Klangforum, other ensembles also began playing his music – ensembles less familiar with him and his language. That requires precise and easily comprehensible notation. But notation has its limits: it can’t so easily replace or ensure universal access to a mutually developed culture of sound and a musical language learned over many years.

In Rehearsal and in Concert

Andreas Karl You’re closely linked not only with the composer Beat Furrer but also with the conductor Beat Furrer. How have these recent rehearsals and recordings of his music been for you?

Gerald Preinfalk He feels and knows his own music extremely well. He has an exact feel for what’s right in the moment of performance and shapes tempi, pauses, and dynamics accordingly. He embodies his music: the ways in which he moves, speaks, and conducts all correspond. In miavita da vuolp feels to me like an extension of his own speech into music. And he hears everything with extreme precision – every sound of moving air, every instrument key, every pitch.

Vera Fischer It’s absolutely helpful, in the rehearsals and in concert, to sense his presence as a person and perceive his facial expressions. He illustrates his music for me, which is hugely inspiring.

Dimitrios Polisoidis With Beat, there’s this unique congruence between who he is and what he does. The characters of his being and his music are identical – which also, by the way, applies to the appearance of his notation. In fact, the scores to many of his earlier works were published as facsimiles of his clean copies.

Björn Wilker Beat is very good at putting his music, the expression he’s looking for, into words – and the only way to verbalise its essence is often as a metaphor, a comparison. He’s also very good at demonstrating his music – by singing, humming, beating.

Vera Fischer All of which, by the way, likewise applies the other way around: his music explains him.

Annette Bik Some passages can only be grasped in a dramaturgical or formal sense by way of Beat’s explanations and comparisons – which have grown far more precise over the years.

Dimitrios Polisoidis There’s also the importance he attaches to the sound of sung or spoken texts and their immanent theatricality. Not to mention how the texts always govern the pieces in a formal sense regardless of their language; in this respect, he works like a stage director. Indeed, his music contains quite a bit of drama; there’s no need to add anything.

Andreas Lindenbaum It’s precisely this dramatic tension that you see even in his body when he conducts.

Annette Bik His left hand is under so very much tension; it shows every nuance, no matter how small.

Gunde Jäch-Micko It’s a tension that’s permeable, though, one that pulls us in. Moreover, certain qualities in his sound are pretty much only possible with him as the conductor. He has a special ability to “draw them out” of a piece together with us.

Vera Fischer His music soundsdifferent when he conducts it.

Olivier Vivarès In Beat’s music, every detail counts. Once they’re all there, a piece will start to truly breathe – and we can takemore flexible tempi and immerse ourselves in the interpretation. In rehearsals, we take each other very seriously. That helps us get a clear idea of what needs to be achieved in terms of sound, dynamics, tempo, and expression, and then we work together with him to find the means by which to do so.

Opera – An Open Art Form

Beat Furrer

A historical perspective on the human voice in the context of opera through the centuries reveals to us a continuously unfolding idea of what “being human” actually means. The human voice itself tells us of allegorical or mythical figures – from Monteverdi to Mozart, to Rossini and Wagner, to Berg and Janáček, to name but a few of the major turning points – as well as of contemporary characters. Going beyond the language of the libretto, it appeals to us – with an unsettling immediacy it talks of the human condition.

Opera reveals its reality to us, merging it with our own; it speaks of its pain, happiness, and fears, finding its resonance within ourselves, the listeners. Its voice, which reaches way beyond the semantic content of its language, speaks of much more, of things much more deeply hidden. In a way, the represented character disappears behind the reality of their voice.

The idea that “Things that cannot yet be spoken of, can perhaps already be sung”, describes the utopian potential inherent in opera. Heiner Müller, however, added a postscript: “But when everything has been said, the voice starts to turn sickly sweet” – that’s to say, its beauty congeals, becomes stereotyped, rhetorical.

The great, successful moments in an opera performance are neither on hand, nor can they be preserved; they always contain the risk of failure. It is in moments like these, in which stage, text and music complement each other in a subtle equilibrium, that an entirely new space is created. Without explanatory reduplication, the voice itself speaks and is absorbed directly by its listener, who thus makes the narrative their own. Whether or not I close my eyes, whether or not I am familiar with the libretto – I am captivated and animated way beyond my discursive comprehension. My body internally joins in the singing, it enters into resonance with “the other”.

It is the sound of the voice which, in the end, constitutes the character of the protagonist.

“All opera is Orpheus”: Opera is always a transgression of limits. Just as the operatic form transcends the limits of the genres involved – stage design, words, music – the voice transcends the limits of the represented character. The Orphic transgression is a breach of the boundaries of the radically “other”: the underworld and death. He is the antique figure that mediates between humankind and nature.

And yet: there hardly exists another art form today which is thus heavily barricaded by prejudices and fixed opinions, preventing people – or at any rate making it difficult for many – to engage.

What kind of opera am I referring to? Am I talking about a museal institution, conserved in beauty, which retains just a small remnant of this wonderful tradition, but is about to forfeit it, owing to ignorance, a lack of ideas and of a conscious awareness of social responsibility? No, I’m talking about the possibilities that this very institution – in connection with creative forces – has to offer society, and of the kind of opera houses that have recognised this fact. This is not just about music or theatre. Everything is at stake.

Vocal culture should be allowed continually to evolve! Otherwise, this great tradition, too, will languish. We’ve got to “interview” the medium opera regarding its future possibilities; new narrative forms must be found, new things created – only in this way can tradition open itself into the present day and continue as a living cultural memory.

Especially today, in a digitalised world of unprecedented change, radical destruction of social structures and of nature – the very basis of our existence – we find ourselves struck dumb, baffled and amazed, robbed of our ability to act, degraded to the status of marginalised onlookers.

Today more than ever, we are in need of art, of opera, of areas of freedom, and of a new language, in order to comprehend what’s happening to us. We need a new aesthetics, a living contemporary art, in league with the great traditions, open towards the present.

The repertoire presented by venues worldwide has continually shrunk, merely focussing on the great “hits” of opera history, almost completely ignoring the extremely rich, open, early history of opera as well as contemporary works. What is needed now is the political will, courage, and providence, and a recognition of the urgent necessity to support change in such institutions – not just demanding capacity utilisation statistics to justify their existence, but also to enquire whether these institutions in fact produce art. Art as a force that frees up space within the stone walls of necessity, the seeming lack of alternatives in political decision making – an art which, mirror-like, enables insight into and experience of reality; a reality that stands in sharp contrast to a digital parallel universe.

Opera as an open art form – as an art form leading us “into the open”.

The Voice’s Nakedness: FAMA

“It is open day and night, consisting entirely of ringing metal ore, it reverberates and resonates with sounds, repeating what it has heard. There is no silence anywhere, just murmuring voices, mutterings, like the ocean’s waves, like fading thunder. Fama herself can hear anything that happens in the skies, in the seas, or on earth…” (Ovid, Metamorphoses, Book 12)

Everything is present. A voice speaks. In FAMA, the balance between orchestra and voice is transformed in such a way that – following the dense, energetic chorus-orchestra-sound of the 1st scene – the instruments gradually surround the audience, until finally, in a kind of “wide shot” (Scene 6), and with the orchestra reduced to a single contrabass flute, the focus is entirely on the voice itself – like a film-zoom onto the protagonist’s face. The orchestra is transformed into a resonance chamber, into an extension of the larynx. Fama’s house, starting point of the narrative, becomes the interior space of the protagonist. Here, the voice in all its intimacy and vulnerability becomes perceptible.

Scene 3 is a virtuoso spoken aria: From a profusion of words, of wildly associative, erratic thoughts, the character is gradually put together. Initially articulating her observations, intimations, desires, projections, dreams, and fears in playfully-coquettish cascades, she finally, conscious of the intractability of her situation, ends up in despair. In scene 3, the sound of the instruments is closely entwined with the sound of the speaking voice – it is transformed into the resonance chamber of her language. The instruments seem to carry her words further, to reinforce and to distort them, or else to insert them in a web of other voices.

After that: darkness.

Following scene 4, a “chorus island”, the voice in scene 5 seems to have lost its corporeality. It speaks through a funnel which is directed above the audience, relating a dream.

In the next scene (6), the protagonist is again illuminated by bright lights. She stands in front of a mirror: “How strange my voice sounds, is it really me who speaks? Surely my face is also completely different now.” Voice – identity: At this instant, the actress doesn’t represent anyone (no Fräulein Else) but herself – the voice of the actress.

Scene 7 is an enormous crescendo which ends in a rushing noise: the sound of the waves inside Fama’s house. After that, a foreign voice begins to speak; the orchestra is now positioned in the rear of the audience. As if coming from another world.

Theatre of Voices: Book of the Desert

The specific form of the Book of the Desert is determined by the change in proportion between voice and orchestra, scene by scene.

A theatre of inner voices, such as Ingeborg Bachmann’s visions and poetic visitations, through the (mental) deserts within us. The poet’s distorted diary becomes the basic model of an endgame in music theatre and opera. Here, any kind of narrative structure is fragmented, the characters remain prisoners of their own stories. There are no dialogues. Like on various narrative levels of lost myths, the actual story is rescinded by variant interpretations and reflections of simultaneous asynchronicity.

The voice’s quality itself becomes the subject. Its sound is instrumental, instrumentally distorted or reproduced by the orchestra. Scene I is based on a text by Händl Klaus, spoken by myself, which I analysed electronically, and subsequently reconstructed orchestrally. Whereas in the first scene the “speaking” orchestra is duplicated by an actor who speaks the same text, in scene VII the orchestra “speaks” the identical words, albeit on its own – like tracks in the sand. This is where the ancient Egyptian text appears: Papyrus 3024, “Death stands before me, like…”.The voice finds its resonance in the sound of the orchestra, overlaid beyond recognition; choral amalgamation of voices, spatialization of voices. The sound of the orchestra resumes the sound of the voice. This is a discontinuous narrative; every character remains prisoner of their own story. Traces of gestures, things that have already happened, arrange themselves to form a whole. Like an outcry, an imam’s chant, transcribed from memory and orchestrally reconstructed, interrupts scene I. The absent voice.

This is a theatre beyond plot and action – just voices in space.

The Text-Machine: La bianca notte

La bianca notte is a reversal of FAMA. Vocals range between various different levels of stylisation – from speaking voice to instrumental sound, from creaturely sound to outcry, from exclamation to a recitative-like parlare cantando, through various orchestral spaces. The orchestra colours the voice’s timbre, or the voice is fitted into an orchestral structure which is continually transformed – from harmonic to metallic sound, from instrumental sound to a scream.

La bianca notte is a journey through a nocturnal city. The always busy common sense is asleep; we can hear shouts, whispers, scraps of conversation and the sounds of the harbour, the squeaking of the ships’ masts and chains, waves splashing against the quay wall.

All this develops into a phantasmagoria, into images and stories.In one night, the protagonist walks across the city and, as in a dream, is tossed into various different time zones. The whole scene resembles a cubistic tableau. He encounters real and imaginary figures from the past. Dialogues are put together in a kaleidoscopic manner. This is not about questions and answers, everyone remains within their own narrative, inside their own text.

Solo passages are presented as soliloquised dialogues in a way that leads to a fragmentation of the (re)sounding spaces, even within a monologue. It seems as if the protagonists were calling to each other across a precipice.

Regolo and il Russo, as well as two female voices, Sibilla and Indovina (the soothsayer) form a group round Dino. Whereas Indovina comes from another time, as if she had been purloined from an Italian opera, quietly observing events, Sibilla, who has fallen for Dino in an “amour fou”-style passion, seeks refuge together with him in the phantasmagoria of an imaginary contemporaneity. Her love founders shortly after their encounter in scene 8. A dream which is here represented by the simultaneity of their two text layers, performed by complementary voices.

Regolo, on the other hand, typifies the Mephistophelian counterpart. He is born out of the same darkness as Indovina. During this night, Regolo takes Dino to the almshouse. Here they encounter the poet and violinist il Russo, whose facial characteristics resemble Dino’s. As il Russo, Dino comes face to face with his own failure, with his own end. His last words are: “io non vivo, vivo in uno stato di suggestione continua.”

All that remains is the night: appearing as a utopian space, a u-topos of alternative possibilities, as well as a realm of madness and complete hopelessness. The night, the disappearance of firm outlines and contours, is both the musical narrative’s subject and its point of departure. Out of darkness, figures and their stories gradually emerge. Like in FAMA, whose house appeared to be sealed on a non-existent horizon, in La bianca notte the darkness of the night – oscillating between background and folly – also shuts itself away in the course of the story’s parabolic ending.

Seen in this way, La bianca notte could also be read as a critique of the dark sides of modernity: where the individual becomes an outsider, and the artist’s function is transformed – he becomes society’s pariah and thus the functioning appendage of the universal machine of stupidity; everything obeys the laws of a terrible Dialectic of Enlightenment. At any rate – in the end, Dino is no longer the poet Dino Campana, who, between the times, attempted to lead a fulfilled life in love, and as an artist.

He has turned into an anonymous being, lacking any kind of identity, who is forced to realise that society no longer has a place for him; that his love for Sibilla is doomed to fail and that proof of his own existence, which he used to gain as a writer, in search of himself, of the kinds of inner voices that are able to express a different realitiy, has also foundered. In the end, he loses his name – there is only anonymity, a complete loss of identity: “Io mi chiamo Dino e come Dino mi chiamoEdison… Sono una stazione telegrafica…” And finally: “io non vivo, vivo in uno stato di suggestione continua.”

I have tried to approach the idea of opera on the basis of three examples. Opera as interaction of sound, text, set design and the performers’ moving bodies. To put the question differently: What are the conditions for the creation of such moments that we call “theatre”? What exactly are these mysterious moments of subtle (im)balance between the protagonists, how are such extraordinary instants of an ambiguous space created – a space which, in the end, completes itself within the sphere of the unknown? In the spaces between the imagination’s floating encounters. What is it, really: this spontaneous appearance of another, possible world behind things? For the moment, I’m trying to translate this image into the compositional mirror writing of the animate world. It seems to me essential that, time and again, new pathways through the narrative should reveal themselves to the listener. Opera as open art form; as an art form leading into the open.

It’s obvious that, for instance in FAMA, when the protagonist speaks of the glass lodged between her and her mirror image (scene 6), the instrumental sound is transformed into the material presence of glass. When she speaks of her “completely different voice”, the sound of the contrabass flute becomes this “other voice”; when she speaks of the shimmering glow of the lake’s water (Scene 5), the flutes’ whistle-sounds and the high accordion are imagined as light. When she asks: “Who’s playing the piano so beautifully down there?” the kind of imaginary abyss opens up that I envisage. This is the opposite of an illustrative duplication; the expressive content appears on the reverse side of the composition, so to speak. Sound becomes physical presence – physical presence becomes sound. Always, a story is told. But how? With every new piece, I ask myself this question.