Erstwords: Wandelweiser

erstwords: Wandelweiser
2015-11-05, 10:35 AM
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erstwords
Wednesday, September 23, 2009
Wandelweiser
by Michael Pisaro
Wandelweiser is a word
Wandelweiser is a word for a particular group of people who have been committed, over
the long term, to sharing their work and working together. I still find it something of a
miracle that we discovered each other and have continued to function for over seventeen
years: coming from different musical backgrounds, living in different parts of the world,
and feeling free to go our separate ways when necessary. In fact, the group as such
doesnt ever come together as a whole, and includes others besides composers:
musicians, artists, writers friends. In Haan (near Dsseldorf) there is an office where
scores are collected, the web site maintained, and recordings are released. This place,
lovingly run by Antoine Beuger, is essential to the continued existence of the
organization, but not to the deep connections that exist between us. Our sense of a
shared mission is due, I think, to the countless beautiful musical and artistic moments
http://erstwords.blogspot.ca/2009/09/wandelweiser.html
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we have experienced with each other.
Edition Wandelweiser was the name Burkhard Schlothauer gave to the fledging
publishing and recording company he formed with Beuger in 1992. I guess it means
change signpost if one understands it as a combination of Wandel with Wegweiser; or
perhaps more literally, change wisely (or, if one understands the second part as
Weise: wise man of change?) Whatever it means, I was never completely comfortable
with the name, but have always understood it somewhat humorously as something
that just popped out of Burkhards linguistically inventive mind, rather than as a
description of any kind of aesthetic program. (Im pretty sure he was not trying to
indicate that we were especially wise.) In any case, Antoine had recently met Jrg Frey,
Chico Mello, Thomas Stiegler and Kunsu Shim and it must have seemed that they had
enough in common (not just musically) to band together. They had a feeling that there
had to be a way to do things outside of the rich, overconfident new music organizations
in Germany and Switzerland, plus a sense of being outside of the status quo these
organizations created. Over the years several more joined including myself, Manfred
Werder, Carlo Inderhees, Radu Malfatti, Marcus Kaiser, Eva-Maria Houben, Craig
Shepard, Andr Mller, Anastassis Philippakopoulos (and several others who have since
left: amongst them Makiko Nishikaze and Klaus Lang) and then, at some point, there
seemed to be enough people, even though we kept meeting (many) other interesting
musicians. (I will say more about this later.)
The first years of the organization were quite dynamic. Members came and went. For a
while there were connections with Edition Thrmchen in Cologne and Edition Mikro in
Zurich, two other publisher collectives of avant-garde music. For a period of about five
years, starting in the mid-90s, Wandelweiser had an association with another
performance and publishing group, named Zeitkratzer (the whole organization then was
grouped under the umbrella of the English translation of that name: Timescraper).
Burkhard was the only one who belonged to both groups. At the time Zeitkratzer
(directed by Reinhold Friedl) was more oriented towards the live electronic side of the
experimental music spectrum. Still, there was a fair amount of overlap between the two
groups, as Zeitkratzer recorded works by Schlothauer, Malfatti and Beuger, and had as
members, musicians such as Axel Drner and Ulrich Krieger, who shared some aesthetic
preferences with the composers in EW. After 2000 however the two groups went their
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separate ways. (Some associations continue since 2007 Ulrich Krieger has taught at
CalArts.)
Wandelweiser in 1992
This was an exceptionally obscure stream of music in 1992 almost invisible, at the
edge even of the experimental avant-garde. There were no signs of it in North America
or, as far as I know, anywhere outside of Germany and Switzerland. One would only
have discovered it by accident.
Here is how I found out about it. Kunsu Shim who, while no longer a part of
Wandelweiser, was crucial to the aesthetic development of the group was visiting
Chicago in the fall of 1992 (with his partner, German composer Gerhard Stbler).
Kunsu, of Korean background, had lived for several years in Germany. He was very quiet
(and slightly shy), but friendly the opposite of the boisterous American new music
types I knew at the time, and the first person I had met in a long time who wanted to
talk about the music of John Cage and Morton Feldman.
Cage had been a visitor to Northwestern University, where I was teaching, for a few
weeks in the spring of 1992. He had died in August of 92 and his name was still very
much in the air. At that time and I think for most of the long period after Silence was
published (1961) it seemed musicians were more interested in discussing Cages ideas
than his music. For Kunsu, the music of Cage, and of those who worked with him and
followed in his wake was felt to be more radical and more useful than the writing:
because it had so many loose ends and live wires still to be explored (something I would
also later encounter with other Wandelweiser composers). Thus 433 was seen not as a
joke or a Zen koan or a philosophical statement: it was heard as music. It was also
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viewed as unfinished work in the best sense: it created new possibilities for the
combination (and understanding) of sound and silence. Put simply, silence was a
material and a disturbance of material at the same time.
In 1990 I had started to put relatively long silences into pieces, without really knowing
why I was doing it. I wanted to stop telling musicians what to do in every detail and to
start creating possibilities for performers to explore a particular, individual sense of
sound within a simple clear structure I would provide. But I felt as if I was alone in these
interests. Part of the circumstance behind Wandelweiser is the uncanny synchronicity:
around that time several of us (including Kunsu, Antoine, Jrg, Manfred and Radu)
were making more or less tentative stabs in this direction, without at all being aware
that there were others doing it.
Kunsu Shim and my first encounter with silent music
Kunsu gave me some tapes of his music. One consisted of a recent solo marimba piece
called floating, song, feminine (1992). There were hardly any sounds on that tape! I
was instantly captivated. Tape hiss, a very few incidental noises (a chair, a cough, a few
other unrecognizable sounds) and once in a great while a single short and abrupt
marimba note, which seemed to appear out of nowhere: like the sharp tip of a pencil
puncturing a sheet of paper, or a red balloon in a clear sky. (Later I would learn that the
player was on a ladder and occasionally dropping mallets onto the keyboard. Im not
sure if this would have affected my response to the piece.) It was at once so clear, so
simple that even a 3-year old would get it, and yet, simultaneously so mysterious and
complex in its affect.
These early pieces by Kunsu, including in addition, vague sensations of something
vanishing (string quartet and contrabass, 1992), marimba, bow, stone, player (1993),
expanding space in limited time (solo violin, 1994), and the chamber pieces (1994)
seemed to be putting the world on the head of a pin. In expanding space in limited time
the bow sometimes moves only half its length in five minutes. If you saw the violinist
playing you would think he was a living sculpture installation instead of music. In a
performance of the piece at Northwesterns Pick-Staiger Hall in 1994 it took 20 minutes
for me to hear any sound from the violin at all. Once I did start to hear it, over the
course of the nearly two hours duration, the music became almost unbelievably rich:
there seemed to be more sound, more tightly compacted in this miniature world, than in
the statistical complexities of Xenakis (or the black metal of Burzum). The music also
revealed the complexity of silence itself. Silence in music was not the cessation of
sound, or even a gesture: it was a different sound, one with more density than those
sounds made by instruments.
No apology
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Why do we like what we like? This is usually the most difficult point to explain.
Why would a schooled musician like myself, someone who grew up listening to and
studying Jimi Hendrix and avant-rock, free jazz, and classical music suddenly decide
that music with very little sound was the most exciting thing in the world? Basically
every member of Wandelweiser has a version of this story. Ive spent a lot of time
pondering what it was that was so fascinating and inspiring about this piece (and the
other pieces from this direction that I was beginning to hear). I have come to the
conclusion that, while its possible to trace the moments that might have set the stage
for such a reaction, the reaction itself is inexplicable. It is, at its root, not logical. It
doesnt follow from anything like a step-by-step process. You make a decision in a
moment, and suddenly youve turned down one fork in the road. Terrifying and
reassuring; strange and familiar; exciting and normal: all at once.
Theres no reason to love this music. One just does (or one doesnt). Aesthetics and
history come after the fact. Essays (like this one) will not make you like it better and will
not ultimately defend its continued existence. The last thing I would want to do is to
normalize something I continue to find strange.
Once one has made the turn onto this strange road, a world of difference opens up.
What looks like a narrow passageway from the entrance, turns out to have all kinds of
byways, pathways, way stations it becomes a world of its own. Small musical
differences that to some might just seem like inflections (for example, the difference
between a silence of 50 and of 60 seconds, or of a few decibels, or the difference in
timbre between a low trombone or an e-bow guitar, or between digital silence and
recorded silence) become intensely interesting to those working with them. Having had
some training in just intonation, this was familiar: the difference between an equal
tempered and a just (5/4) major third is for some unimportant, and for others of
fundamental importance. (If someone says about a kind of music that it all sounds the
same, its very likely to interest me. In my aesthetic experience its more enjoyable to
make my own landscape out of things that are apparently the same, that to be given a
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group of diverse things that already stake out their own clear positions on the map.)
To finish the Kunsu story
The recording of Kunsus music was definitely much farther in this direction than I had
gone. Soon he had provided me with a few more of his scores along these lines (there
werent many then) and a few recordings. It was then that I first encountered the music
of Antoine (his incredible lesen, hren: buch fr stimme, for voice and tape from 1991)
and Jrg (his very simple and beautiful Invention for piano, from 1990). [Later it
became clear that both Frey and Beuger had been moving in this direction for a while
Frey making gradual movements away, from the 1980s onward, from his orientation in
the New York School music of the 1960s, and Beuger, who already in his teens had put
silences into pieces, picking up composition again in the late 1980s/early 1990s with
pieces such as schweigen, hren for orchestra (1990) very likely the first piece to
sound like a Wandelweiser piece.]
Kunsu and I met again a little over a year later (1994, I think), and after that,
unbeknownst to me, he took the liberty of sending Beuger some of my recent scores. A
few months later I received a phone call from Antoine and we had a long conversation
(anyone who has had the pleasure of one of these long phone talks with Antoine will
know what an incredible experience that can be), at the end of which he asked if I was
interested in joining the collective.
Shortly thereafter, on a trip to Germany, I met a group of the current (Antoine, Jrg,
Burkhard, Chico, Thomas), and soon to be (Radu, Carlo) members for the first time. It
was an incredible bunch of interesting, strong, diverse, stimulating, and very humorous
people! It was like meeting up with some of Walter Zimmermanns desert plants in the
midst of the fertile high culture of central Europe (notwithstanding that some came
originally from Korea, Brazil and unfashionable places in Switzerland, Austria and
Holland).
Making sounds with Stones
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One thing I took part in on that trip in the fall of 1995 was a recording of Stones by
Christian Wolff in the atelier of Burkhard Schlothauers apartment in Berlin. I love the
disc, but the recording process itself was unforgettable. We had one rehearsal only: just
enough to situate everyone to the recording environment and to see what people were
doing. Each person made their own realization of the score, given minimal requirements
from Antoine I think ten sounds, however one wanted to understand that, to be made
over the course of the 70 minutes duration of the recording. Naturally everyone had a
different method of realizing the piece. Antoine had used chance procedures, and it had
thrown up a need to make three sounds at once, quite a trick given the kinds of sounds
he had chosen (involving balancing something and striking it in two different ways with
stones simultaneously, if I remember correctly). This took some amusing acrobatics, but
in the end came off successfully. Thomas Stiegler made every stone sound using his
violin, intertwining pebbles with bow hair in the strings, dropping tiny stones on the
bodyit was like a miniature symphony in a violin. Burkhard dragged a large stone very
gently over the floor of the atelier for a long, long time. Kunsu Shims sounds were all to
occur within a period of about two minutes, 55 minutes into the recording. He sat
without any visible motion (as far as we could tell, none whatsoever) for the first 55
minutes and then quietly, almost inaudibly, made ten extremely delicate sounds with a
few very small pebbles and some cloth. Jrg Frey, as someone who had performed many
pieces by Wolff, had determined, Wolff-style, to hinge a few of his sounds upon actions
by others, unbeknownst to the people playing. By chance this had created a situation
where the sign for the beginning of a sound and its end (i.e., the actions of two different
performers) necessitated that he rub two good size stones over another gently for nearly
half an hour. At the end of this Jrg was covered in white dust.
Listening to a Wandelweiser disc

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The making of this recording and, especially the idea that we would release such a thing
(as happened in 1996) is reflective of one of the most important features of the thinking
that was taking place within Wandelweiser. Obviously a recording is different in many
ways from a live performance. The most profound difference in my view is how one
experiences them. A concert is a series of moments in which something indefinable
passes through sound and between people. The moments are sensuously immersive
(sights, sounds, feelings, smells, tastes), but impermanent. But you have a relationship
with a recording. It can be a brief relationship and can then somewhat resemble a
performance. But the best recordings are lasting in their own particular and repetitive
way.
A recording is also an artifact that doesnt care what you do with it. You can listen to the
same song 500 times; you can refuse to open it (c.f. Brian Olewnicks review of Sectors
(for Constant) by Sean Meehan); you can hang it on the wall, sell it or throw it away.
With recording, sound is stored for use. How do you use a recording like Stones? Do you
just listen to it like anything else (perfectly possible in this case) or do you find ways of
listening to it that suit the recording in other ways: say playing it all day at low volume
(so that it can be forgotten, except for those very few moments when a sound rises to the
surface, reminding you its still there). Or play it so loud that you hear everything.
In other words, the recording can be viewed as open, something like an instrumenta
particular instrument that makes a limited set of sounds that can nonetheless have a
variable relationship in the environment in which they are played. Although there are
many discs in the Edition Wandelweiser catalog that can function as fairly normal
listening experiences, their presence alongside those such as Stones, calme tendue
(Spinoza), Branches, silent harmonies in discreet continuity, exercise 15, ein(e)
ausfhrende(r) seiten 218 226, phontaine, Transparent City, and im sefinental (to
name only the most obvious in this direction), creates an interesting double trajectory:
from the recording as concept towards its use as music, and, conversely, the invitation to
a listener to experiment in their own way with how to experience the more traditionally
presented music. (I dont mean to suggest that Wandelweiser owns or established this
category just that it plays a role in how I experience the music on any given EW disc.)
The first decade
So, after a while, as concerts started to happen (in Dsseldorf, Aarau, Zrich, Munich,
Chicago, etc.) and discs started to be released (with an initial onslaught of eight in 1996)
some attention was given to the group in the German speaking new music press and at
various music festivals. The presences of Radu Malfatti (I didnt know any of his work as
an improviser yet) and Manfred Werder (having just returned from a few years in Paris)
made themselves felt. At this stage (late 90s) Wandelweiser seemed very much like a
German thing not just as a basis of operations but where most of the things were
happening. This was ironic, inasmuch as most of the members were not from Germany.
(I have to add here that the Swiss contingent of Jrg and Manfred did a lot to make
sure that Wandelweiser was not only a German thing, with many strong and memorable
concert series in Aarau and Zrich.)
Ive often wondered about this landing in Germany. It may have something to do with
the high regard the American avant-garde was held in Europe, and in particular in
Germany, compared to the status it had in the US at the time. It was often my
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impression that Cage, Feldman, Wolff, Lucier and the others had had a greater impact
on the late 20th century musical life in central Europe than they had had in the US. The
musical situation in the States, at least in classical and jazz music, had been flooded with
more conciliatory voices: the minimalism of Glass and Reich, then the neo-Romantic
attitudes struck by the majority of academic composers; in jazz this tendency was
symbolized by Wynton Marsalis (coinciding with an apparent lack of momentum in free
jazz, and very little improvised music to speak of). My friend, the musicologist Volker
Straebel has called this period the death of the American avant-garde and this was
precisely what it felt like. So Europe in general, and Germany in particular, with its large
resources for culture (even helping marginal enterprises like Wandelweiser) was more
fertile ground.
There were two centers of Wandelweiser activity in Germany. Antoine, Kunsu, Marcus,
Andr, Eva-Maria, percussionist Tobias Liebezeit, pianist John McAlpine, the artist
Mauser, and for a while Carlo, his wife, Normisa Pereira da Silva and Radu all lived in
and around Dsseldorf/Kln. Thomas Stiegler wasnt too far away, in Frankfurt.
Antoine has had an ongoing series at the Kunstraum in Dsseldorf since 1993. A huge
number of Wandelweiser concerts have taken place there (the list itself would be a piece
of a kind just reading the way the titles change over the years is interesting at least
to me). There seemed to be just enough in the budget to bring musicians together, and
so over the years many of us have come to feel that this place is a second musical home.
(I just need to close my eyes to hear the sound of the rooms with Jrg Freys clarinet
echoing through them.)
The artist Mauser (about whom more later) had his studio in nearby Cologne and this
was another frequent performance location in the first decade. It was a very simple,
fairly large and extremely pleasant studio space in the courtyard of an apartment
building in a relatively quiet section of the city. Here the practice of daylong concerts
(Ein Tag), developed by Mauser and Antoine, really found its footing. For a while these
were yearly and incredible events, where either very long pieces or collections of
pieces would be done alongside time based work in other media: visual arts
performance and installation, video, dance and so on. Many would come and spend a
few hours there, to watch some of the performance, and to relax on the patio under the
trellis and have Kaffee und Kuchen. Others would spend nearly the whole time following
the performance, even though often very little would be happening. Although I could
only occasionally take part in events there, the days at Mausers are easily amongst my
most memorable artistic experiences.
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The other center of activity was Berlin. In the first decade the Verlag (the German word
for publishing company) was there, housed by Burkhard at his business. Recordings
(such as Stones) were made in Burkhards studio or in an old church near his house in
the countryside a few hours away (Hohenferchesar). Former members Makiko
Nishikaze, Chico Mello and Klaus Lang also lived in Berlin, at least part of the year. I
was close by for the better part of a year in 1998/1999 on a fellowship from Knstlerhof
Schreyahn. The musicologist and close friend to several in the group, Volker Straebel
lives there. At the end of 1996 Carlo moved to Berlin. There, along with artist Christoph
Nicolaus, he created one of the founding Wandelweiser situations. This project, called
3 jahre 156 musikalische ereignisse eine skulptur (3 years 156 musical events
one sculpture) took place in the choir loft of the Zionskirche (in Mitte, directly across
the street from Carlo, Normisa and their young son Matheos apartment), every Tuesday
for 3 years, always promptly at 7:30 p.m. Each concert featured the premiere of a new
10-minute solo piece (plus the rotation of one of the pieces of Nicolaus' sculpture
which consisted of stone posts of various lengths laid on the old wood floor of the
balcony). Although some friends outside the group wrote works (including amongst
others, Peter Ablinger and Wolfgang von Schweinitz), the overwhelming majority of the
new pieces came from Wandelweiser composers. Id venture to say that if you see a tenminute solo piece in the EW catalog from 1997 to 1999 it was written for this project.
Cumulatively over the three years, thousands of people came to the concerts, and had
their first experience of this music. Peter Ablinger once described to me his pleasure at
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taking an hour ride in the U-Bahn to hear a ten-minute concert (with a trip to a caf or
pub afterwards where often long discussions would ensue).
In any case, even in Germany, we had to exist on a shoestring. All the discs and the
performances (after the initial round) only happened because individuals in the group
found a small opportunity to do something. A free space close by; the interest of a few
creative performers; a little grant money: in sum nothing that would come close to
funding an average size music festival, would be enough for several densely packed
Wandelweiser events. (A typical example would be a week in Dsseldorf with concerts
every evening and two on Saturday and Sunday with new pieces being rehearsed by
various groupings of the ensemble.)
When I look back over all the events that took place over the years (certainly in the
hundreds, with probably close to one thousand pieces performed) I am amazed by how
much can be done with little or no money (still pretty much the case) and relatively little
public attention.
Different aesthetics under one roof
At this point I think I need to mention that Wandelweiser does not embody, as far as Im
concerned, a single aesthetic stance. To be sure, from the outside there appear to be a
set of shared characteristics, including an interest in silence, duration and radical
extension of Cagean ideas and the work that followed from it. In fact, fourteen years ago,
these might have been terms more easily applied to (much of) the music but even then
there were lots of different ideas about where the music was going as well as important
differences in taste and philosophical stance.
Here is a list of some of the things I can remember discussing with people in the first
years (and this might help to suggest how diverse the set of influences and conditions
were):
There were several different ideas about which works of Cage were most valuable. It
wasnt only 433, but the number pieces, 000, Roaratorio, Music for __, the
Variations, Empty Words, Cheap Imitation, the String Quartet (in Four Parts). What
seemed to be at stake here was not only the status of silence, but of the relationship
between silence and noise (the noise of the world), and the function of tone within that
continuum. Beugers important essay Grundstzliche Entscheidungen (1997) deals
directly with this issue.
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The music of Wolff was critical for many of us. Christian was at the meeting in Boswil
in 1991, where Antoine met Jrg Frey and Chico Mello. (Jakob Ullmann, Urs Peter
Schneider, Ernstalberecht Stiebler and Dieter Schnebel were also there. Manfred
Werder was in the audience for one of the performances.) Wolff has also been a great
supporter of our music and many of us have worked closely with him on his (and our)
music. Much of his music attempts to tap into the creative power of performance in an
explicit way. Christian had been close friends with Cornelius Cardew, had worked with
the Scratch Orchestra and had played with AMM but this feature had been present in
his music already quite early on, for instance in his For 1, 2 or 3 People (1964). While I
would not call what happens in this piece improvisation, it does involve on the spot
decision-making that people who have worked in improvised situations would
immediately recognize. At the root, and this I think applies even more to Wolffs music
(where it has been pursued in many different ways) than Cages, there is an
understanding of a composition as a stopping point, as opposed to an endpoint, in the
whole process of creating music. For many of us (all of us?), Wolff proved a deeper
source of inspiration for making new work than Feldman. (Which is not to say that
Feldmans work is not beautiful or helpful for some of usit is.)
There was, early on, and continues to be an ongoing curiosity about the depth and
breadth of the experimental tradition, American or otherwise, with a special interest in
some of the radical and obscure works. Antoine is especially gifted at uncovering little
known, radical work. I first learned of Tomasz Sikorski, Michael von Biel, Maria
Eichhorn, Robert Lax, Alain Badiou and even Douglas Huebler from him (this list could
go on much longer). Thanks to Antoine, at one recent Wandelweiser event, Terry
Jennings Piano Piece (1960) was performed and seemed to be right at home amongst
pieces by some of us. At a concert in Neufelden (near Linz) this summer, the
Wandelweiser Composers Ensemble played Toshi Ichiyanagis Sapporo (1962) and it
almost felt as if it had been written for us to play.
We have had occasional (but ongoing) discussions about the various directions jazz
and improvised music has taken in the previous 30 years. This was important in the
sense that it intersects in so many ways with the notions of indeterminacy. Radu, having
worked his way from Jack Teagarden to Paul Rutherford and then beyond, brought a lot
of experience and opinion to these discussions. But for myself as well, growing up in
Chicago, playing jazz guitar, and hearing so much of the music of the various AACM
combinations, this was an especially important issue. At the beginning there was little
idea that what we were doing had much in common with what was going on improvised
music this would come later.
There was a definite awareness of the importance of the German avant-garde:
especially Helmut Lachenmann (with whom Kunsu had studied) and Matthias
Spahlinger (with whom Thomas Stiegler had studied). From early on, some of the
thinking about instruments and the use of sound, and above all, instrumental noise, was
influenced in audible ways by these important figures.
As kind of a counterbalance there was an interest in many various small and strange
things: art and music made by the various members of Fluxus, odd bits of poetry (Hans
Faverey, Robert Creeley, Fernando Pessoa), the work of the Gugging artists and poets
(especially Oswald Tschirtner) or, especially in my case, American vernacular music of
the 1920s and 1930s (Harry Smith territory). For me these various oddball streams
came together in the one-of-a-kind poetic work of Italian/Austrian poet Oswald Egger
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(who was introduced to Antoine through the publisher Thomas Howeg, Zurich).
Over the years there have been many discussions amongst us concerning fundamental
issues in making music. Because some of the ideas in the pieces attempt, in their own
way, to get to the root of a particular musical situation, sometimes it has been helpful to
use thought from outside. As Gilles Deleuze points out, philosophy has been, over the
last three millennia, the main source of concept creation. (Science and mathematics in
his view create functions, and art creates percepts sensuous objects to be
perceived.)
Each of us, without being anything like a professional philosopher (were more like nonprofessional philosophy readers), has drawn inspiration from philosophical work. This
is very hard to talk about in depth without sounding pretentious, so Im not going to.
However, not mentioning it also seemed wrong its an important part of the
Wandelweiser atmosphere.
The conceptual background is present in a lot of the work we have shared (again,
especially at first). I think it partially explains why, over certain periods an intense
amount of activity was centered in one particular area of musical creation.
For a period in the mid- to late 1990s there was a lot of work done, by several different
composers, on the solo piece. Behind it is, I think, an interest in the number 1. This led
to a great number of very diverse pieces: exploring the unit of time structure (first music
for marcia hafif, stck 1998, fr sich), being alone (tout fait solitaire), the sonic
features of one instrument (die geschichte des sandkorns, kammerkomplex, mind is
moving, die temperatur der bedeutung), an expanse of limitless time (calme tendue,
ein(e) ausfhrende(r)) or the disappearance of perceived time altogether (ins
ungebundene, a certain species of eternity) to mention a few of the many works. One
thing that has always been striking about this work to me, is the tangible presence of the
performer when not playing. This is something that is never communicated on a
recording the continuity of the sound and silence is borne by the particular person,
whose singular presence is more important than anything written on the page.
At some point the duo (or twoness) came into something of a focus (early on, mostly in
the work of Jrg Frey, but then most recently by Beuger). Looking at the pieces, one sees
a world of difference between 1 and 2, in musical terms. Its hard to avoid the idea that
two in music always implies, at the very least, relationship if not love. [Lovaty,
zwischen, dedekind duos, 2 ausfhrende, and two/too.]
The most important conversation
Many important exchanges happened during the rehearsal process. We all spent a great
deal of time getting to know each others music by playing it. The Wandelweiser
Composers Ensemble is a group of sympathetic performers who nonetheless bring their
own styles of playing and thinking. One writes for individuals rather than instruments.
When Antoine, Jrg, Radu, Manfred or Marcus play on one of my compositions, I know
that their musical character will permeate the work. And I know that their way of
playing it will tell me things about my own piece that I could not have known without
them. Even the simplest looking piece takes on a curious afterlife, as one sorts through
what happened to it in the hands of one's friends.
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As Jrg Frey has said: the most important conversations took place not in words, but in
the music itself, from one piece to another; with one person going a different direction
with very similar material to what the other had used. Seen in this way, it is only by
getting inside the individual works that one sees the energy that is at play amongst this
group of musicians: where notions of what is similar and what is different are replaced
by much more complicated (and interesting) trajectories and tensions.
Radu brilliantly summarized to me the coming together, the commonality and the
differences in this way:
I think that these things [i.e., the ideas of what we were doing] are there anyway and
that "creative" people are only those who pick it up earlier then the rest, or hear it, or
feel it sooner. In the Wandelweiser situation: Who started it? Who is a "follower"? I
think we all started to become interested in similar things, even coming from very
different angles and directions and therefore we met and got together and felt a
mutual understanding right away.
A river delta
Thats the image I can best use to describe what has started to happen as a result of all
these conversations over the years, as our work has developed. What might have seemed
at first like something of a single narrow stream, has proved to be capable of some
variety. Early on, I took pleasure in the fact that I was never quite sure exactly whose
piece I was hearing. The overlap and the sense of a truly shared language was exciting
and inspiring. Now I take pleasure in being able to recognize, sooner rather than later,
whose piece it is even as it continues to be part of the same stream.
Art
Antoine introduced me to the monochrome painting of Marcia Hafif, an American artist.
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The idea behind this work was that one kind of material (that is, one color and kind of
paint) was already multiple. It is, abstractly, one color, but in reality, when the paint is
applied to the canvas by hand, there are many miniscule variations in tone and texture.
The fact that the description was simple but the reality complex, did not fall on blind
eyes or deaf ears. It is interesting how revealing a choice of a favorite artist can be. Jrg
Frey loves the still life painting of Giorgio Morandi: and thus it becomes possible to see
in his work the subtle, careful, endless shift of the same basic material each time
somehow just new enough to engage you, and to make you more deeply aware of the
possibilities for expression with limited means. It wont surprise anyone that Manfred
Werder is fascinated by the conceptual artists. I can remember him reading Lucy
Lippards Six Years: The dematerialization of the art object from 1966 to 1972 like it
was a suspense novel. Carlo Inderhees has been influenced by the work of On Kawara.
(That makes sense, doesnt it?) Although I love all this art, recently my own tastes run to
James Turrell, Juan Muoz and some of the installations of Sarah Sze. As these
exchanges started, I had the sense that much had happened in the realm of the visual
arts that had no parallel with developments in music (Carl Andre, Donald Judd, Sol
LeWitt, Dan Flavin, Agnes Martin, etc.). Perhaps, with all of the interesting work done
in experimental music in the last 15 years, this has started to change.
The presence of one artist-musician and two great artist friends of Wandelweiser is a
very significant (if in the US, seldom visible) part of the group.
Mauser introduced himself to Antoine at a concert of John Cages in Cologne in the early
1990s. His work, which kept evolving right up until his death in 2006, was a significant
part of the Wandelweiser environment. Entering Mausers studio for the first time in
1995, I at first thought it was devoid of art. As we sat and talked, the sun shifted and I
became aware of very light, somehow luminous squares on the walls. At some point it
was clear that they werent just effects of the light, but artworks: very fine translucent
paper had been fixed to the wall, and the paper caught light to varying degrees,
depending upon the angle with which the light hit it. Could anything be simpler? But
nothing is as easy as it looks. The art appeared and disappeared magically and seemed
to have its own un-emphatic duration. It had taken Mauser decades of very hard work,
filled with uncertainty, to arrive at this solution: at once clear in concept and
unbelievably sensual (you took it all in with your eyes before your brain started
working). It became a model for musical work for some of us.
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The artist Christoph Nicolaus has been a close friend to several in the group for nearly as
long as it has existed. Christoph does many kinds of work: drawing, photography, video
and other media. Much of his work is durational in nature: collecting single drops of
water from various sources every day and storing them in glass containers (where they
create beautiful clouds of evaporation); photographing the same location at the same
times every year (in spring, summer, fall and winter); making a daily drawing using the
sun and a magnifying glass to burn narrow, straight lines onto paper (dark brown
images which nonetheless retain the luminosity of the sun). With his ongoing series
Garonne, he is making a very large set of videos of rivers (having already covered much
of the world to do this) according to a very simple principle: finding a bridge and filming
directly down on both sides, using autofocus, as long as the battery holds out (thus
creating a series of ca. 60 minute videos, paired for each river, with water flowing from
the top to the bottom of the screen in one, and from the bottom to top of the screen in
the other). An installation presents a collection of 2 to 6 rivers shown simultaneously,
chosen at random from the pile. The differences are astounding: the colors (all shades of
green, brown, black, orange and blue), the flow, the wind and weather, the kinds of
debris one would never imagine how singular each river could appear. One of my
favorite Wandelweiser events was the exhibition of these videos in Berlin in 1998,
simultaneous with Carlos solo cello piece fr sich. Carlos music and Christophs videos
were in profound harmony something multi-media art often strives for, but rarely
achieves. Nicolaus has installed a beautiful collection of Mausers work in his large
apartment in Munich and hosts monthly concerts there under the title Klang im Turm.
It is one of the central current locations for Wandelweiser events.
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The least classifiable member of Wandelweiser is Marcus Kaiser. He is a cellist

painterarchitectcomposerbuilder/designermaker of sound piecesvideo artist.
Marcus does not juggle these activities he works on all of them simultaneously as if
they were part of some vast rhizomatic assemblage. He paints jungles the way they
grow: adding layer after layer of green until it is nearly a monochrome. He records
individual layers of sound regularly over the course of many days, until, when
simultaneously played back, these recordings reach a point of near saturation (in which,
however, sonic features remain distinguishable). He designs desks that serve as
workspaces in a communal environment. His work is grand in scope, but not oversized;
it is bold, but presented with gentleness and humility. (These last two are deeply
personal qualities that anyone who knows Marcus will recognize.)
Mild weather / distant thunder (Wandelweiser events)
Although over the years there has been great variety in the location, structure and
personnel involved in the concerts, the character of a Wandelweiser event has some
constants: A great deal of music; many discussions; the feeling of good-natured
friendship and community.
A strong reaction from someone else (I really did/did not like that, and heres why.)
can serve to clarify ones own thinking. However, in my experience the interactions that
emerged from Wandelweiser events, have usually taken place in an atmosphere of
general support where it is a given that one would continue to care about and for the
other, regardless of aesthetic differences.
Antoine, who in Dsseldorf has staged more large-scale Wandelweiser events than any
of the rest of us, has always been particularly clear in his feelings about this matter (and
is himself a good model for the attitude): people should not feel wounded by
presenting their work or ideas. Critique does happen, but to me it has seemed rather far
down the list of things to accomplish during one of these gatherings. In any case, with a
group of close friends, one usually knows how they feel about one's work. Over the long
run, sympathies and differences will make themselves clear in the decisions made in the
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work itself (as if individual works were part of larger picture). For instance, starting in
the mid-90s one could follow the use of the bass (or low) drum duo from work to work,
composer to composer: Ohne Titel (fr Agnes Martin) (Frey, 1994/95), fourth music for
marcia hafif no. 3 (Beuger, 1997), time, presence, movement / one sound (Pisaro, 1997)
finally becoming four such instruments in Malfattis l'effaage (2001). A close look at
these four apparently similar pieces would reveal subtle but substantial differences in
approach. Although each piece can stand alone, there is also a (wordless) discussion
going on between them. There are many such discussions in the Wandelweiser catalog.
None of this means that striking events are avoided quite the contrary. But these tend
to be shocks produced by the works themselves. If I think about some of these: the first
time I experienced Beugers nine hour composition, calme tendue; the endless (and
occasionally hilarious) stream of Swiss birds and valleys in Jrg Freys Lovaty; the way
the density of Marcus Kaisers incredible jungle paintings permeates his cello playing;
the radical juxtaposition of control and freedom in Radus Dsseldorf Vielfaches; the 15second summary of the orchestral experience contained in Manfred Werders 2008-1
(just to mention the first five that come to mind), shook me as an artist in a way no
harsh words could ever do. Im still dealing with these events. (In part, my summer twoweek festival, the dog star orchestra, is an attempt to find some kind of North American
/ West Coast parallel to these concert meetings.)
Beyond the creative impetus received from discussions and exchanges of ideas, there
was, above all, the pleasure of wonderful performances of the music. In addition to the
members of the Wandelweiser Composers Ensemble, we have each been very lucky to
work with performers whose dedication to the music and to the people making it is
responsible in part for the continuity of the work being made.
Here I tip my hat to a special group of musicians who have kept faith for many years in a
spirit of friendship and generosity: pianist John McAlpine, percussionist Tobias
Liebezeit, oboist Kathryn Pisaro, speaker Sandra Schimag, accordionist Edwin
Alexander Buchholz, the Quatour Bozzini (Clemens Merkel, Nadia Francavilla and
Isabelle and Stphanie Bozzini), violist Julia Eckhardt of Q-02 and Incidental Music,
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flutist Normisa Pereira da Silva, cellist Stefan Thut, percussionist Greg Stuart, pianist
Jongah Yoon, pianist Guy Vandromme and saxophonist Ulrich Krieger. I cant imagine
our music without the creative participation of these people.
A few statements about composition (concepts, structures, sounds)
Let us call a musical concept an idea or thought about music at some remove from the
embodiment of the thing itself.
A written composition contains a concept of how a particular music should be made. (In
this way, all written music is conceptual.)
In a composition, a small, clear concept might be preferred to a large, overarching one.
(For this way of thinking, better a piece that takes up the simple coincidence or noncoincidence of two players than one that seeks to redefine orchestration.)
There is greater diversity to be found in a collection of clear concepts than in a collection
of overarching ones.
Clear concepts can sometimes lead to perplexing results: results that test the powers of
perception on some level and are conscious of that test. One kind of sonic pleasure is
connected to the effort the mind of the listener makes to understand (or properly hear)
the sound situation initiated by the composition.
The musical situation will get some degree of its structure from the composition; but the
composition cannot account for everything. In the written work, something might be
said about the time, or sound, or player or instrument (or all of these), but it is essential
to keep in mind that much (most?) of the sonic reality will occur in the situation itself.
The performers of the work are capable of being aware of the concept and the structure
given by the composition, and of making active decisions at the same time.
There is no clear and logical way to affix a percentage of creation or responsibility to any
one of the musical actors. The music arises as a result of a whole set of circumstances,
almost as if, once set in motion, it is doing the acting and the thinking.
The process described here is independent of conventional notions of what might or
might not sound good, what is easy or difficult to grasp, or what is easy or difficult to
listen to.
At its best the surface of the music (i.e., the sounding result) will be engaging enough to
draw a listener into the world of the piece. It is inside this world in that significant
artistic events (moments that can alter the way we hear and understand music)
transpire.
There is nothing wrong with a beautiful surface, placid and composed, despite its
contact with musical upheaval.
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Where are we now?

Over the years the network of people associated with Wandelweiser has expanded. The
regular concerts taking place in Aarau, Dsseldorf, Munich, Zrich, and Los Angeles,
along with semi-regular ones in New York, Berlin, London, Vienna, Chicago and Tokyo
have done a lot to make people aware of the music and to draw people to it. Given that
new music is being written constantly and then performed, the concerts are still the
frontline of activity (and represent much more than could ever be recorded and
released).
As is probably already clear, the openness of much of this work to environmental sound,
its more than occasional extended duration, and the frequent use of indeterminacy
means that in most cases there is no such thing as a repeat performance: the second
performance of a piece (in a different context or with different performers) can feel like
another premiere. So we all, even after all these years, continue to find many reasons to
perform each others work, and often serve as advocates for it (which seems to be a rare
thing it was at least seldom found in the contemporary music environment in which I
grew up).
Now, mainly through personal contact and involvement in performances, there are also
a number of musicians of a younger generation who take Wandelweiser as one of their
starting points. As influence is such a tenuous thing, it would be hard to know where to
begin or to end a list of these musicians. Its probably best to say that, for a group of
younger musicians, the music of Wandelweiser is a part of the experimental music
atmosphere in which they learned to breathe.
The recent compact disc recordings are, as in the past, not an extension of, but a
complement to the concerts. As mentioned above, many of the more interesting EW
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discs represent things that could never have been performed as such. To choose recent
examples, both Antoine Beugers too, with recordings of separate duos made in
Dsseldorf (Jrg Frey and Irene Kurka), and Tokyo (Rhodri Davies and Ko Ishikawa)
combined to make a new piece out of two other pieces and the duo field recording
performance disc by Manfred Werder and Stefan Thut do not represent possibilities
available in a concert space (Im Sefinental). My two most recent discs on the label are
also examples: both realizations of an unrhymed chord were specifically designed as
recordings, and hearing metal 1 is a work for recorded percussion to begin with.
It is here perhaps that the music of the Wandelweiser group shares something with
some interesting recordings on labels such as Erstwhile, Improvised Music From
Japan, Slub Music, Hibari, Another Timbre, Manual, Cathnor, Confront, Potlatch and
others that seem ostensibly more concerned with improvised music. Recent releases on
these labels also often confound notions of live and recorded means, and blur the line
between what has been spontaneously invented (or improvised) and what is composed
(or assembled) in the studio. Perhaps this sense of shared territory is one of the reasons
that EW releases have found a successful outlet in the US in Erstwhile distribution
(erstdist).
Ive recently started thinking about how much overlap there is between these apparently
different enterprises. It is not uncommon for improvisers these days to limit or fix
aspects of their performance before playing. One might set a total duration beforehand
(as Radu likes to do), or bring only a certain limited set of materials or an (apparently)
limited instrument (such as Sachiko Ms sine wave sampler). Or perhaps an
improvisational work might find itself in a context where composed works have also
been played (a practice which AMM has long engaged in). Recently in concerts and on
recordings, works by Sugimoto or Cage might be understood as belonging to
repertoire of an ensemble that most often improvises. While I think its fair to say that
something is being shared by these various musical streams, I would prefer at the
moment not to name what that is (in part because I have no idea what to call it). At the
moment I feel that this unnamed area has a tremendous potential going forward.
Non-national music
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Despite its base in Germany, Wandelweiser is not a national style or trend. It was
remarkable that people from Austria, Switzerland, the Netherlands, Germany, Brazil,
Korea, Japan and the US felt they had much more in common musically (and often
personally) than they did with their own countrymen. The American experimental
tradition was gone (or at least, not a part of our generation) and this was being replaced
by something else. Whatever it might be called, it was certainly not the province of one
national way of thinking about music or making music. Outside of the countries where
the members of Wandelweiser live, there have been a couple of strong developments in
the last several years.
For nearly ten years now a set of shared musical activity has existed between many
members of Wandelweiser and experimental musicians in the UK. My wife Kathy and I
had the opportunity to get to know something of the scene in London in 1996. As she
was there doing her dissertation research on the Scratch Orchestra, we had the chance
to meet and talk to John Tilbury, Howard Skempton, Michael Parsons and many others
(and we heard AMM live for the first time in Chicago not long thereafter). During our
stay in London, I learned of the music of Laurence Crane, who I managed to meet on the
next trip over. Shortly thereafter, Manfred Werder came into contact with two
composers with whom members of Wandelweiser have since often worked: Tim
Parkinson and James Saunders. (To this list of UK collaborators, I would also add
composers Markus Trunk and John Lely, though this list is growing rapidly.) Members
of Wandelweiser have performed at INSTAL (Glasgow) in both 2008 and 2009, and this
has led to more contact with the vibrant experimental improvisation community in the
UK and elsewhere.
Radu Malfatti had of course lived once in England, but is, as usual, a special case. Since
his musical shift, many of his friends from that earlier era were no longer on speaking
terms with him. However a whole new set of associations with a younger generation
developed mostly improvisers, in London and Berlin, who looked to him as a
trailblazer in a new style of making music. (There are simply too many names here to
mention!)
The Tokyo Connection
To close this section, Id like to say just a little about the relationship that has developed
in recent years between Wandelweiser and some musicians from Japan.
Some of these, in retrospect, had something like an aura of inevitability. Certainly, to
choose one example, Toshiya Tsunodas somewhat hands-off approach to field
recording (already present in the very beautiful recordings of 1997) something I think
of as steady state recordings of silence are not so far away from thinking we in
Wandelweiser might have recognized (had any of us known of it then).
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When Taku Sugimoto first contacted Radu Malfatti in July of 2000 it might have come
more or less out of the blue, but if one looks for a moment at the music coming out of
Tokyo from at least the mid-90s onward there is a sense that there too something
radical, having to do with the fundamental nature of sound and silence, was at work.
The world of Opposite is not so far from that of Beinhaltung, that of The World Turned
Upside Down not so far from the one of Dach. In any event, as their work together (such
as Futatsu) amply demonstrates, there was a quick understanding between these two
great musicians.
When Taku Unami began distributing Wandelweiser discs through Hibari in 2004, the
music became much better known (and apparently, appreciated) amongst experimental
musicians in Japan. Both Radu and Manfred (starting in 2004) have worked there
several times, along with, most recently, Antoine. In a short time some beautiful musical
projects between these musicians have developed including most recently some
wonderful recordings: Manfred Weders 20061 on Toshiya Tsunodas Skiti label, A
Young Persons Guide to Antoine Beuger (produced by Sugimoto for his Slub Music
label), and kushikushism, a duo project by Radu Malfatti and Taku Unami (also on Slub
Music).
Antoine told me a story that may or may not be symbolic of the way in which
Wandelweiser is understood in Japan, especially amongst younger artists. When
Manfred, Radu and he visited Tokyo in November of 2007, Antoine received many discs,
often without any labeling, from young musicians. One particular musician gave him a
few, explaining in each case, which ones were more Wandelweiser and less
Wandelweiser. On one of the more Wandelweiser discs, there appeared to be no
sound at all.
As Ive become acquainted recently with much more of the music made in Japan by
experimental musicians from the onkyo group and its offshoots, Ive returned to the
thought behind Radus comment above many times. Sometimes the concerns, if not the
music, seem so similar as if to be almost identical: as if a group of ideas was circulating
of which no one was directly conscious as if they had no real point of origin and were
able to place themselves anywhere they could find a host.
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In the music of Sachiko M and Toshimaru Nakamura there is (or can be) such an
intense stillness. Where does it come from? How available is it to others? In the work of
these musicians with Keith Rowe I find an inspiring parallel to some of the music I got
to know with my Wandelweiser friends. To be sure, there are many differences: the
prevalence of electric over acoustic instruments, the fact that the music is improvised,
and the various lineages that the musicians have within their traditions, to name the
most obvious. Nonetheless, the stillness, the silence and the serene beauty; the sense of
taking your time and trusting your audience to take the time with you; the evolution of
the work and the sense that an active exploration is going on; to me these suggest a
deeper kinship. Perhaps the most representative (and beautiful) example of this is the
work of these three (with Otomo Yoshihide) at the incredible concert in Berlin on May
14, 2004, documented on ErstLive 005 particularly on the final disc.
When I think about our group now, and especially the large set of friends of this music, I
wonder if some of the most fragile seeds planted in the mid-century, by Cage and the
experimental tradition, by the certain subgroups within free jazz and improvised music
communities, and by the quiet experimental tendencies in Japan (Toshi Ichiyanagi, Yuji
Takahashi) have, after spending many years underground started to spring to life:
invisibly everywhere.
Summer/Fall, 2009
I would like to thank Jon Abbey, Manfred Werder, Radu Malfatti and Antoine Beuger
for their help with this article.
photos/credits:
1. the wandelweiser composers ensemble (joachim eckl)
2. antoine beuger (hartmut becker)
3. john cage (ben martin)
4. jimi hendrix (photographer unknown)
5. desert plants (unknown)
6. stones (CD cover/ida maibach)
7. zionskirche (unknown)
8. christian wolff (unknown)
9. gilles deleuze (still from French TV)
10. radu malfatti/mattin (yuko zama)
11. mauser in his studio (marianne hambach)
12. sonnenzeichnungen (nicolaus) (kathryn pisaro)
13. marcus kaiser (in sook kim)
14. kunstraum (with eva-maria houben, john mcalpine, michael pisaro) (renate
hoffmann korth, ew website)
15. wolff.beuger.frey (silvia kamm-gabathuler, ew website)
16. sachiko m/dan flavin installation (yuko zama)
17. taku sugimoto/radu malfatti (eleen deprez)
18. keith rowe/sachiko m/toshimaru nakamura/otomo yoshihide (yuko zama)
at 11:02 PM
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1 comment:
Richard Pinnell said...
This is superb Michael, thank you so much.
September 24, 2009 at 7:14 AM
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we have experienced with each other.

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The least classifiable member of Wandelweiser is Marcus Kaiser. He is a cellist

Where are we now?

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