Works

musica viva // 7. 4. 2011 // Klaus K. Hübler, Azoth: In Conversation With the Flautist Carin Levine

Carin Levine, you’ve often performed works by Klaus K. Hübler. Can you describe his musical language? Does one find a similarly dense form of ‘New Complexity’ to the music of his teacher, Brian Ferneyhough?

It’s similarly dense, but very different. It would certainly be wrong to say that he writes complex music because he studied with Ferneyhough. First and foremost, Hübler’s music is multi-layered. He works intensely with different levels and layers, whether in a single instrument or in the interplay of several instruments. It’s the same in the new piece: there are layers within the separate instruments (rhythm, dynamics, accents) and there’s an additional, second kind of multi-layeredness, namely that of the ensemble when the gestures and melodic movements of the instruments come into contact with one another, overlap and move apart again.

Has this multi-layeredness always existed in his work?

Yes, always. It’s this constant alternation between concentration and reduction.

The combination of instruments is already quite unusual: cornet, flugelhorn, bassoon and harpsichord, as well as the piccolo, which plays at an extreme dynamic level in an extreme register. The extremes play an important part?

The extremes are very important, and that becomes clear when you think about the title: azoth is connected to alchemy. It’s the early form of the so-called ‘philosopher’s stone’, the penultimate stage in the alchemical process, so to speak, which is supposed to yield the mysterious quintessence. Everything related to that is already in this piece: the search for the philosopher’s stone, for truth, wisdom, gold, eternal life.

For the alchemists, azoth was a pure spiritual substance, separate from matter, in which the ominous philosopher’s stone would then appear. Is the music accordingly full of tension and expectation? Full of hope but also desperation?

Yes, you could say that. I think when one listens to a piece of classical music, it’s usually a fairly clear situation. There’s a beginning, a middle and an end, and when it finishes, one’s satisfied and thinks, ‘Yes, that works out, it’s good.’ It’s not like that here. Everything remains open.

From the beginning? Is the beginning a real beginning?

That’s the question. The theme is quite slow. The music is not as fast as it looks at first. The bassoon starts with a group of grace notes, but one has the impression that it’s already come from somewhere, it already has a past.

If we make a comparison with visual art, could one compare the music to a picture by the abstract expressionist Barnett Newman, which has no beginning and no end, being an excerpt from an infinite continuum?

As if the music were suddenly switched on? Yes, there’s some truth in that. The piece is already ‘in the air’ somewhere, it’s already there before it’s there. And the way it presents itself, for me the form is completely open. There’s really no ABA form, no sequential form, no development or recapitulation. No – as the title expresses, it’s an open question. The alchemists never found an answer. It’s no different in this piece: there’s no solution.

But there was an opinion among the alchemists that this legendary azoth was not some amorphous mass, that it definitely had a form – a polar form, with a kind of positive and negative light.

That’s true, I also read that. The philosopher’s stone is a divine symbol of the alpha and the omega, the beginning and the end. But I don’t think this was the reason or the trigger for the composition, because the musical language of extremes and contrasts, where several levels coexist and interlock, that’s Hübler’s own personal language which runs through his entire output. I’ve played a lot of his music, the very early pieces too, and one could always feel this approach very clearly.

So Azoth is a logical continuation of that?

Like a natural development, that’s right. The language becomes more and more clear and concentrated, but it doesn’t change its style, its specific tone. I remember a very early piece from the early 80s that also had a very unusual instrumentation: three flutes, harp and cello, and there were also different levels – I even had to work with my whole body.

Did you have to move to produce special sounds?

Yes, the head movements were precisely choreographed – up, down and sideways. That was an additional level. I’ve known Klaus K. Hübler for a long time, I like to think that I know his way of thinking pretty well, and we’ve spoken a lot, many times. With Azoth I asked him at the start whether this was a new period of his work. But he denied it emphatically. I think that Hübler – and this takes us back to the beginning and the comparison with his teacher Ferneyhough, which is almost always made – has a natural form of complexity. And that’s exactly what has fascinated and challenged me in New Music for many years: it’s like mathematical problem. I have various givens that I need to solve. When you’ve solved it and can take it on stage, that’s wonderful.

Do you have to keep practising Telemann sonatas to ground yourself again through tonality?

No, I don’t. I don’t try to reach New Music via early music. It’s more the other way around: I think one can get completely a different insight into early music by viewing it from the perspective of the music of our time.

How would you describe the basic mood of Azoth?

This metallic quality of the piccolo flute in its top register, this feeling of strain, of tension – there’s something of the alchemist’s desperation in that. To be clear, I don’t mean desperation as an emotional state but in musical terms, as one of very many expressive possibilities.

What’s left at the end?

A kind of exhaustion. The music gets deeper and quieter, and then this aeolian sound at the end: low and unearthly. But no solution has been found. If Azoth is the stage before the philosopher’s stone, that how it stays. There’s exhaustion, but no solution. The philosopher’s stone cannot be found.

À la mémoire de René Rauber ‘Languissante’ for Viola d’Amore, Ensemble and Orchestra

In this piece – a tribute to his departed friend – Klaus K. Hübler once again crafts his music beyond the usual compositional boundaries. It is a probing of the worlds in which the composer operates, from everyday things – often experienced and reproduced with much humour – to more spiritual areas that he invites us to enter with him. He does not cling to conventions; all components of music are examined, questioned, reinvented and transformed back into music.

Everything is subordinated to intuition, which seeks to express itself – extending to the disposition and composition of the ensemble.

The instruments, the ensemble, the orchestra: they are examined in their constitution, taken out of their typical role, given new possibilities and recreated in a new form.

First movement: the viola d’amore introduces the music with a solitary song. The phrases are structured to produce a kind of verse form, and the special ability to play the instrument polyphonically is used to develop the phrases into complex formations.

The second movement sees the entrance of the ‘peculiar’ ensemble, and the original composition of this instrumental group evokes symbolic associations: two wind instruments, the highest and the lowest – the piccolo and the rare helicon – as well as bells, harp, guitar, accordion and piano. They play a form of funeral march in transparent textures. Note repetitions wander through the movement in irregular, ponderous steps, interrupted by questioning exclamations. Towards the end, the viola d’amore resurfaces by coming into dialogue with the ensemble. The texture almost dissolves into nothing when the viola intones gossamer notes that disappear in the space like butterflies.

Third movement: five cellists (two of them sitting with their backs to the audience) are positioned on a platform above the ensemble: a dramaturgically powerful moment. The music remains transparent, permeable; thoughts flow from one cello to the next, sometimes overlapping, forming a homogeneous arc.

Fourth movement: requiem. Hidden from view, seven violists play repeated glissandi in phrases that recall the verses of the first movement. The seven musicians, con sordino, play like a single instrument with incredibly subtle sonorities – sounds of sorrow, of loss.

Fifth movement: the viola, alone once again, gradually bids farewell, pianissimo.

Sephiroth 2010

Sephiroth – the plural of sephira, Hebrew for ‘number’. This is also the root for the Greek word sphaira, ‘sphere’. The sephiroth her act as a formal framework, as in the Song of Songs, where they name the body of the beloved and thus the form of God, and in many works of art since then, extending to Umberto Eco’s novel Foucault’s Pendulum. The music of Klaus K. Hübler is characterized – paradoxically – by the co-incidence of dark, mysterious beauty and rigorous, almost mathematical clarity. The reference to cabbalistic ideas is therefore a natural one: Hübler’s music achieves a unity of balance and beauty.

Robert HP Platz

Notturno

for 10 instruments (1980)

Notturno for 10 instruments was written in 1980, during a period in my work defined by a strong reduction of compositional means and an engagement with various aspects of tradition. Most of all, it is a study in changing degrees of harmonic density. Here the rhythmic and sonic construction was designed to convey, via associations, the impression of nocturne-like uncertainty and bizarreness.

Klaus K. Hübler

„Feuerzauber“

auch Augenmusik, Studie in/über Phantasmagorie
for 3 flutes, harp and cello

The title is not deceptive, for this work is based on a specific historical piece: the ‘Feuerzauber’ section from Richard Wagner’s Die Walküre, a very typical passage for Wagner. It achieves its effect, which would be completely unattainable for a single orchestra member playing a solo piece, through the seeming effortlessness of the large forces involved – Wagner’s well-known phantasmagoria through a concealment of the work behind the music, which is the main reason for its haunting effect. My composition seeks to represent the mechanisms of Wagner’s phantasmagoria with the same methods from which it draws its effect: concealment of work through a revealing of work. Deliberately composed difficulties of coordination, for example, permits such a dialectic. The separation of normally combined actions of sound production enables their analytical representation; at the same time, conditioned by the technical difficulties, a phantasmagoria of a different kind ensues. Different degrees of deviation arise between the written score and the sonic result: visual music and the listening impression move apart. But this phantasmagoric component of analysis differs fundamentally from that of Wagner: while the latter achieves it suggestiveness by creating the illusion of ‘nature’, the analytical type appeals to the listener to realize the nature of their sensory impressions.

Klaus K. Hübler

Ohne Titel

for alto flute, octo-contrabass clarinet, violin, piano, percussion, fixed media

Not all that is crooked is beautiful, but this piece is beautifully crooked. Without title; without label; everything stands for itself and points to nothing outside itself. Without tutti: instruments as individuals, characters, like figures in an imaginary narrative with a broken dramaturgy? Without escalations or dramatic developments – every event stands for itself, is ‘posited’ and thrown? Without ‘normal’ notes – the sparseness of the conception almost leads to a ritualization of sound, and thus to a demonstrative staging of the performance? What function does the conductor have? Do they become a theatre director?

Günter Grass: ‘Everything beautiful is crooked’
(motto in the score)

Robert HP Platz
2000

MVSICA MENSVRABILIS (1975/76)

for 2 violins and viola

The term musica mensurabilis, meaning ‘measurable music’, comes from the Middle Ages. It refers to a notational form that originated in the 13th century and allowed, for the first time, a precise rhythmic notation of polyphonic music without being tied to predefined melodic material (modes). Mensural music differs rhythmically from later music in two ways: it only knew duple note divisions (i.e. no triplets, quintuplets etc.), and was not defined by the later bar structure based on a regular alternation of weak and strong beats. This historical meaning of the term points to one aspect of this composition: it uses exclusively rational, ‘measurable’ that are not weighted by any metric scheme. Most of all, however, the use of the term points to an element of the piece in a different, more literal sense: music that appears as measured and measurable, and thus describes from the outside what essentially defines music or, more precisely, musical performance: that aspect of a ‘musical’ interpretation which slightly modifies the written score in question. Everything that characterizes such a performance – ritardandi at the ends of phrases, vibrato, ‘delivery’ and so forth – should be avoided when performing this piece. The music is reduced to an ‘inhuman’ negative of what is usually thought of as music, emptied of all ‘musical’ imponderables. ‘Music in the administered world’ (Adorno) is reflected in the rejection of an ‘administered’ music. The composition is in two parts, of which the second is a repetition of the first. Because of its more constructed nature – the ‘measuring’ procedure takes on a life of its own, one could say – the repetition takes on a fragmented form. The constitutive principle of the composition is ‘cancelled out’ by the composition itself. The ending of the piece is open, not optimistic.

Klaus K. Hübler

String Quartet No. 2

‘sur le premier prélude’

More than ever before, our music is confronted with its own history. The Notre Dame school of the 12th century is as present as our most familiar contemporaries. An awkward and onerous situation that forces us to measure our music against earlier works and from which one cannot escape, except by ignorance or a faith in the ‘salvation myths’ of irrationalist escapism. (Whether the goal is referred to as ‘India’ or ‘New Simplicity’ is a matter of secondary importance.) It is beyond doubt that such cowardly evasions can, at most, aid subjective sensibilities – assuming one is willing to remain in the dark about oneself and one’s work (which those concerned like to dress up in autohagiographic epithets from the sphere of ‘personality and work’). In such a (semi-conscious) state, one is convinced of one’s own originality while the past sneaks unnoticed through the back door: Mahler’s equation of tradition and sloppiness. Should it be that someone, as I unreasonably do, feels no inclination to abandon themselves to a repressed or half-considered historicism, a confrontation with one’s cultural heritage is inescapable. Not, of course, in order to ‘acquire’, let alone ‘possess’ it – and then flog it off ‘for two Courant groschen’ as the destiny of music – but certainly in order at least to make an attempt at negating, preserving and elevating it. This perhaps holds – and this is undoubtedly a utopian perspective – the possibility of an individual way to come to terms with history through the consequences that are specific to history and to the person. These are a few brief thoughts that have informed a number of my works in recent years. This includes String Quartet No. 2, albeit with one qualification: it is a piece woven from a thread of playful irony that dons the anachronistic cloak of a set of variations ‘sur le premier prélude’ (from The Well-Tempered Clavier, Book 1) and fantasizes about continuous motion, with a certain connection to the discredited tradition of the ‘meditation’. (Debussy was right: ‘For all his weaknesses, Gounod is necessary.’) The fact that I arrive at a different result from Gounoud, however, is due not only to the different ‘listening angle’ but also to my Romantic disposition: ‘Better the naked black branches of wood than a faded cloak of rustling leaves from last year.’
(Jean Paul, Introduction to Aesthetics)

Klaus K. Hübler

CHANSON SANS PAROLES

- Kafka Study I for B flat clarinet, cello and piano

This composition was written in 1978 and forms part of the cycle Stücke für Maria, which consists of five autonomous works: three instrumental and two vocal compositions. The first and last pieces are solo sonatas for violin and viola respectively; the present Chanson sans paroles is the third part, located between the two vocal works. The subtitle ‘Kafka Study’ refers to the formal structure. The instruments initially share a uniform basic material, namely a G minor triad – though it only appears in a dissociated form. The development of this material or an insistence on individual elements of it now takes place in each of the three instruments – clarinet, cello and piano – in different, instrument-specific ways. This results in a form that is typical of conversation scenes in Kafka’s work: in the course of the conversation – in this case in the course of the compositional drifting – something seemingly self-evident and unambiguous – in this case the G minor triad – proves to be anything but a reliable basis for communication. The seemingly unambiguous turns out to be ambivalent because the conversational partners – in this case the instruments – associate different ideas with what they are saying – in this case, they realize different possibilities of development. This conception articulates distrust towards the traditional means of musical expression, based on the question of artistic mediatedness; problematized interaction is the theme of the piece. In this sense, the main title refers not so much to the Romantic form of the ‘song without words’ as to the ambiguity of this formulation itself: chanson sans paroles.

Klaus K. Hübler
1983

„Am Ende des Kanons“ (1983)

Musica con(tro)versa for trombone and organ

‘am ende des kanons’ combines two instruments that can be sonically merged, but are irreconcilable in their ideas. They can only be kept together by an abstract bond of construction, canosis iussu, albeit at the price of a decisive restriction of their individual characteristics: musica conversa. The resulting pressure leads to an outward and an inward explosion: musica controversa: resolutio/cercar. The final section is defined by a constant increase in canonic structures in the trombone part. In the process, the increasingly iron grip of this procedure enables the development of the instrument’s specific possibilities.

Klaus K. Hübler

KANNITVERSTAN

Audio play for pre-recorded sounds

In the story by Peter Hebel, one reads of a person who poses all manner of questions to others. But his conversational partners cannot understand his language any more than he understands theirs. Thus every time he seeks to find out something, the only answer he receives is that the person cannot understand him. The stranger even misunderstands the meaning of this statement, mistakes the response for a positive answer, causing him to engage in speculations that nonetheless lead him to the centre of the question. The title of Hebel’s story is ‘Kannitverstan’ (from Ger. kann nicht verstehen, ‘cannot understand’).

In my piece, which adopts this title, you will hear typewriters, teleprinters, telegraphs, printing machines, computer systems and other devices used for communication or the transmission of messages. You will also hear recordings of conversations in restaurants, words spoken at demonstrations and people’s assemblies, reactions of audiences at a football match and a concert etc. – that is, recordings from places where, or from which, messages, news and information are at least potentially conveyed or exchanged. But one cannot understand what is being said, what information is being passed on directly or via the mediation of machines. And, in a figurative sense, the individual recordings of which the piece consists cannot ‘hear’ one another: they are recordings from the sound and noise archive of Bavarian Radio, artificially placed in relation to one another. These recordings are distributed in time and in the stereophonic space according to a strict plan, and are subjected to a variety of manipulations; one could therefore say that they follow certain ‘radiophonic’ rules. Thus the tables are turned on our omnipresent means of communication: the medium is no longer the message, for the now-unintelligible or random message of the media itself in turn becomes the medium for speculating ears.

Klaus K. Hübler
1985

Kunst

for flute, viola and harp

‘The violet blossom, art’ – the first line of the poem of the same name by Henry of Meissen, (c. 1250-1318), also known by the nickname Frauenlob [praise of women], is placed at the head of the composition as its central idea. voran.
This short piece is in three parts; each section begins with a bar at the same starting tempo, with all three instruments playing. This is followed by solos from each of them, with the flute solo in the final section. (This solo can also act as a transition to my work Epiphyt for flute and chamber orchestra). Kunst is very sparingly scored, evoking a crystalline, transparent sound that is reinforced by the special treatment of the harp, whose part is notated on four staves. The two upper staves do not show any concrete pitches, but rather which of the instrument’s diatonically-arranged strings are to be plucked; the sounding result is only determined with the addition of the pedal positions, which are notated on the two lower systems, each time with the starting and finishing position. The hands and feet are required to act completely independently.

Klaus K. Hübler
(Kunst was composed at the suggestion of the flautist Sylvie Lacroix, and is dedicated to her)

etwas, was sich wiederholt: Wellen, Versuch für Kinder

This work, composed in 2004 as a commission for Wien Modern, is an easily appreciable composition for children that explores the sonic characteristics of waves in a subtle and artful fashion. A beautiful lake, perhaps, with glorious sunshine and a light breeze. Just as one sits in front of it and initially sees nothing but water and the monotony of the waves, the piece’s musical material is sparingly chosen. Gradually our view becomes more focused, however, and we see that no two waves are alike. The troughs of the waves have different sizes, and there is a refracted shimmering on the surface of the water. The waves rock and break with different intensity, and sometimes a line of foam runs right across the lake. One can see them reaching the shore and disappearing; or perhaps they encounter a resistance that abruptly opposes them. Small drops form, larger ones too. An object falls into the lake, leaving behind circular waves. The eye can make out more and more. The ears begin to listen to the sounds of the water, and more than that: they transform what is visually perceived into a sounding rhythm, into tone colours and little melodies. A wave is traditionally described as a soft, round type of movement, and usually expressed in music with triple metre and rhythmic figures. Hübler does not use these methods; his waves span small three-bar phrases. But just as the water waves can break, can bring each other’s movements to a halt and cause them to disappear below the surface of the water, Hübler not only makes the three-bar phrases follow one another, but also interlocks them. The position of the ensemble enables us to experience the waves not only making movements towards the shore, but also running horizontally. This evokes the space of a lake. What seems to be the same keeps returning in different guises. What remains is a careful listening within this rocking motion.

(Astrid Schmeling)

Sonata for Solo Violin

The Sonata for Solo Violin (1978) is one of my earliest engagements with the subject of ‘tradition’. In this piece I drew very deliberately on elements of historical musical language and, not least with the choice of D as a pitch centre, evoked memories of Bach’s Chaconne. I did this neither out of presumption nor guided by historical intentions; rather, my goal was to articulate my own position more precisely through an actual incorporation of a baggage that was already latent simply through the choice of instrumentation. A central aspect for me was a gradual unfolding and reduction of the material in time, which explains the monstrous temporal scale of the work.

Klaus K. Hübler
1984

Exzerpt

Versions A, B, C for solo flute (1981/99)

Exzerpt – as the title already indicates – comprises the three flute parts from Hübler’s ‘Feuerzauber’ auch Augenmusik. Studie in/über Phantasmagorie (1981) for three flutes, harp and cello, extracted and newly combined. The earlier piece focuses on unplayability as a compositional idea and also refers to the phantasmagoria of Richard Wagner’s ‘Feuerzauber’ from Die Walküre. Hübler achieves this unplayability via through interpretive difficulties: tempo shifts, problems of coordination for the individual players, as well as wrong notes. Hübler emphasizes that ‘the possibilities of the instruments are never overstepped; rather, the boundaries of human ability are explored.’ Accordingly, these difficulties can also be found in Exzerpt: the flautist is confronted with two staves, the upper one with only four lines. Here the player finds the required degree of overblowing and different ways of blowing; the lower stave contains the fingering instructions. These completely independent actions are augmented by a third layer: the rotation of the instrument. These autonomous ‘voices’ create a polyphony that is evoked by a musician who normally concentrates entirely on one kind of lip action. For Hübler, the most important aspect of his composition is a ‘discrepancy between the appearance of the score (Augenmusik) and the sounding result’, which makes it difficult for the musicians to form a sonic idea of the music.

Sylvie Lacroix

CERCAR (1983)

for trombone

Cercar. This title contains two words, recercar and carcer, for Bach’s inscription from the Musical Offering applies to this piece too: cantio et reliqua canonica arte resolute [the melody and other elements resolved in the canonic style]; the ‘king’s theme’ from the latter forms the basic material, albeit without ever appearing in an obvious fashion. In contrast to the Bach, however, polyphony is not used here as an artistic resource in its own right, but rather serves as an unbreakable shackle whose increasing pressure forces a new spirit of the instrument to articulate itself in resistance. Its genesis is thus connected to traditional techniques, but no longer requires them: through the polyphonic treatment of the different components of sound production (lips, slide, valve, breath, diaphragm…) turns the purely homophonic trombone into an instrument that possesses the ability to realize a highly multi-layered form of line.

Klaus K. Hübler

Sonetto LXXXIII del Michelangelo

for piano (1986)

The tactile sensations in this piece, both acoustically and pianistically speaking, are characterized by a sense of cool hardness inspired by the marble addressed in Michelangelo’s sonnet. At times, this property is translated into an ‘almost fixed hand position’ (Hübler) and compact, block-like piano writing that does, however, display a very detailed rhythmic inner life. The form is determined by ‘a detailed schema that specified semantic units, ostinati, changes of playing technique, fundamental compositional approaches (abstract), degrees of elaboration/density and the number of independent rhythmic layers as interrelated but autonomous durations with individual emphases.’ The polyphonic overlaying of rhythmic layers takes place more through an increase in textural density than a horizontal fragmentation of rhythmic sequences: vertical polyphony.

From Michelangelo, Sonettto LXXXIII

Non ha l‘ottimo alcun concetto
Ch’un marmo solo i se non circoscriva
Col suo soverchio, e solo aquello arrivo
La ma, che ubbidisce all’intelletto.

Not even the best artist has any notion
That the marble does not already hold
Yet he can only find the fitting mould
If his hand follows his mind’s devotion.

Robert HP Platz

Finale und kurzes Glück

for trumpet

A single piece as a finale, as the endpoint of something past. Thoughts rush past of things that can no longer be heard; from the beginning, which cannot really be a beginning, a dynamic restlessness, a struggle of events. The music becomes increasingly nervous, memories appear closer together, then collide: rhythmic structures overlap, can hardly be separated anymore, and all within quartertone intervals. Then, gradually, everything calms down, the complexity fades, what remains are quiet sequences, individual notes at with restrained, no longer changing dynamics, ‘sans nuance’. At the end, then, when the opposing associations have expended their energy, a brief happiness, without any outcry, far from emotional chaos; perhaps the calm certainty of melancholy: alibi, alias; elsewhere, elsewhen.

Bernhard Messmer

PALIMPSEST / KONJEKTIONEN

for bass flute (1989/2003)

Hübler’s central focus is a consistent aesthetic and analytical engagement with the playing techniques of instruments – which led him to introduce an ‘action notation’ that does not specify the intended sonic result, but rather indicates the ‘actions’ of the performer in minute detail and pushes them beyond boundaries. For string instruments, for example, he notates the actions of the left and right hands on separate staves, and for wind instruments ‘the fingerings, lip and breath articulations are separated and treated polyphonically. The result is a sound refracted on several levels: unstable, as fragile as that imperceptibly short instant between sound and noise that characterizes the emergence and disappearance of an instrument’s note.’ (Robert HP Platz). Hübler began Palimpsest/Konjektionen for bass flute in 2003. (A palimpsest was originally a parchment that had been written on several times, where the old text had been scraped away but its shadow was still visible beneath the new one.) This extremely technically demanding piece was premiered by Carin Levine at the 2004 Darmstadt International Summer Course for New Music.

B.B.H.

for piano (left hand), speaker and Jandl

This small cycle for piano (left hand), speaker and Jandl, composed in 2005, recalls the peculiarity of someone like Robert Walser, the experience of seemingly being drawn by the mechanics of bizarre simplicity into the abyss that lurks behind the faithful spelling-out of events, losing one’s sanity while surrounded by distortions of familiar phrases.

The initials B. B. H. stand for Bach, Brahms and Hübler. The three-part composition uses the main motif of Bach’s famous chaconne in D minor as its model. First this theme is ‘treated’ in the left hand through the lens of Bach, and after four cadences it is finally ‘cadenced off’ by an Ernst Jandl fragment. This is followed, once again in the left hand, by a further variation under the Brahmsian directive, which leads into the left- and right-handed finale, which at times spreads across nine staves – a finale which Hübler marks with his own name.

One could say that music history is spelled out in this composition. The chaconne from J. S. Bach’s Violin Sonata in D minor subordinates itself to the will of different styles. This colouring leads more to a grotesque than a developmental phenomenon, and this accentuation of the comic is supported by the moment in which the pianist recites Jandl.

Hans-Peter Jahn
2006

HÖRSERMON

Piecing-Together [Klitterung] for speaker, cello and piano

GeschichtsKLITTERUNG [falsification of history]: the Grimm German Dictionary lists klittern, klüttern (vt): daub, write hastily and quickly; make spots. Cf. klittern, klüttern (vt): rattle, knock; write small, useless things, ruminate. ‘A listening sermon [Hörsermon] is a sermon to the army [Heer] and a sermon for listening [Hören].’ From Johann Fischart, Geschichtsklitterung (1590), Worterläuterungen zum Text der Ausgabe letzter Hand nach 1590 nach der Neuausgabe von 1963.

Ute Nyssen