Mag.art. Julie Hirzbergerová /Germany/ - akordeon / accordion

Reflection: Quo vadis, musica contemporanea?

After all Covid 19 prohibitions and restrictions were abolished. I obtain after several years break the chance to visit a contemporary music concert near my today’s home again. The performed piano recital inspired me in different ways to think about the future of contemporary music – movie titles „Quo vadis” or „The end of poets in Bohemia...“ will be the headline of my thoughts.

Even if the evening was devided between compositions by young Balkan composers (Greece, Macedonia, Albania) and, on the other hand, a part with a retrospective of German authors, I thought to recognize a lot of these pieces. So I searched for the composer’s curricula and found out that almost everybody was inspired by master classes or studies by renomated composers of my generation (some of these people or their musical language I personally got to know during my own studies).

In this way the memories of my student’s life has become a summary of what I have experienced as an auditor of contemporary music. And the question, what has not actually been here before? Where will contemporary music direct? I would like to share here some experiences as examples for cogitation. Even if they will be only like small incoherent shards all of them somehow show pieces in a big (and I think also obvious) mosaic of the whole development, we use to call contemporary or modern serious music.

A colleague from my studies changed his major not long after completing his master's degree in composition, arguing that the new generations lack awareness of music as such, especially classical music. Therefore, in his opinion, there is no need for new compositions, but rather to bring the music already created closer to others. Today, he is very successful in his work with children's choirs. Another friendly composer decided to quit composing at the beginning of the new millennium, despite a successful career in his field. The reason: everything essential had already been written. Was everything really already composed? In order to answer this question, I began to think about which ventures might be relevant to approaching this issue in some way.

The first example comes from my field. In 1998, Schrift 3 for accordion by Bernhard Lang, a piece from 1997, was premiered in Graz. This twelve-minute composition is characterized by a complex polyrhythmic component, distinct dynamics (especially toward the quietest notes), and knife-edge virtuosity at maximum playable hand reach in both manuals, both at an equally virtuosic tempo. Schrift 3, with its difficulty and its composition at the end of the last century, somehow symbolically closes a whole century of new music for the classical accordion, since even the first piece of this designation, Hugo Herrmann's Sieben neue Spielmusiken of 1929, waited two years for its premiere before proving itself "unplayable" because of its difficulty. Krassimir Sterev – the first performer of Schrift 3 – prepared for the first performance for more than a year.

Of course, we can find these capacity limits (range, dynamics, playability, etc.) in other periods of (not only) contemporary music for many other instruments. György Ligeti's Volumina (1962) offers itself as an illustrative example for its maximum use of the organ's already enormous dispositions, even with its fictional story of fire and melted pipes.

An interesting example of using the maximum capacity of the percussion instrumentarium for me was Florian Geßler's Glocken für drei Percussionisten und zehn Grazer Geläute (2002). What was exceptional about this piece was the use of large church and town bells and carillons, not as passive musical colour, but as full musical instruments incorporated into the piece with precise pitches, rhythmicisation or at least precise timings in the score.

As an example of piano works I would like to mention Peter Lackner's Kanon für Autoklavier from 2003. Although this work, unlike the previous ones, already crosses over into the category of electronic music, I would like to describe it on the basis of the use of the piano as such. Here it is probably necessary to briefly explain the principle of the so-called automatic piano: this instrument was designed by Winfried Ritsch. It can be attached to any ordinary piano. Thanks to 88 electromagnetic relays, the instrument can play all the keys at once. In doing so, it is possible to control various parameters such as the length, strength, depth and intensity of the beat or even the speed of the repeating tone for each key individually and independently (https://www.zhdk.ch/forschungsprojekt/klavierautomat-555271).

The building block of this particular piece is a magic square with 64x64 cells. The purpose of the magic square is to create combinations of numbers so that their sums, written in a square grid, added both horizontally and vertically, always give the same result and the numbers are not repeated anywhere.

If we convert 64x64 – i.e. 4096 numerical data – into a binary number system, we get a code that allows the piano automaton to play all possible combinations from a dash (i.e. zero) to all twelve notes at once in a twelve-tone system. Lackner has backed his magic square with a grid for dynamics and another graphic for the number of octaves played. At the point where all twelve keys play in all octaves, all 88 notes sound at once. This is the de facto mechanical maximum of the piano. I will address the question of electronics later in my reflections.

Physical musical instruments logically have their physical possibilities. By physical musical instruments I mean instruments with natural tone production without the use of electrically or electronically generated sound. The same is true of the physical capabilities of the human being – both on the part of the listener and on the part of the performer – here, of course, I am referring to physical limits that go far beyond considerations of the musician's technical ability.

For example, one student project featured a piece for accordion and live electronics by a local young composer at a concert of the Styrian Accordion Teachers' Association. Here the button accordion was given a new keyboard – a computer keyboard – and the played notes were immediately generated into other tones and sounds. I do not even mention the use of electronics in this case as a relevant compositional technique, but only as a sound amplifier. The author was guided by the possibilities of loudspeakers, but he exceeded (either accidentally or deliberately) the somatic possibilities of human hearing. During the course of the piece, all the listeners left the concert hall, some of them could not stand the volume of the piece even in the lobby. To this day, I do not know whether this piece was performed to the end.

Not only on the side of the spectator, but also on the side of the performer, Erik Satie's Vexations is a striking example. Although this piece already was written at 1893, Vexations could generally be understood as one of the symbols of the efforts of contemporary music. Satie never explained or commented on this three-line piece, so its true meaning is still being pondered. Is it a piece intended for mainstream performance (with its 840 repetitions)? Is it a philosophical musing in the form of a musical score or merely satire, musical wit and creative play? To date, the piece has received several public performances – including by individual performers – lasting between fourteen and thirty-five hours, as well as unfinished attempts and various mechanical performances. The version performed in Graz was shared by ten pianists and lasted nineteen hours. As a listener, I heard several parts of the concert - the afternoon, the late night, and the last hour-long section, which ended at noon on the second day to the final accompaniment of the bells of the local churches. Although I interrupted my listening more than once, it was interesting to note the state of one single piece still going on, sometimes without the audience present at all.

From Satie it is only a step to John Cage's work, or rather to his seminal works in this sense. While 4´33´´ is already one of the typical didactic examples of how to bring someone closer to the understanding of contemporary music and its transcendence beyond the ordinary listening to "tones". I, too, have encountered it more than once in various lectures (of course, we also actively performed it). I have only recently discovered his composition ORGAN2/ASLSP. On a weekend trip, we visited the small town of Halberstadt in Saxony-Anhalt close to where I live.  Returning to my car, I discovered a tourist signpost to one of the churches there with the subtitle John Cage Organ. When I looked it all up (at www.universes.art/en/specials/john-cage-organ-project-halberstadt), I discovered that on September 5, 2001 (Cage's 89th birthday), a performance of his ASLSP (as slow as possible) for organ began there. Then, after a 17-month hiatus, the first note of the piece, conceived by the organizers to last 639 years, was played. The most recent change of sound took place on February 5 this year. The organizers decided to designate 639 years as the performance time. They want to symbolically celebrate the existence of the first twelve-tone keyboard of today's type documented in Halberstadt 639 years ago. This project is significant above all for its temporal extent of seven centuries into the future (realistically utopian, but idealistically exceptional) and for the seven-century-old inspiration for starting this project, and thus for the great overlap of the period of several generations towards the transcendental perception of this work. A kind of small infinity opens up for our perception. Of course, on my next visit to Halberstadt I am counting on attending the "concert".

Such unusual compositions go beyond the purely theoretical, such as philosophy, history, theory of art and psychology. Beyond that, they also have their profane pitfalls – whether it is the issue of organization and financing or the legitimation of the performance of art for the one per mille of the population that is interested in such distinct ventures, all the way back to the philosophical level of the legitimation of art in general today (especially European art or the art of the Occident).

After recapitulating the above-mentioned compositions, it is also clear that as the physical capabilities of men and instruments are exhausted, we increasingly cannot do without the aid of technology. Whether it is "mere" electricity or the incorporation of various mechanical automatic machines. The use of technical aids is culminating in the entry of computer technology and, especially, artificial intelligence into the art scene. Personally, I can not get rid of the impression that we will be (or are already?) characters in a science fiction novel with an apocalyptic climax and the end of the world (i.e. a cultural epoch). With the entry of artificial intelligence capabilities into perhaps all branches of art, as well as other parts of human endeavour, we have entered an alien, unfamiliar and uncharted space that holds many more questions than answers for us.

It is sufficient to outline just a few of the many topics of common musical understanding: intellectual property, global dissemination without a control mechanism, creativity and originality of the work, the financial side of the matter, legal issues in general, the legitimacy of such "art", the implications for the existence of musicians, or composers, or artists in general. The related right to protection of personality and a number of problems that are yet to arise with the gradual expansion and improvement of artificial intelligence. It is likely that   artificial intelligence – like many other innovations – will be used, abused and eventually outlived. Time will tell whether its influence will be judged in hindsight as a positive contribution to the arts or as a negative blight on our musical language.

I would like to conclude the whole question of electronic music with an anecdote for reflection, which was told by the guest of honour, the Korean composer Younghi Pagh-Paan, in my recital for the concert series "Göttinger Abende zeitgenössischer Musik": At the concert, where one of her compositions was interpreted, there was to be a premiere performance of electronic compositions by other composers. After the first of them was over, three potential composers stood up to gave thanks, convinced that it was their composition...

If I dare to say, that – from our current view – man has exploited his own technical possibilities and also of his technical equipment, he has reached the limit of his mental, creative and emotional possibilities, on the estetic plane he has exhausted the nuances of the beautiful and the ugly, he left behind the boundaries of taste and good manners, he handed over control of his incineration to dead matter, so I, theoretically, can contemplate, perhaps not immediately, the end of civilization, the end of a cultural epoch. So I can ask: Has everything been written?

Perhaps my own experience and fantasy cannot extensively conceive this question. Most of the composers would definitely say no although I prefer the opposite answer. I must say, after I completed this article, I held a helpful book in my hands. It was Hidden Wishes, Restless Travels from the Macedonian author Vladimir Jankovski (Czech version translated by Zdeněk Andrle and published in O.LEANDR, 2023). I was impressed by a thought of the main character Martin: „The idea, all stories are already told, is total stupid. Permutations of life are endless.”

Hopefully we can wait with tense for what the future of contemporary music will bring and what can contribute to it. Thus, we can aks now and then: „Quo vadis, musica contemporanea?”