Tyske tilstander

Jeg har akkurat kommet hjem etter et tre dagers opphold i Frankfurt am Main. Målene for reisen var å høre Hans Zender dirigere et av verdens beste samtidsmusikkensembler, Frankfurt-baserte Ensemble Modern, og å intervjue Zender i løpet av hans workshop med ensemblets "aspirantorkester". Det var en sterk og oppløftende opplevelse å møte denne usedvanlige mannen som dirigent, komponist, lærer og samtalepartner i løpet av to dager. Jeg fikk også et kultursjokk i møtet med "tyske tilstander" på konserten i Alte Oper. For selv om Zender klager over samtidsmusikkens vilkår i Tyskland, er det sjelden man opplever en fullsatt sal - nærmere 500 mennesker - på en konsert med modernistisk musikk i Norge! Den velfortjente trampeklappen ville ingen enda ta for Ensemble Modern, sopransolist Angelika Luz, Zenders komponistelev Frank Gerhardt og dirigent Zender selv, som også bidro som komponist med sitt nyeste verk, det besnærende "Adonde/Wohin?" fra 2008.



Som et eksempel på "tyske tilstander" fremstår også workshop'en med Internationale Ensemble Modern Akademie . Disse fremragende musikerne har fått ett års stipend for å få tett oppfølging i fremførelse av moderne musikk av sine instrumentkolleger i Ensemble Modern, og for å få workshop-undervisning av sentrale dirigenter, komponister og musikere innenfor samtidsmusikkfeltet. Jeg fikk være til stede mens Zender ga ekstremt lyttende, nyansert og kompetent tilbakemelding på "aspirantorkesterets" tolkning av Stockhausens høymodernistiske klassisker "Kontra-Punkte" fra 1953. Jeg ble imponert og forbauset over hvordan Zender - som er kjent for sine radikale nytolkninger av Schubert og Schumann - også klarer å gjøre den eksperimentelle arven fra -50, -60 og -70-tallet levende og aktuell, både gjennom sine kommentarer til stipendiatenes tolkning av Stockhausens stykke, og gjennom sine tolkninger av Bernd Alois Zimmermanns "Omnia Tempus Habent" (1957) og Earle Browns "Centering" (1973) på konserten i Alte Oper. Det var utrolig spennende å snakke med ham i to fulle timer i pausen under workshopen, og den fruktbare spenningen mellom tradisjon og nåtid var et overordnet tema. (Intervjuet vil senere bli offentliggjort på norsk). Kanskje har vi i Norge mye å lære av de "tyske tilstandene", i alle fall slik de kommer til uttrykk gjennom nytenkende ildsjeler som Hans Zender - og gjennom fullsatte samtidsmusikkonserter og modernistiske lærlingplasser!

B. A. Zimmermann - Zender's mentor in pluralism

Hans Zender published his first composition already in 1949, at the age of 13. The style of early works like the Wind Quintet from 1950 is playfully neo-classical, and the young composer predominantly wrote in genres associated with that idiom, like trios, quartets, sinfoniettas, and divertimentos. Zender had a notable youth work in the traditional genres behind him when began studying composition, conducting and piano from 1956 to 1959, in Frankfurt am Main and Freiburg. His composition teacher was Wolfgang Fortner (1907-87), an initially traditionally inclined composer who was increasingly interested in serialism and became a driving force at the Darmstadt summer courses. Having finished his studies in 1959, he immediately established a successful conducting career. For Zender the composer, however, the 1960s was a time of doubt and searching. According to his own accounts, Zender was convinced by the necessity of serial composition during his study years, but like many of his contemporaries, he gradually experienced the framework of serialism as an aesthetic limitation.

In this search for new possibilities he was profoundly influenced by the composer Bernd Alois Zimmermann (1918-70), with whom he shared a year’s residency at the German Academy at the Villa Massimo in Rome in 1964. At that time, Zimmermann had already established his own pluralist aesthetics integrating musical styles from disparate times and cultures, inspired by the poet Ezra Pound, whose expression “all ages are contemporary” forms an ostinato in Zimmermann’s texts about music. In Zimmermann’s conception, we are surrounded by a multitude of disparate signs of the past, and our experience of the relation between these signs and what we conceive of as our present time is non-linear, flexible and individual:

One cannot get past the observation that we live peacefully with a vast variety of cultural products stemming from the most different times, that we exist simultaneously in many layers of time and experience, most of which neither appear to be derived from each other, nor to be connected with each other [...] And so, a special phenomenon of our existence seems to be that we are able constantly to experience this tremendous diversity, and to experience it with all the changes that occur because it will always be different threads which are linked together for a split second.



Zimmermann’s main point is that our internal experience of time is not successive and linear as the measurable “cosmic” time. The past and the future does not have a distinct psychological reality, it is all mingled in the subjective experience of the present, which leads Zimmermann to the radical conclusion that there really is no present in the strict sense: “[…] there is no present in the strict sense [...]. Time folds itself into a spherical shape.” Zimmermann’s philosophical recognition of the „spherical shape“ of time prompted him to explore the possibilities of pluralistic composition: „From this concept of the spherical shape of time I have developed my so-called pluralistic composition technique, which takes the complexity of our musical reality into account.” In the words of Constantin Floros, Zimmermann’s pluralistic works initiate „[…] a conversation, an imaginary dialogue between the ages“.

Zimmermann’s pluralism could also be interpreted as a kind of through-composed intertextuality. The paradoxical coexistence of different layers of musical “reality” is staged in a single score, with the illumination of experienced links between layers being given particular concern. In these musical montages citations sometimes spring forward, but Zimmermann claims that these are often overemphasized by critics and misunderstood as parodies, while he prefers to compare them to scientific citations, with precise source instructions. But this “intertextual” web of musical connotations is in no way intended as an objective comparison of stylistically distinct available forms. Zimmermann refutes the common assumption that his pluralistic form is a mixing of musical styles. Referring to Cage and Kagel as like minded composers, he discards the concept of style as an anachronism unable to capture the complex musical “reality” which he defines as the spherical shape of time. Furthermore, Zimmermann emphasizes the role of individual inspiration. As he understands it, the complex web of influences inspires inner pictures in the individual, and the composition of pluralistic music is a “calculated projection” of these inner pictures.

Zimmermann’s view of musical “reality” as multi-layered and of the inner experience of musical time as non-linear was a crucial impulse for Zender in his search for a new compositional language from the early 1960s on. The influence from Zimmermann’s multi-layered montage technique is obvious in many of Zender’s works, especially in the first five Cantos (1965-74) and the opera Stephen Climax (1979-84), and as a conductor and writer on music he has continued to emphasize the late friend’s importance.

But, maybe just because of the closeness to Zimmermann, Zender has been careful to distance himself from his profiled theoretical concept of pluralism. Through the years, Zender has suggested different alternatives for the word “pluralism”. In a text from 1976, Zender argues that the philosopher Jean Gebser’s notion of integration captures Zimmermann’s ideas – and the situation of contemporary art in general – better than Zimmermann’s favoured concept of pluralism. Gebser believed that earlier evolutionary levels of consciousness – “magical” and “mythical” – exist unconsciously besides the newer “mental” level in the contemporary mind, and that the challenge of our time was the integration of these earlier levels into the modern rationalized consciousness. Zender understands both Zimmermann’s and his own confrontation of different music historical levels as attempts at an existentially charged integration of this kind, rather than the mere juxtaposition of exchangeable differences that the notion of “pluralism” easily implies.

In a sketch from 1988, Zender applies the art historian Werner Hofmann’s extended, extra-historical use of the term manierism to both Zimmermann’s and his own music. Hofmann sees manierism as phenomenon recurring through art history as a reaction to a hegemonic “classical” art form dominated by rules. In Hofmann’s terms, the distinctive traits of manierism are style mixing, multiplicity of material, and the decomposing of coherent forms and unequivocal expressions. Manierism plays freely with the rules, conventions and clichés of the preceding classicism, citing, exaggerating, and breaking them in a distanced manner. Zender argues that Mahler’s music is better understood in this context of manierism than as a late romanticism. Mahler was a foreboding the montage music of the middle of the 20th century, Zender claims. He views both the second Viennese school and the serialism of the 1950s as “classicist” in that it seeks to form a logically defined and coherent language. The pluralistic montage music of Zimmermann, Bussotti, Berio, Schnebel and himself is then a “mannerist” response to the “classical” tendency of serialism.

Thus, the concepts of “integration” and “manierism” were employed by Zender in the 1970s and 1980s as alternatives to Zimmermann’s notion of “pluralism”. Furthermore, in an interview from 2006, Zender adds heterogeneity to the list of alternatives. He regards it as a more precise description of his compositional diversity than pluralism, drawing attention to the aforementioned principle of productive tension between aesthetic contradictions which he elsewhere refers to as “gegenstrebige Fügung”. Even though the notions of pluralism and heterogeneity may seem very close, Zender’s point is that the latter concept implies an antagonism where the first only depicts difference.