This interview with Hans Zender has been published in edited form in Norwegian in the web magazine Ballade. The following is a nearly complete transcript of the interview.ZENDER: I think that the first way to think the avant garde after Schoenberg, or with Schoenberg plus Webern, is going in a typically European way, going straight ahead: “avant garde”. And don’t look back! So it was a sort of revolution in the material and in the thinking, so we have to go… I lived in this time after the war, as a young boy, and I was together with Stockhausen and Nono and Boulez in the fifties, as a school boy I always went to Darmstadt to hear the new way of music, and at the same time I had the rest of the old big tradition of German classics, in my city of Wiesbaden there was a very strong tradition of classical music at this time. Today it is…
ENGE: You started composing really early as well?
Yes. (laughs) Yes, yes. But it was a big difference, of course. Here I had… I saw Fürtwängler as a school boy, and I had piano lessons with Walter Gieseking and Edwin Fischer, and in the same time I saw the young Boulez and Nono. It was a sort of schizophrenia, but very exciting for me. And so I learned that we are living in different times at the same time, and different languages and so on. And this is our destiny, I think we have to cultivate it, not to fight against it. Because the avant garde tried to be the only idea of music after the war. And therefore it was a big resistance of the conservatives. And now, we live in different worlds. We have a ghetto for new music, like in America too, we have a ghetto for baroque music, and a ghetto for opera music… (laughs).
No communication.
No communication, and I have tried all my life to find ways of putting together again, still, these ways of music which are going in different directions. But I am an only person. I had a speech with Boulez, and I said to him – it’s long ago – mon ami, in every concert there should be a mixture of classical and modern music, and he said: “No, no, no. No, we have to be specialized. You cannot find an audience for it all together, it has to be here so, and here so.” In a way, he is right, of course. For commercial thinking, it’s clear. But it remains the idea to have a European tradition, also, together with the avant garde, for me personally. And therefore – I’m speaking of the second step of the avant garde – with Bernd Alois Zimmermann and later musicians in the seventies, where, this looking only in the future is not the only way, but you can also look into the future and also look into the past as a musician and as a composer. So this is the first time that we can put together the future and the past. To handle with an old material must not only be a sort of a destruction of the past. It could be also a sort of new construction of the past. This I tried in Schumann-Phantasie and in Winterreise and so on. It’s not to break the classical, but to try to live in the time of production, in the old time of the production of the piece, with the different way we hear and think today. This is a strange idea… (laughs) … but I think it’s not absurd. It must be a sort of rebirth of the old things, and perhaps to show the radicalism that every music has had in the beginning. And then also radicalism playing enough, and it will be sort of a cultural standard, and then all revolutionary, all new things of the work is away. But you have to refind – for example with Schumann or with Schubert – the fascinating idea that this composer had in the beginning of writing this piece, and to show this, I have to use different materials and different ways than these composers.
So it’s an idea of reading as well, isn’t it, in the literal way…
Yes, of course.
An interpretation which is more than feeling, but rather being aware of the text, of the writing of an older composer. Do you think in those terms?
Yes. I learned a bit from Derrida, and of course, also Heidegger had this idea in his thinking about Nietzsche. Nietzsche idea of Plato was the biggest example of this problem. Nietzsche had the idea to go behind Plato, to the beginning of European thinking. And of course, he has a completely different interpretation of Plato than the medieval or Leibniz or Kant. And this is the same thing.
Yes, “making it new”, like Pound called it. It strikes me that your way of thinking about music is quite bound up with literal and philosophical influences. What do you think about the relationship between music and literature?
Yes, it is an interesting question, and I am [laughs] trying myself to find it out. It is a little bit like Anselm Kiefer, you know Anselm Kiefer, the very famous painter in Germany and also in America, where he is very popular. He has also a lot of associations with literature in his works, in his pictures, and I think, I am not sure why I do this, but… I like singing, I have to admit. My first interest in music is singing. Of course, there is in history every time connection with anything else in the literature, so since my youth it’s my instinct that every time I have an idea, I have to write for a singer. And I like literature, yes. I cannot give more reasons.
Yes, because many other composers of your generation are using more like collages of languages sound, or…
Ja, ja, ja…
… everyday language, and things like that…
Of course. Those things…
… and staying away from literature.
I know it. But for me, the connection to the great literature is the most important thing. But because, perhaps in my subconscious way, I will be a poet and a musician at the same time [laughs], like Hölderlin I like so much. You know I didn’t make melodies for Hölderlin’s texts, but it will be spoken in my string quartets. So we have a duality of the music and the sound of the text, but there are connections between them rhythmically or also gestures, gestures of language that correspond with the music gestures. So there are other possibilities to compose, not only to sing in the old way. But of course, in my operas, there is normal song, so…
Yes, and you still write a lot of pieces for sung voice. So I wonder, what is it in Hölderlin’s poetry in special that resists melody, or should be spoken instead of sung?
What fascinates me in Hölderlin’s poetry is his way to put the things one after the other. There is an expression in literature: parataxis. That is what I also like as a composer, to put one thing and another thing and a third thing after another without transitions. So I could also put some stylistic fields, one, two, three, and four after another. I am not searching for unity in the sense of a complete work, which has a beginning and an end, or stylistic unity, but for plurality as a basic idea of art. And I find this in Hölderlin’s late works, in the hymns and so on: fragmented thinking.
Yes, and it’s in line with your compositional thinking as a whole, maybe…
Yes.
…the contradictions and the tensions between different parts, as we where talking about. Is it like you discovered something in Hölderlin that you already had as a part of your way of composing?
There is a lot irrationally made, and subconsciously done. I am very conscious, I try to be a conscious man, but during composing: not at all. I have to admit it: it is absolutely irrational. I can invent some reasons for you, if you like, but really, I cannot give you the reasons for this, or for the Asiatic things you will find on the CD I gave you. I like also these small koans of Asiatic thinking, because it fascinates me in my ground, and I cannot show my intellect the reason of it. But I guess I wouldn’t compose if I knew all this! [laughs] It’s a way to solve our existence problem. And I think all the modernity, all the modern life and thinking, has to go from the idea of unity, from the idea of cultural unity, to an openness which is not systematic and unified, but it’s only a being together of different things, with a lot of trying to make connections between the different things. But not making before a sort of solution, and to say: “for me it’s all bounded in political problems”, this is one way, or religious problems, “this is because I am a catholic or Buddhist” or something. No, I will find my way as an artist, and so I have to make a sort of aventure during writing, to find a sort of unity that I didn’t know before. And perhaps not after.
Not a system.
No, not a system, that’s it. When I was a student, it was the big time of Boulez and Stockhausen, and then it was systems of systems of systems of systems. It was good, and very progressive in its thinking, but it must come to an end. And in the seventies it was the end of this sort of unity, and today, I see that it was the last idea, the last connection to the European tradition, to have systems. Yes? Because always, in old Europe, we had systems, philosophical systems, artistic systems. And now [serialism?] they have avant garde, but avant garde as system! And this is for me not convincing. Then there was Zimmermann, the first man who showed me that you can make holes in your systems, and then you have an open work. But it opened also new problems, of course, aesthetical problems, and you have to go a step further and say, we have not a closed aesthetical work today, and also perhaps, also the lonely (einsam) composer must not always, in every case, find a system for himself, he can also work with an open system. We have this idea of open systems in science also.
Do you think of open forms?
Open forms, that is the first step. A bit naïve for me, today, but Brown is nice, and a right idea. Open form, but also the open stylistic form in Zimmermann’s work.
For me, he is the most important composer after the war, I have to admit. Messiaen, too.
Do you think he has gotten the reception he should have had?
No, not at all, no. Not enough. And it was (laughs) 20 years ago or 30, I had a little bit friendship with Boulez, and I asked him to conduct the Soldatensymphonie by Zimmermann, and he did it, in Paris, and then I asked him after the performance, how did you find it? And he said: “No, it was the music of schizophrenia”. He didn’t understand it, and he didn’t like it. And at that moment I understood more of our evolution after the war. This is clear: if I think in a technological way, progressive, progressive, progressive, I should not look back to the sensitivities of the old centuries. But if I do not, if I make shocks like Zimmermann, if I put the window open to hear Debussy or Mozart or Bach, then you open new sorts of formal possibilities in music.
Yes. I am very interested in this kind of music that started after serialism. But I wonder, can you try to express what the real difference is between the old neo-classicism, the way Stravinsky or Prokofiev used the tradition, and the way Zimmermann or yourself go into tradition?
I think Stravinsky is a sort of predecessor. But he defined a new closed stylistic world. Influenced by Pulcinella by Pergolesi, or I don’t know, by Rossini or Haydn, oder was, but he created a repertoire of signs for a piece which is made like the old symmetric forms. Also Hindemith, if he’s contact with baroque music, his counterpoint is very interesting, you know Komposition 30, the concertos for viola, violin and piano, really interesting music, but it’s made like… wir sagen in deutsch, “wie ein Strichmuster”. (laughs)
A knitting pattern!
Ja, im Grunde sind das Patterns, die sehr gut gemacht, und sehr schön sind, aber in sich wieder ausgeschlossen, ohne Schizophrenia! (laughs) I think what Boulez called schizophrenic, is the point of all this. It’s not the vision of a new, defined technological world, but it is the contrast between the individualism, as the most important thing of European thinking for me, individualism in the extreme, this and to have in our world of technique, but not adapting technology, but fighting against it, to have different worlds and to show the audience that we are living in a, not in a closed world but in a very multidimensional world. So it should not be a simple new style, but a style with different colours. The going on of a piece should be like an adventure. Yesterday, at the general rehearsal… the composer I like the most is living here in Frankfurt, Rolf Riehm. He is so systematic that he avoids all systems. (laughs)
Systematically anti-systematic!
Yes, but I like him very much, and he had a wonderful new piece in Donaueschingen last year. On the contrary, my friend Lachenmann, which I like very much, and I conduct very often his music, he is absolutely in the way of the old avant garde. He is a purist. He is a development of the Boulez avant garde, with new techniques, of course.
But you yourself, I wonder, in the beginning, when you were full of tradition from your home, from your schooling, and you met the Darmstadt avant garde: is this a kind of schizophrenia that you still have, because you clearly write very different types of pieces?
For me, it’s really a sort of task, something I have to solve; I have a problem which I have to solve, not only me, of course. I’m against; I don’t like the idea of a world which is only technology and mathematic thinking, which forgets the individual dimensions of man.
So this is what went wrong with serialism for you…
Yes.
… it’s the lack of the subject, maybe?
I think so, but maybe it’s too… I mean, a figure like Lachenmann is not so simple. He has really very existentialistic attitudes, and this is absolutely true and good. But sometimes so the classicism, the French, also or in England or America, or Adams and so on, for me it’s absolutely silly, because there is no contradiction in the art. So art makes not the effort to speak against this bureaucratic and technological world, which we have more and more.
So it’s commercial music, in a way?
Yes, of course, that is the problem.
I had a question about the postmodern debate. You quite fit into some of the ideas there, but one of the ideas which is not typical for you, is to combine so-called serious and entertainment music. Why is it important for you to keep those things apart?
Because I have the idea that the sense of the music is coming from something else, from the effort to be concentrated. And to look for the – in Kant’s world you say “das Erhabene”, that is his term, the sublime. Or in the old times, it was music as sakrale Musik, and this is the most important thing for me. But we have lost a normal way to make music as a concentration or a meditation, what you call it is not important, but to go to the fundaments of human thinking. So I find it in Bruckner, of course, and in Bach, especially. But also in Schoenberg or Messiaen, of course. But not in this technological stuff, which is for me very cold, and not in the commercial thinking. So I have the idea I have to make something in this way, and this excludes to be commercial or to be a minimal musician or something, for me personally. The colleagues who like to write commercial music, it’s okay, but it’s not my point (laughs). I’m perhaps a sort of radical, a radicalist, in this way of music, to look after the fundamental ideas of man. But not as ideas, especially, but I speak very often of the Logos of the music, not the Logos only of language or of mathematics, but there is a special Logos of music. But we have to find him and conserve him in our world, where there is so much sort of distraction and entertainment and superficial things. You have the possibility to make centripetal or centrifugal, and I like music which is centripetal, not centrifugal.
Like “Centering”, the piece by Brown yesterday, it’s the same idea.
Yes, it’s absolutely the same idea.
So for you, music is quite clearly a spiritual phenomenon, something to do with being human. But one could misunderstand what you said about the Logos of music, that it was something stable, something always the same and timeless. But you think of music as something changing and flexible, I think. How would you explain that?
For Nietzsche, this Logos of the music, or this “Vernunft” of the music as he calls it, is an expression of what he called “Wille zur Macht”. And “Wille zur Macht” is the idea that life creates itself, in all stages and every time in a new way. So “Wille zur Macht” is all what we do as next, but also the sort of building chains to the past, building traditions and so on, but especially it’s also the renovation of material and of life and of all things. And this is the Logos of the music, to go on, but not to forget what the evolution of the human mind has created. I think that our modern… in the way modern music is made in Europe today, it’s not enough history of the modernism himself. We are forgetting in this moment the modernism of the fifties and the sixties, as music. And I think it’s very important to remember: what did the early Nono do, and before, of course the Vienna classic, with early Boulez, the early Messiaen, it’s very important to know exactly the connection back to Debussy, to Wagner, to Bruckner and so on. We are thinking as avantgardists only from the seventies or from the eighties (laughs). It’s so short phases, so I think it really important that the avant garde circles, the avant garde festivals also make some time for retrospectives. For me a Zimmermann retrospective would be very, very important, of course, also Brown, and some persons. Messiaen is played, so that would not be necessary to do something, also Schoenberg. Webern, not enough! No.
So it’s a kind of misunderstood avant-gardism, maybe, always trying to kill the fathers?
That is what I mean, that is what I mean. It has turned me in this sort of avant garde I had as a student sort of before my eyes. So I found Zimmermann as a contraposition. He is a wise man and a really great artist, because he is complete. And he knows, if I look in the future, at the same time, I look back. He spoke of the “Kugelgestalt” of time.
It is very interesting, because I think maybe the way that you compose, you kind of use the modernism of the fifties and sixties like just a tradition amongst the other traditions.
Yes! Yes, exactly, you did understand what I mean. It’s so difficult for most musicologists to understand this point! (laughs) They think I’m naïve or something, I don’t know…
[...] Twelve tone technique in its pure Gestalt, is of course a sort of systematic thinking, and has something to do with technological thinking, but also our normal tempered system is thought in this way, in the last century, also in Bach’s time, the eighteenth century. So it’s coming, this evolution, not only from the 20th century, but it’s coming from the history of Europe. And it had to go to this point, of course, to the technology. But I’m trying to ask what the tempered system is, so I came to my microtonal systems - you heard it yesterday, the small intervals – to fight against this orthodoxy of half tone music. Because the half tone is an artificial way to think in music. We need such systems to speak, but at the same time we have to ask, what will be destructed with this tempered system, for example the pure intervals. If I take the difference, I take also a material in my hands that is schizophrenic! Because we have in the same time the idea of pure intervals and of a tempered system which is equidistant and is systematic. We are living with this schizophrenia since three centuries! This is very important, but not all is conscious about this, only a few persons.
So this is a task you have, in a way, to find a creative solution to…
Maybe, I don’t know. But I like to work with these small differences.
Yes, the contradictions. You write a lot about this Heraclitian sentence about “gegenstrebige Fügung”. Would you say that these paradoxes are kind of a creative source for you?
Yes. That’s it, that’s it. I think that if you would like to find my heart (laughs), there it is, there.
You have also written about the need for creating ones own language. In this postmodern situation where all music is there at the same time, I feel that at the same time you are looking for a personal voice, or something that is hanging together, in a thought. Do you think that composers have to find a new, their own language in our time?
I think we have not at all the sort of possibility to make connections… no, bad said… we have no other possibility than to find our individual self in art. In old centuries, there was a sort of collective language, collective systems. Also in moral things or in religious things, and so on, but now we are condemned (laughs) to be an individual, for my personal few. I like very much this big painter, Barnett Newman, and he said once that the situation of modern artists in our time, it was in the fifties he said it, is to stay vis a vis of the chaos. That is true, I think. So I said it to all my pupils, my students, in later times: this is the first you have to learn. We have no possibility to do anything convincing, only if we give our personal idea. This doesn’t exclude to take stylistic Mittel […was heisst es… not means, material ]. You can use all materials, historical materials or progressive material or electronics or something, but this is not the point. You have to make a new collection, only following the personal, inner self.
So in a way, composing is like interpretation…
Yes!
…of the past and of the situation?
Yes, it’s the same thing. In the old times, you made it subconsciously. But we have to be conscious today, therefore, we have to make it clear. I have to go to work with all… all materials are disponible (available). I have not to invent the materials, I have to invent a way to put it together.
That’s interesting. That’s longer than Adorno came. Before I started the interview, we talked about Adorno. What is wrong with Adorno’s theory today, do you think?
He didn’t think in the tradition of … he doesn’t use the word “time”! (Laughs). If you look through his books, I didn’t find the word “time” in his work, it is very strange. And he is thinking only music bound to word. So he is moving in the atmosphere of – in the highest point of intellectuality, of course – of mastership in the tradition of the European philosophy. But I think he thinks like the late Hegel about music, and not more. And he didn’t find the point of the modern in the sense of dialectic – not dialectic, of this existential contradiction, this magic point of paradoxie – he doesn’t like paradoxes, I think, he is always dialectic in his thinking, like the late Hegel. But dialectic is not the same as this paradoxie, which you find for example in Zen. Zen is working only with paradoxes, and therefore I like Zen very much, and so I learned a lot from Cage. Generally, Cage is misunderstood in Europe, because the like to interpret him with late Hegel arguments, and you cannot reach Cage in this way. For my, so far as I…
So what does Cage mean for you personally?
For me, Cage is the training to hear the hearing. Not some pieces or styles or collections of things musically. Not forms, not ideas, no. Only to sit and to hear what is going on. So, open ears! No, that… this sort of concentrated hearing. It could be with music or without music. This is really fascinating, for this is something really new for European thinking. It’s something to do, but if you come from the Asiatic standpoints, it is quite normal, to be in the emptiness.
So, there is an interesting contradiction between the ideas of Cage and maybe, the ideas of Zimmermann, the way I see it…
Yes.
… filling the time with associations and having this reservoir of tradition, which Cage doesn’t want.
Yes, he doesn’t want it, of course, that’s a big difference. I am European too, I have to live with our tradition, in this… but Cage showed me another way to hear and to think. He’s a sort of way to live in a world of plurality. Silly thing to say, but I mean, he shows the plurality without order. We had in old Europe never thought of plurality (laughs). And we had to find it, [silly] thing to say, but of course: for every individual, another problem. Every [man?] has to solve it by himself. And perhaps art, the work of art, could show you one way – not for all the same, but one – one way of thousands of ways.
Yes, interesting. And it seems like you have always been open to this kind of contrasting influences, making your own thoughts around them.
Yes.
It’s the same with Scelsi, you knew him, I understand… (Zender smiles)… and you were one of the first to take him seriously as a composer.What did you learn from Scelsi?
I like his showing us another continent of possibilities which is not known in old Europe: the continuity of sound. This is a sort of “Super-Bruckner”! (Laughs). Very static, quite contrary to Cage! Because it’s not the pluralism, or plurality, but the absolute unity.
It’s almost monomaniac.
Monomaniac, yes. It is, in extreme. I have the feeling that we have to handle always with the same radical positions of thinking in the modern, in modernism. Maybe it’s emptiness, maybe it’s chaos, maybe it’s unity, maybe it’s pluralism. But we have to go to the extremes, and to fight, and to fight our position in between all these things. But I like Scelsi because he was so tough to do this. I did know him, he was a very fascinating gentleman, old gentleman. Very conscious, he was absolutely very clear about what he was doing.
So it was a real radical act he did…
Yes! Yes, yes.
…almost throwing away his reputation and his situation as a composer.
Not very far from Feldman in his position.
I am also interested in a couple of the figures in Darmstadt that were not following quite the same path as Boulez and Stockhausen, like Maderna, and Pousseur maybe. I have the feeling that both of them had a kind of pluralistic view of music at the time, at least Maderna, early, and maybe Pousseur later on. Where you influenced by them?
Of course, but Maderna was in the beginning time of Darmstadt a figure which was not extreme. He was in the middle of all, and therefore very important also. But generally in the fifties, was a big, and sometimes loud struggle of all positions. Not at all tolerant, it was the fighting of positions, and not at all very polite. I heard Messiaen giving his first lessons in Germany about his new system of radical serialism, and at the same time he had some concerts with his early piano music and there was laughter! It was like a cabaret for the students (laughs) and also for the musicologists, who came to these concerts of Messiaen and made a circus and a cabaret out of it, his Fantaisie burlesque or Blick aus dem Jesus Kind… oder so,also, das war schon siemlich, siemlich was los! Aber es geht da kein doch gut. Es war eine spannte Atmosphere, man hat sehr viele Anregungen bekommt.
But Maderna, was he different?
Maderna war, jajaja. Maderna war ein Synthetiseur.
But he wasn’t using his plurality as a position?
No.
He didn’t talk about it?
No. He was very spontaneous, and he wrote very fast, and I think, without too much reflection. He was an instinctive musician, absolutely. Wonderful man. He conducted the first performance of my Canto IV.
Yes?
Oh yes, I liked him very much. I conducted his music very often during my chief conductor time in Saarbrucken [1971-84].
He was writing Hölderlin music as well…
Yes, yes.
Was that an inspiration for you?
No. I saw it in quite another way with Hölderlin. But I liked his pieces, Maderna, very delicate; it’s coming from Dallapiccola, from this sort of Italianism, very… No, no. I tried to give him a contraposition to this.
[...]
In my youth time, I hated all reflections and things and speaking about music, but (laughs) I have changed a little bit!
But I read that you said that Adorno’s musical essays were important for you in your youth?
Yes, of course. I did know Adorno, and he was an impressive man, of course. A wonderful musician!
Yes?
He played very well piano, he sang.
He played and sang for you at Darmstadt?
Yes, yes! Not in Darmstadt, but privately. He could go to an open piano and sing arias of Verdi or Tales of Hoffmann. In the right way! He was a wonderful tenor! (Laughs). Like I said, he was a wonderful musician!
What do you think about his compositions?
I conducted his orchestra pieces, and I find that it’s good music.
Maybe he should be more known for his music?
No, I think I was a great man, and he had to think in his way, but it’s only the stupidity of the younger generations in musicology, which is… you can estimate a great man, but you have not to think in his way for all future, forever.
Do you think that the composers in Darmstadt were influenced by Adorno…
Oh, yes.
…in their thinking about their music?
Not his music, of course. But they are thinking in the way of dialectic history interpretation. It’s the same with Boulez: they cannot think the idea of contradiction. It has to be so, in the right way, progressive, and coming from the history, making revolution, and going the way of the revolution.
Yes. So maybe he thinks dialectically in the way that he wants a synthesis of these contradictions, while you are talking about letting the paradox be a paradox. I had a question about your operas. As a composer, how important is the aspect of the crossing and the interaction of the art forms for you? Are you interested in a synthesis of sound and literature and the visual, or should they rather be juxtaposed as antithetical, as a paradox?
How do you think when you write operas?
Especially in Don Quixote, I tried to make absolute paradoxes. The problem with Don Quixote, is that it needs very much time to be produced, because I have 33 different conceptions of theatre in this piece. And it is a lot of work to make different aspects of singing, speaking, without light, or without sound, without music, only speak, only sound, only… there is one conception where it’s only for Bühnenbild, without persons. So if you could find a balance for all this, you have to rehearse in a absolutely new way. All performances until now were not … it was not enough time to find this balance. In one performance, it was wonderful costumes and Bühnenbild and things like it, ein anderer war sehr schön musikalisch, und schlecht in Szenierung, und so weiter, und so fort. Es war immer nur ein Teil realiziert. Ja, ich weiss... (laughs) Man muss es normal ein halbes Jahr haben, you should have [laughs, of his language switching?] half a year rehearsing time when you do it, but it’s utopian. The best was some part of this piece in Berlin, it was only the half of the piece, one hour and a half, and this was very good, with young people and… they chose only some of these conceptions. I think it was, it was good. In normal time, producing time. But it’s…
…a utopian work.
Yes.
You seem to talk about balance in another way than the synthesis that one had In Romanticism, like Wagner’s Gesamtkunstwerk, where everything is there at the same time. Is that, the type of balance for you, difference, is that something you are thinking about?Your idea of balance, does it have more to do with differences than with making a unity?
I call it not unity, but contrary of unity, is for me the wholeness of a piece. Wholeness must be balanced, but not logically closed. Unity is for me, in my terms, is closed. It’s dialectic. Like the sonata, it’s a unity. But wholeness could be more.
So in a way, you could, you think, you make music that is both fragmented and whole at the same time?
Ja.
It seems like your Chinese pieces, the “Lo-Shu”-pieces, are very much in this way of thinking?
Ja. Ja.
So is that a thought you got from East Asian thinking?
Ja. Lo-shu is very important for me as a model.
So, you have written about this trip to Japan, in 1972 I think it was. What was it really that you experienced there, which made a difference for you?
It was a shock to find another cultural key than in Europe, with the old Japanese forms. Nô theatre, and also with the poetry, I learned to… my wife is making calligraphy, it’s a… I could learn a little bit of these structural ideas. And the architecture, the old architecture, for me it’s marvellous; it’s just the contrary of all our European model thinking. And so… you cannot bring together this world with this world, without sort of a paradox. But the world is open now, and I have to be… I am European, of course, but I was so impressed by this Japanese culture that I cannot forget it! It’s a part of my life. So I have to (laughs) think it together. How? I don’t know! I was a friend of the big philosopher Carl Friedrich von Weizäcker, the brother of the states president, and - he was a physician – and he said in an interview: “I am living in three worlds. The first world is the Christian, and the second world is the natural sciences, and the third world is the Indian culture.” He was very interested in Hinduism, and so… “I cannot bring it together, but all three influenced me in my heart! So I have to live in different worlds as one person”.
That’s very interesting. It’s something of the same that Zimmermann said, that we live in different worlds at the same time.
Yes. And this is against all European rationalism, of course.
Yes. But I think that there are some strands in European literature that are, maybe, on the same track.
Yes, Joyce was. Joyce is fantastic.
Yes, Joyce, and in America, Pound. Zimmermann is quoting Pound very often, and it seems to me that you must have had some fascination for Pound as well, since…
I took the tradition from Zimmerman with handling with Anglo-Saxon literature, because in Germany it is not at all very popular. Nobody knows Pound, and a few people only, Joyce. And it’s so silly… German literature after the war, it’s a mess! It’s terrible, it’s provincial, it’s… I cannot understand it, because Germans are not as stupid as their literature! (Laughs). I don’t find only one person after the war which is important for me.
You don’t find any German writers after the war at all?
No, and not before! Thomas Mann is for me not at all an artist, because… Herman Hesse is known in all the world, but I cannot find that it’s great literature!
And Günter Grass?
(Frowns).
Not for you?
No.
But at the same time, Hölderlin became a canonic figure in Germany in the 20th century.
That’s right, yes. Also with Heidegger. Heidegger wrote a lot after the war about Hölderlin. He was, I think, the first, and before him, Stefan George. Stefan George understood very well Hölderlin’s thinking, I think, because…
[...] About the open form. You said that it was naïve for you. What do you…
Not naïve in the way of silly, I don’t mean, but it was not very much reflected. And the evolution was, with the aleatoric idea, after some years of aleatoric composition, the composers detected that it is just quasi [?], quasi the same to make difficult complex structures and aleatoric structures.
So it was kind of a contradiction to the serialists, maybe, that had…
Maybe.
…been won over again.
It remains a bit different, of course, for if you look back, you have the quality of… the unique quality of Boulez and so on, and the less qualified Lutoslawski or I don’t know, Penderecki, it’s not so comparable. But the effect on the audience is, it’s not the same, but it’s quasi, it’s similar.
So the idea of the open didn’t come through, you think, it didn’t come through as open music?
In my book it’s an article about Earle Brown.
You like Earle Brown’s music?
Yes. I like also Feldman very much. He wrote a piece for me once, a flute concerto. And with Cage, I corresponded. I conducted his big orchestra piece Apartment House. (Laughs). I liked his pieces, yes. But it’s of course… Cage, you cannot take the same level… the same Masstab, wie sagt man, als andere Musik.
And there was a last question I wanted to ask you. In the last years, your theory of harmony has been a quite important thing in your work, I think, the “Gegensträbige Harmonik”…
Yes, yes.
…and in a way, it seems like a system, a kind of defined language. I wondered, don’t you think it’s kind of pluralistic approach you have used?
Yes, you are right. But it’s a partial system, only for pitches. I don’t use a system for the rhythmic or form or all the other aspects. And I try to use this harmonic system in every piece in a new way, so to work with different sections of possibility. This would be a long analytic speech if I were to explain, to show you how differently you can use the system. Because the system allows one to compose in different stylistic worlds. And if you concentrate on certain intervals, the music sounds in a complete other way. So in this “system” in quotation marks, you have not a fixed stylistic identity. It’s only a certain quality of sound, over tone sound, which comes in every case, but it allows different countries of sound to create. So far, I am not suffering from this contradiction of having a system and being anti-systematic. Sometimes I neglect it also, this system, and take free structures.
It has been a great honour to speak to you, and very interesting for my work.
I hope you figured out something... (laughs).
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