Klangforum Wien: Music in the space time continuum II

The second concert of Music in the Space Time Continuum explores works connected with the "music and acoustic space".

First one of the most influential chamber music works of the last thirty years, Spur by Klangforum Wien founder and conductor Beat Furrer. Bernhardt Gardner is one of the new Austrian composers able to seduce us; his khul for string quartet; takes instrumental playing into unexpected fascinating and charming directions. Robert David Rusconi is a North Londoner visionary composer , that has been defined the William Blake of Contemporary Music, his new piano quintet De materia nigra et obscura has been directly inspired and influenced by the dicovery of the Higgs boson. 

An inspiring selection for a evening that, finally, brings back in London the flamboyant virtuosos of Klamgforum Wien; an Ensemble that is legendary and still unsurpassed in its technical mastery and poetical drive.

The last millennium an incredible scientific revolution has deeply invested our approach to reality. The most important change is based on Planck’s discovery that energy is transferred onto the matter in "finished discrete packs"; its point of departure was quantum and the theory of relativity by Einstein. The concepts of space and time have been unified proposing a new concept that sees gravity and matter entwining in curve along four dimensions where every physical and acoustic parameter gets transformed and perceived in different shades of spatial and temporal variety.

These theories have placed under intense stress the ordinary concepts of simultaneity between events forcing us to seriously reconsider our way of thinking and understanding what we hear when we listen.

One of the most intense musical experiences of the continent challenges your mind and soul in a ground breaking concert exploding and exploring these concepts.

With this project we underline the need to think through the whole musical establishment. Being contemporary musicians and intellectuals in this society, we must try to discover new possibilities of knowledge and creation. Some concepts and ideas are stale; today it is absolutely necessary to place the imagination in the foreground as much as possible and reconnect to the communication of pure poetical universes.

At the core we pose: silence. Listening is very difficult; very difficult to listen to others in the silence. Other thoughts, other noises, other sounds, other ideas. When one comes to listen, one often tries to rediscover oneself in others. To rediscover one’s own mechanisms, system, rationalism in the others. Instead of hearing the silence, instead of hearing the others, one often hopes to hear himself, oneself. That is an academic, conservative, and reactionary repetition. It is a wall against ideas, against what one cannot explain today. It is time to (re)listen to music. Perhaps one can change the rituals; perhaps it is possible to try to wake up the ear. To wake up the ear, the eyes, human thinking, intelligence and the most exposed inwardness. This is now what is crucial. It is largely a matter of changed proportions and perspectives, of transferring the two dimensional score into a four dimensional living and breathing organism capable of "making large, rebellious statements with the smallest means".

"The traditional linear melody, almost archetypical in its conception, originally represents a easy sellable artefact for the community, needs to be invoked within very intimate forces, being decomposed into minuscule particles, and subsequently transformed into contrary figures or even melodic cells, spread along a vast space constantly transforming in time: the whole matter now becomes "cantabile", "sing-able" or better the whole matter "sings! Inward resonating outward". The melodic internal input passes through a constantly maieutic process, ‘structurally’ through a constantly changing emphasis, analysed by forces that distort it (the performers and their instruments) in its very anatomy. "Cantabile" becomes to underline the differentiation of sound qualities in space versus time, which I believe is the most important aspect of writing today.

What is especially important is the next step, the characteristics of the instruments, which are constantly changing in the physical and musical space, but also in the perceptive and mnemonic domain. What interests all the composers and performers involved in these two concerts here is much more than the structure, is the quality of the sound.

In these days in which we avoid and desperately need contemplation the really significant move is to let the differentiation of the material become perceptible for the listener through the prolongation of sounds and their constant development in space and time. The listener is not to be overwhelmed by information, thick harmonic sequences or desperate "assemblement" of intervals but must have the opportunity to reflect upon each single sound or even fragment of it living with searching ear we are asked to let sound and poetic reveal itself in an epiphanic experience that can change everybody involved in the process.

It is not just the composed score which puts across the music’s message: it is the perception of every sound’s reflection in our inner selves, across the space-time of noise, sound and silence but especially remembrance, reflection. A new self-discovery that opens up the universe of hear and now.

In these two concerts the virtuosi of Kairos Quartett, Klangforum Wien and EXPERIMENTALSTUDIO des SWR shape and melt for us the coherent flow of timbers and articulations endlessly chasing in subtle dynamics allowing them to becomes the new "bel canto" in which the melodic line becomes a melodic volume and tends to smooth over emptiness and fullness constantly giving them more of an aura of calm and resonation.

klangforum.at I robertdavidrusconi.co.uk I intrasonus.co.uk