probably the only wolfgang rihm thread ever. C/D, S/D, etc.

WAIT TILL YOU HEAR RIHM!

has he made any electronic music? Also what is the stylistic change from piece to piece?

as for describing the "stylistic changes," i'm no expert, unfortunately, being all ears and no head. i like to think of it as the purest form of stream-of-consciousness.

the "works overview" from amg sums it up nicely, methinks:

Describing music is always a species of tragic action: tragic, because the best music demands a response, but also defeats any response -- it beckons but resists, possesses, provokes, and then scatters. So to call German giant Wolfgang Rihm's music "difficult to describe" is also to identify it as particularly musical, exuberantly native to itself and wildly frustrating to the alien media of language. If we want to catch even its fleeting moments, we need guerilla tactics. So a myriad of mini-methods then -- "attempts" as Rihm might call them.

First, the autobiographical tack: Rihm is a hyper-articulate spokesperson for his own work, prone to the same logorrhea as anyone groping for ungraspables. Rihm knows at least what he wants: "I want to move and be moved. Everything about music is pathetic." Not of course pathetic as in "useless," but "pathetic" as in "overcome by and with expression." And thus, "Music must be full of emotion, and that emotion full of complexity." And that complexity always seeks the limits and margins: "In my music, there is always a search for extremes...the outburst: this is simply the one thing I have been seeking."

Next, an evocation: how does this music sound? For lack of clearer terms, extreme. Extremely fast, extremely slow; dangerously high and impossibly low; opaque or transparent, completely. The harmony? Paradoxical: a dissonant parade of consonances, a muddy jet of brilliant tones, a sparkling mire. But the gestures are the Molotovian foundation of this perilous music: they veer, careen, and collide with fabulous unruliness. Often Rihm's scores (and his working methods) radiate a startling disregard for "form." They don't deliberate, they "stream" -- or, more often, dart and rush, with the full terror and exhilaration of a beast hunting or hunted. Death, as silence or immobility, is always on the heels of a Rihm piece, and so the sounds often emit a febrile, adrenaline stink of the living -- extremely sensuous but also excruciating. A work often unfolds like an emergency, or an unrepressed necessity -- shocking and irrefutable, a last confession.

But behind these fading articulations, which only clamor after the music's surface, there hides a knotty sphinx in Rihm's artistic personality. So many of his own declamations voice an obsession with freedom -- freedom "to" (any techniques, any allusions, any systems) but also, perhaps more so, freedom "from" (all techniques, all allusions, all systems). One could call it a Romantic urge, though the music knows no refuge or repose; it might be Gnostic, if it weren't so outrageously fleshly. But one composite quality, wholly school-less and unsystematic, burns through Rihm's work: it is a search for Others, an uncompromising attempt to encounter the unknown. Hence a body of perpetually outsider works, autonomous by default, absurd by impulsive design. They remain unknown even to their author: "[my works] are individuals with a physiognomy of their own, they have a destiny, they come and go and come again. I really have nothing more to say to that." -- Seth Brodsky

have you picked up 'jagden und formen'? - will listen to this soon-ish but it sounded pretty gd to me when I heard bits of it in the shop I bought it from.

I have the recording on Kairos. It hasn't grabbed me, but I definitely want to hear "Jagden Und Formen".

but "jagden und formen" is non-stop rollercoaster total fun. it does not stop. thanks for sending, julio.

it compares interestingly to the fast sections of Braxton's Composition no. 96, with Rihm being perhaps more lucid and traceable, and Braxton going for totally insane symphonic overkill.

New York, Lincoln Theatre, Ensemble Intercontemporain
Wednesday May 25, 2005

wish I lived in new york

(info via the A Ross blog)

has anyone heard anything by klaus huber? brian ferneyhough - a former pupil - writes a note abt him.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IafNWn7LUg0

this thread title is a provocation to the ballot poll community i hope

Rihm has a new composition - "Will Sound" - on the new Alarm Will Sound album, Modernists.

a few years ago Martin and I saw his freak-a-zoid opera about Nietzsche, "Dionysos", in Berlin and it was great. and crazy sounding as you might expect.