Manfred Werder - stück 1998 seiten 624-626 (skiti)
Manfred Werder's music presents many an obstacle for both performer and listener. Most recently (via Will Montgomery's realization on Cathnor and Werder's own "2007 (1)" on futow) my exposure to his work has involved field recordings. Not so this one.
"stück 1998", as intrepid Wandelweiserians are aware, consists, in toto, of 4,000 pages of score, each page inscribed with 40 actions, making for 160,000 of these actions and scheduled to last, should one perform it in its entirety, for 533 hours and 20 minutes. For some reason, the trio of Jürg Frey (clarinet), Stefan Thut (cello) and Taku Unami (laptop) chose only to play three pages. These pages are included in the handsome packaging and bear evenly spaced, small type-size notations like (reading across the top row of p. 624), h2 F #A1 c4 d2
These are all notes (in German notation) and are held for six seconds, with six seconds of silence between. Very orderly, very controlled. How the sequences of notes were created, whether intentional or by chance, or some combination thereof, I've no idea. The dynamics stay in the same medium range through this rendition's 32 minutes. The static nature of the instruction obviates the sensuousness one hears in, say, late Feldman, where notes are also laid horizontally next to each other but with infinitely subtle variety in volume, touch, etc. As has been remarked elsewhere, it's very difficult, if not impossible to parse out Unami's contribution from the others; it sounds for all the world like only clarinet and cello. Toward the end, one hears voices, perhaps children, from what sounds like an adjacent room.
And that's that. I find it very hard to say much of anything about this particular recording. Given the score, I find myself thinking of it almost spatially, as one of thousands of performances of the piece, occurring spread out over space and time. This is one small nodule, one matrix of note-points, which can be imagined in a 3 & 4 dimensional array of such nodules, the white pages flitting out from the imposing stack, wafting to this or that ensemble or individual, being read and played, then migrating back to its home. It's rather like a molecule, rigid and disciplined on its own, held in check by strong forces, but when combined with its siblings, possibly part of some wondrous thing, if all but imperceptible by those of us isolated with this one shard.
Interesting.
Toshiya Tsunoda's blog site (skiti is his label)
Available from erstdist
"533 hours and 20 minutes" - it's that last 20 minutes that kills ya
ReplyDeleteBrian. the version of 2007(1) released on Futow is realised by the Encadreguys- Takahiro Hirama, Kanichiro Oda, Takefumi Naoshima and Mitsuteru Takeuchi rather than by Werder himself.
ReplyDeleteRight, that was a misleading sentence--I knew that! :-)
ReplyDeleteWell i called Stefan Thut a violinist rather than a cellist at my blog on Monday. I reckon in about ten years time we will both be writing such age-addled nonsense that nobody will have a clue what we are on about.
ReplyDeleteI need to get this Skiti release, can't believe you wrote a review of something before I even own it! ;)
you are getting slow on the draw richard! i like this one too. good to hear a Werder that doesnt include field recordings. like daniel's 3" this could have been longer as well.
ReplyDeleteBrian, I love this piece and was really happy to see your intelligent review of it. Though I haven't heard this particular recording yet, but guess I've been involved with maybe 30 or so performances of it over the years in various locations.
ReplyDeleteI think what you describe in the last paragraph is pretty close to my experience. The piece gathers momentum and context when one hears performances by different people in different locations at different times. It is modular, and ongoing in structure and so (for the time being) any one performance is always somewhat incomplete. It is, to my mind, something like the date paintings of On Kawara (where because the format is very similar from one painting to another, one recognizes the different viewing circumstances that much more clearly). It's pretty amazing that the performance is already at page 626 out of the 4000 total, since each page lasts 8 minutes! I look forward to a time when there will be many recordings of this piece: solo/chamber/orchestral, indoors, outdoors, electronic, acoustic, etc.
I might be wrong about this, but it is my understanding that for each performance the number and order of the pages played is determined by chance operations.
ReplyDeleteSee, I was getting the impression, reinforced by Michael's comment, that Werder was somehow controlling, to the extent possible, the sequence in which the pages were performed. Don't really know, though.
ReplyDeleteWerder's controlling factor (again, as I understand it) is that the same page can't be performed twice (until all the pages have been performed once? or possibly ever again?).
ReplyDeleteBut yeah, I'm sure Michael knows much more about it then either of us.
Still, even if grossly misunderstood, I find these direction to be quite interesting.
What happens is that each page may be performed once (and only once) – Manfred sends out the pages in sequential order. That is, you tell him (as a multiple of 8 minutes) how long your performance will be and he will take that number of pages off the pile. The next performance will pick up in sequence where the previous left off.
ReplyDeletenow that sounds exciting. i plan on doing a performance of this sometime this summer.
ReplyDeleteFor what it's worth, there will most likely be a chamber ensemble performance of this in NYC in the near future.
ReplyDeletemanfred will be here in Santiago, Chile next march. So we will be playing the pages that come inmediately from the skiti release (that is page 627 to maybe 650). I'm hoping that we'll play at least two different versions of it (a solo, an ensemble or a little group).
ReplyDeletenicolás