"Blunt Instruments"
by Alex Ross
The New Yorker, Nov. 12, 2012
In 1921, when Prince Max Egon zu
Fürstenberg agreed to finance a festival
of contemporary music in the German
town of Donaueschingen, he might not
have guessed that the series would still be
going strong nearly a century later, much
less that it would be playing host to onstage provocations involving young composers smashing instruments and pretending to smear themselves with
excrement. So it went at the 2012 edition
of the Donaueschingen Music Days.
Over a weekend in mid-October, this
Black Forest tourist hub witnessed a
stimulating and stupefying onslaught of
activity: six concerts, twenty-one world
premières, an evening of avant-garde improvisation (featuring the venerable English ensemble AMM), and sound-art in-
stallations around town. Some ten thousand people attended, advertising
their opinions in the form of applause,
bravos, boos, and shouted insults.
“Langweilig!”—“Boring!”—was heard
more than once. The audience skewed
young; T-shirts and hoodies outnumbered dress shirts and suits. It was a music
festival in the mode of an art fair, with a
crowd avid for adventure and scandal.
The mood at Donaueschingen this
year was especially charged on account of
looming budget cutbacks at Southwest
German Radio (SWR), which has run
the festival since 1950. SWR operates not
one but two orchestras, the SWR Symphony Orchestra Baden-Baden and
Freiburg and the Stuttgart Radio Symphony; in September, an advisory board
voted to fuse them by 2016. The decision
has drawn furious opposition: at stake, it seems, is not just the fate of the ensembles but the future of Germany’s lavish
system of cultural funding, whose premises have been questioned amid economic
turmoil. The community of contemporary music has perhaps the most to lose
from a potential shrinking of state support. Much of twentieth-century music
history unfolded at Donaueschingen—
the list of local premières includes
Schoenberg’s Serenade, Weill’s “Mahagonny Songspiel,” Xenakis’s “Metastaseis,” and Ligeti’s “Atmosphères”—and it
is almost impossible to imagine such an
enterprise subsisting on private funds.
Hence the remarkable gesture made at
the opening concert by the thirty-two-
year-old German composer Johannes
Kreidler. After an announcer introduced
the program, Kreidler, who looks a bit
like Johnny Rotten, walked onstage,
grabbed a violin and a cello from members of the SWR Symphony, and took
hold of the announcer’s microphone.
Kreidler then noisily strapped the instruments together, until they formed the
shape of a cross. When he described his
creation as an inartistic “fusion,” the audience cheered. He then set about destroying the instruments (cheap models,
it was later revealed), perhaps in homage
to Nam June Paik’s 1962 performance-art piece “One for Violin Solo”—a ritual
smashing that predated similar efforts by
Pete Townshend and Jimi Hendrix. A
more restrained, but no less potent, protest occurred at the final concert. After
François-Xavier Roth, the music director
of the SWR Symphony, asked the audience to consider what kind of Germany
it wanted, there were multilingual shouts
of “For music! For culture!” and an immense ovation for the orchestra itself.
Donaueschingen has never been without its critics. In the twenties, the left-wing composer Hanns Eisler dismissed festivals of its kind as “orgies of in-breeding,” devoid of social relevance. In
the fifties and sixties, Donaueschingen
often projected an arid intellectuality.
Anyone intent on mocking the 2012 incarnation would have found plenty of juicy
targets: works in which violinists scratched
away and percussionists clattered around,
to no pressing purpose. Then again, nobody could have sent up the proceedings
more pointedly than Trond Reinholdtsen,
one of the featured composers, whose “Musik,” for narrator and ensemble, contained crazed parodies of recent compositional trends and theories, not to mention
a nonsensical ditty about Donaueschingen’s director, Armin Köhler. “Musik” was
essentially performance art, with Reinholdtsen, as the narrator, losing his mind
amid the profusion of stylistic possibilities
and the confusion of cultural politics. Toward the end, he stuck his hand down his
pants and covered himself in brown goo.
There was an enthusiastic ovation.
Such prankish attacks on a stale avant-garde are themselves rather stale; back in
1960, Mauricio Kagel’s conceptual piece
“Sur Scène” lampooned theoretical gibberish, and included a toilet joke to boot.
Reinholdtsen also went on too long—a
habit shared by more than a few Donaueschingen composers, who tended to exhaust the possibilities of their material four
or five minutes before their works were
done. (Dismayingly, the composers were
almost all men; only one woman, Malin
Bång, was selected for the main concert
series.) Klaus Lang’s wordless vocal scene,
“the ugly horse,” was initially bewitching
in its blurred tonality but fell victim to a
taxingly prolonged epilogue. Franck Bedrossian’s “Itself,” a riot of orchestral color,
thrashed around in search of an ending.
By contrast, Beat Furrer, one of only four
composers over the age of fifty, gave a lesson in clarity and economy in his elegantly
frenzied ensemble piece “linea d’orizzonte.”
Of course, young artists are undisciplined by nature. Self-indulgence aside,
the Donaueschingen posse proved admirably open to the outside world: the
younger ones were particularly eager to
sample textures and technologies derived
from pop music, though anything resembling a tune or a steady beat was in
short supply. Bernhard Gander, a Mohawk-wearing, comic-book-reading,
hip-hop-listening Austrian, offered
“hukl,” a pummelling tone poem inspired by the Incredible Hulk. Klaus
Schedl’s “Selbsthenker II” evoked black-metal music, with contrabass electronic
tones that did strange things to my abdominal region. And Marko Nikodijevič’s “ketamin/schwarz”—capital letters are clearly out of fashion—was
intended to suggest the effects of the
tranquillizer ketamine, with trancelike
drones underpinning hazy echoes of
Mongolian folk song. The piece came to
an abrupt end, perhaps describing what might happen if you took a lot of ketamine in Ulan Bator.
Nothing made a deeper impression
than “Generation Kill,” an explosive synthesis of live and electronic sound by the
thirty-three-year-old Belgian composer
Stefan Prins. In a program note, Prins reported that he had been pondering intersections of technology and global conflict:
American soldiers in Iraq revving themselves up with video games, Arab Spring
insurgents communicating via Facebook,
drones operated by remote control. Rather
than pasting such portentous themes onto
the surface of a work, Prins found a way to
embody them organically. Four members
of the Nadar Ensemble, playing violin,
cello, electric guitar, and percussion, were
positioned behind transparent screens;
facing them were four performers with
PlayStation video-game controllers.
These devices allowed for the recording,
replay, and manipulation not only of
sounds but also of images: the players had
to compete with superimposed, sometimes sped-up video projections of what
they had been doing moments before.
The result was mind-bending, and
not in a druggy, blissed-out way. As the
composer intended, it was disturbingly
difficult to tell what was real and what
was virtual. The musicians were caught
in temporal loops, as if Philip K. Dick
had written a novel about chamber
music. Instrumental timbres were distorted in the direction of glitchy noise, in
the manner of much recent European
music, but the extension of playing techniques achieved a kind of visceral precision. The cellist executed several abrasive
cadenzas with a crushed beer can stuck
between the strings, and the violinist applied aluminum foil to the bridge of her
instrument. There was a desert harshness
to the sound, in keeping with the Middle Eastern focus. Twice, Prins halted all
musical activity to make that focus clear:
we heard crackling radio voices discussing “collateral damage,” and saw inhabitants of a nameless town running from a
Predator drone.
This display of spastic near-genius
was, to my puzzlement, one of the works
that drew a cry of “Boring!” I wanted to
ask the protester what would have held
his interest. Music for amplified lobby
toilets? A piece in which an orchestra gets
drunk on Fürstenberg beer and trashes
everything in sight? Next year, perhaps.
More: Donaueschingen extras.