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Wednesday, September 23, 2009

Wandelweiser

by Michael Pisaro

Wandelweiser is a word

Wandelweiseris a word for a particular group of people who have been committed, overthe long term, to sharing their work and working together. I still find it something of amiracle that we discovered each other and have continued to function for over seventeen

years: coming from different musical backgrounds, living in different parts of the world,and feeling free to go our separate ways when necessary. In fact, the group as suchdoesnt ever come together as a whole, and includes others besides composers:musicians, artists, writers friends. In Haan (near Dsseldorf) there is an office wherescores are collected, the web site maintained, and recordings are released. This place,lovingly run by Antoine Beuger, is essential to the continued existence of theorganization, but not to the deep connections that exist between us. Our sense of ashared mission is due, I think, to the countless beautiful musical and artistic moments
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we have experienced with each other.

Edition Wandelweiser was the name Burkhard Schlothauer gave to the fledgingpublishing and recording company he formed with Beuger in 1992. I guess it meanschange signpost if one understands it as a combination of Wandelwith Wegweiser; orperhaps more literally, change wisely (or, if one understands the second part asWeise: wise man of change?) Whatever it means, I was never completely comfortable

with the name, but have always understood it somewhat humorously as somethingthat just popped out of Burkhards linguistically inventive mind, rather than as adescription of any kind of aesthetic program. (Im pretty sure he was not trying toindicate that we were especially wise.) In any case, Antoine had recently met Jrg Frey,Chico Mello, Thomas Stiegler and Kunsu Shim and it must have seemed that they hadenough in common (not just musically) to band together. They had a feeling that therehad to be a way to do things outside of the rich, overconfident new music organizationsin Germany and Switzerland, plus a sense of being outside of the status quo theseorganizations created. Over the years several more joined including myself, Manfred

Werder, Carlo Inderhees, Radu Malfatti, Marcus Kaiser, Eva-Maria Houben, CraigShepard, Andr Mller, Anastassis Philippakopoulos (and several others who have sinceleft: amongst them Makiko Nishikaze and Klaus Lang) and then, at some point, thereseemed to be enough people, even though we kept meeting (many) other interestingmusicians. (I will say more about this later.)

The first years of the organization were quite dynamic. Members came and went. For awhile there were connections with Edition Thrmchen in Cologne and Edition Mikro inZurich, two other publisher collectives of avant-garde music. For a period of about five

years, starting in the mid-90s, Wandelweiser had an association with anotherperformance and publishing group, named Zeitkratzer (the whole organization then wasgrouped under the umbrella of the English translation of that name: Timescraper).Burkhard was the only one who belonged to both groups. At the time Zeitkratzer(directed by Reinhold Friedl) was more oriented towards the live electronic side of theexperimental music spectrum. Still, there was a fair amount of overlap between the twogroups, as Zeitkratzer recorded works by Schlothauer, Malfatti and Beuger, and had asmembers, musicians such as Axel Drner and Ulrich Krieger, who shared some aestheticpreferences with the composers in EW. After 2000 however the two groups went their


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separate ways. (Some associations continue since 2007 Ulrich Krieger has taught atCalArts.)

Wandelweiser in 1992

This was an exceptionally obscure stream of music in 1992 almost invisible, at theedge even of the experimental avant-garde. There were no signs of it in North America

or, as far as I know, anywhere outside of Germany and Switzerland. One would onlyhave discovered it by accident.

Here is how I found out about it. Kunsu Shim who, while no longer a part ofWandelweiser, was crucial to the aesthetic development of the group was visitingChicago in the fall of 1992 (with his partner, German composer Gerhard Stbler).Kunsu, of Korean background, had lived for several years in Germany. He was very quiet(and slightly shy), but friendly the opposite of the boisterous American new musictypes I knew at the time, and the first person I had met in a long time who wanted totalk about the music of John Cage and Morton Feldman.

Cage had been a visitor to Northwestern University, where I was teaching, for a fewweeks in the spring of 1992. He had died in August of 92 and his name was still verymuch in the air. At that time and I think for most of the long period afterSilencewaspublished (1961) it seemed musicians were more interested in discussing Cages ideasthan his music. For Kunsu, the music of Cage, and of those who worked with him andfollowed in his wake was felt to be more radical and more useful than the writing:

because it had so many loose ends and live wires still to be explored (something I wouldalso later encounter with other Wandelweiser composers). Thus 433was seen not as a

joke or a Zen koan or a philosophical statement: it was heard as music. It was also


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viewed as unfinished work in the best sense: it created new possibilities for thecombination (and understanding) of sound and silence. Put simply, silence was amaterial and a disturbance of material at the same time.

In 1990 I had started to put relatively long silences into pieces, without really knowingwhy I was doing it. I wanted to stop telling musicians what to do in every detail and tostart creating possibilities for performers to explore a particular, individual sense ofsound within a simple clear structure I would provide. But I felt as if I was alone in these

interests. Part of the circumstance behind Wandelweiser is the uncanny synchronicity:around that time several of us (including Kunsu, Antoine, Jrg, Manfred and Radu)

were making more or less tentative stabs in this direction, without at all being awarethat there were others doing it.

Kunsu Shim and my first encounter with silent music

Kunsu gave me some tapes of his music. One consisted of a recent solo marimba piececalled floating, song, feminine(1992). There were hardly any sounds on that tape! I

was instantly captivated. Tape hiss, a very few incidental noises (a chair, a cough, a fewother unrecognizable sounds) and once in a great while a single short and abruptmarimba note, which seemed to appear out of nowhere: like the sharp tip of a pencilpuncturing a sheet of paper, or a red balloon in a clear sky. (Later I would learn that theplayer was on a ladder and occasionally dropping mallets onto the keyboard. Im notsure if this would have affected my response to the piece.) It was at once so clear, sosimple that even a 3-year old would get it, and yet, simultaneously so mysterious andcomplex in its affect.

These early pieces by Kunsu, including in addition, vague sensations of somethingvanishing(string quartet and contrabass, 1992), marimba, bow, stone, player(1993),expanding space in limited time(solo violin, 1994), and the chamber pieces(1994)seemed to be putting the world on the head of a pin. In expanding space in limited timethe bow sometimes moves only half its length in five minutes. If you saw the violinist

playing you would think he was a living sculpture installation instead of music. In aperformance of the piece at Northwesterns Pick-Staiger Hall in 1994 it took 20 minutesfor me to hear any sound from the violin at all. Once I did start to hear it, over thecourse of the nearly two hours duration, the music became almost unbelievably rich:there seemed to be more sound, more tightly compacted in this miniature world, than inthe statistical complexities of Xenakis (or the black metal of Burzum). The music alsorevealed the complexity of silence itself. Silence in music was not the cessation ofsound, or even a gesture: it was a different sound, one with more density than thosesounds made by instruments.

No apology


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Why do we like what we like? This is usually the most difficult point to explain.Why would a schooled musician like myself, someone who grew up listening to andstudying Jimi Hendrix and avant-rock, free jazz, and classical music suddenly decidethat music with very little sound was the most exciting thing in the world? Basicallyevery member of Wandelweiser has a version of this story. Ive spent a lot of timepondering what it was that was so fascinating and inspiring about this piece (and theother pieces from this direction that I was beginning to hear). I have come to theconclusion that, while its possible to trace the moments that might have set the stagefor such a reaction, the reaction itself is inexplicable. It is, at its root, not logical. Itdoesnt follow from anything like a step-by-step process. You make a decision in amoment, and suddenly youve turned down one fork in the road. Terrifying andreassuring; strange and familiar; exciting and normal: all at once.

Theres no reasonto love this music. One just does (or one doesnt). Aesthetics andhistory come after the fact. Essays (like this one) will not make you like it better and willnot ultimately defend its continued existence. The last thing I would want to do is tonormalizesomething I continue to find strange.

Once one hasmade the turn onto this strange road, a world of difference opens up.What looks like a narrow passageway from the entrance, turns out to have all kinds ofbyways, pathways, way stations it becomes a world of its own. Small musical

differences that to some might just seem like inflections (for example, the differencebetween a silence of 50 and of 60 seconds, or of a few decibels, or the difference intimbre between a low trombone or an e-bow guitar, or between digital silence andrecorded silence) become intensely interesting to those working with them. Having hadsome training in just intonation, this was familiar: the difference between an equaltempered and a just (5/4) major third is for some unimportant, and for others offundamental importance. (If someone says about a kind of music that it all sounds thesame, its very likely to interest me. In my aesthetic experience its more enjoyable tomake my own landscape out of things that are apparently the same, that to be given a


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group of diverse things that already stake out their own clear positions on the map.)

To finish the Kunsu story

The recording of Kunsus music was definitely much farther in this direction than I hadgone. Soon he had provided me with a few more of his scores along these lines (there

werent many then) and a few recordings. It was then that I first encountered the musicof Antoine (his incredible lesen, hren: buch fr stimme, for voice and tape from 1991)

and Jrg (his very simple and beautifulInventionfor piano, from 1990). [Later itbecame clear that both Frey and Beuger had been moving in this direction for a while Frey making gradual movements away, from the 1980s onward, from his orientation inthe New York School music of the 1960s, and Beuger, who already in his teens had putsilences into pieces, picking up composition again in the late 1980s/early 1990s withpieces such as schweigen, hrenfor orchestra (1990) very likely the first piece tosound like a Wandelweiser piece.]

Kunsu and I met again a little over a year later (1994, I think), and after that,unbeknownst to me, he took the liberty of sending Beuger some of my recent scores. Afew months later I received a phone call from Antoine and we had a long conversation(anyone who has had the pleasure of one of these long phone talks with Antoine willknow what an incredible experience that can be), at the end of which he asked if I wasinterested in joining the collective.

Shortly thereafter, on a trip to Germany, I met a group of the current (Antoine, Jrg,Burkhard, Chico, Thomas), and soon to be (Radu, Carlo) members for the first time. It

was an incredible bunch of interesting, strong, diverse, stimulating, and very humorouspeople! It was like meeting up with some of Walter Zimmermanns desert plants in themidst of the fertile high culture of central Europe (notwithstanding that some cameoriginally from Korea, Brazil and unfashionable places in Switzerland, Austria andHolland).

Making sounds with Stones


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One thing I took part in on that trip in the fall of 1995 was a recording ofStonesbyChristian Wolff in the atelier of Burkhard Schlothauers apartment in Berlin. I love thedisc, but the recording process itself was unforgettable. We had one rehearsal only: justenough to situate everyone to the recording environment and to see what people weredoing. Each person made their own realization of the score, given minimal requirementsfrom Antoine I think ten sounds, however one wanted to understand that, to be madeover the course of the 70 minutes duration of the recording. Naturally everyone had a

different method of realizing the piece. Antoine had used chance procedures, and it hadthrown up a need to make three sounds at once, quite a trick given the kinds of soundshe had chosen (involving balancing something and striking it in two different ways withstones simultaneously, if I remember correctly). This took some amusing acrobatics, butin the end came off successfully. Thomas Stiegler made every stone sound using his

violin, intertwining pebbles with bow hair in the strings, dropping tiny stones on thebodyit was like a miniature symphony in a violin. Burkhard dragged a large stone verygently over the floor of the atelier for a long, long time. Kunsu Shims sounds were all tooccur within a period of about two minutes, 55 minutes into the recording. He sat

without any visible motion (as far as we could tell, none whatsoever) for the first 55minutes and then quietly, almost inaudibly, made ten extremely delicate sounds with afew very small pebbles and some cloth. Jrg Frey, as someone who had performed manypieces by Wolff, had determined, Wolff-style, to hinge a few of his sounds upon actions

by others, unbeknownst to the people playing. By chance this had created a situationwhere the sign for the beginning of a sound and its end (i.e., the actions of two differentperformers) necessitated that he rub two good size stones over another gently for nearlyhalf an hour. At the end of this Jrg was covered in white dust.

Listening to a Wandelweiser disc


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The making of this recording and, especially the idea that we would releasesuch a thing(as happened in 1996) is reflective of one of the most important features of the thinkingthat was taking place within Wandelweiser. Obviously a recording is different in many

ways from a live performance. The most profound difference in my view is how oneexperiences them. A concert is a series of moments in which something indefinablepasses through sound and between people. The moments are sensuously immersive(sights, sounds, feelings, smells, tastes), but impermanent. But you have a relationship

with a recording. It can be a brief relationship and can then somewhat resemble aperformance. But the best recordings are lasting in their own particular and repetitive

way.

A recording is also an artifact that doesnt care what you do with it. You can listen to thesame song 500 times; you can refuse to open it (c.f. Brian Olewnicks review ofSectors(for Constant)by Sean Meehan); you can hang it on the wall, sell it or throw it away.

With recording, sound is stored for use. How do you use a recording likeStones? Do youjust listen to it like anything else (perfectly possible in this case) or do you find ways oflistening to it that suit the recording in other ways: say playing it all day at low volume(so that it can be forgotten, except for those very few moments when a sound rises to thesurface, reminding you its still there). Or play it so loud that you hear everything.

In other words, the recording can be viewed as open, something like an instrumentaparticular instrument that makes a limited set of sounds that can nonetheless have a

variable relationship in the environment in which they are played. Although there aremany discs in the Edition Wandelweiser catalog that can function as fairly normallistening experiences, their presence alongside those such asStones, calme tendue(Spinoza),Branches, silent harmonies in discreet continuity, exercise 15, ein(e)ausfhrende(r) seiten 218 226,phontaine, Transparent City, and im sefinental(toname only the most obvious in this direction), creates an interesting double trajectory:from the recording as concepttowards its use as music, and, conversely, the invitation to

a listener to experiment in their own way with how to experience the more traditionallypresented music. (I dont mean to suggest that Wandelweiser owns or established thiscategory just that it plays a role in how I experience the music on any given EW disc.)

The first decade

So, after a while, as concerts started to happen (in Dsseldorf, Aarau, Zrich, Munich,Chicago, etc.) and discs started to be released (with an initial onslaught of eight in 1996)some attention was given to the group in the German speaking new music press and at

various music festivals. The presences of Radu Malfatti (I didnt know any of his work asan improviser yet) and Manfred Werder (having just returned from a few years in Paris)made themselves felt. At this stage (late 90s) Wandelweiser seemed very much like a

German thing not just as a basis of operations but where most of the things werehappening. This was ironic, inasmuch as most of the members were not from Germany.(I have to add here that the Swiss contingent of Jrg and Manfred did a lot to makesure that Wandelweiser was not onlya German thing, with many strong and memorableconcert series in Aarau and Zrich.)

Ive often wondered about this landing in Germany. It may have something to do withthe high regard the American avant-garde was held in Europe, and in particular inGermany, compared to the status it had in the US at the time. It was often my


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impression that Cage, Feldman, Wolff, Lucier and the others had had a greater impacton the late 20th century musical life in central Europe than they had had in the US. Themusical situation in the States, at least in classical and jazz music, had been flooded withmore conciliatory voices: the minimalism of Glass and Reich, then the neo-Romanticattitudes struck by the majority of academic composers; in jazz this tendency wassymbolized by Wynton Marsalis (coinciding with an apparent lack of momentum in free

jazz, and very little improvised music to speak of). My friend, the musicologist VolkerStraebel has called this period the death of the American avant-garde and this was

precisely what it felt like. So Europe in general, and Germany in particular, with its largeresources for culture (even helping marginal enterprises like Wandelweiser) was morefertile ground.

There were two centers of Wandelweiser activity in Germany. Antoine, Kunsu, Marcus,Andr, Eva-Maria, percussionist Tobias Liebezeit, pianist John McAlpine, the artistMauser, and for a while Carlo, his wife, Normisa Pereira da Silva and Radu all lived inand around Dsseldorf/Kln. Thomas Stiegler wasnt too far away, in Frankfurt.

Antoine has had an ongoing series at the Kunstraum in Dsseldorf since 1993. A hugenumber of Wandelweiser concerts have taken place there (the list itself would be a pieceof a kind just reading the way the titles change over the years is interesting at leastto me). There seemed to be just enough in the budget to bring musicians together, andso over the years many of us have come to feel that this place is a second musical home.(I just need to close my eyes to hear the sound of the rooms with Jrg Freys clarinetechoing through them.)

The artist Mauser (about whom more later) had his studio in nearby Cologne and thiswas another frequent performance location in the first decade. It was a very simple,fairly large and extremely pleasant studio space in the courtyard of an apartment

building in a relatively quiet section of the city. Here the practice of daylong concerts(Ein Tag), developed by Mauser and Antoine, really found its footing. For a while these

were yearly and incredible events, where either very long pieces or collections ofpieces would be done alongside time based work in other media: visual arts

performance and installation, video, dance and so on. Many would come and spend afew hours there, to watch some of the performance, and to relax on the patio under thetrellis and haveKaffee und Kuchen. Others would spend nearly the whole time followingthe performance, even though often very little would be happening. Although I couldonly occasionally take part in events there, the days at Mausers are easily amongst mymost memorable artistic experiences.


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The other center of activity was Berlin. In the first decade the Verlag(the German wordfor publishing company) was there, housed by Burkhard at his business. Recordings(such asStones) were made in Burkhards studio or in an old church near his house inthe countryside a few hours away (Hohenferchesar). Former members MakikoNishikaze, Chico Mello and Klaus Lang also lived in Berlin, at least part of the year. I

was close by for the better part of a year in 1998/1999 on a fellowship from KnstlerhofSchreyahn. The musicologist and close friend to several in the group, Volker Straebellives there. At the end of 1996 Carlo moved to Berlin. There, along with artist ChristophNicolaus, he created one of the founding Wandelweiser situations. This project, called

3 jahre 156 musikalische ereignisse eine skulptur (3 years 156 musical events one sculpture) took place in the choir loft of the Zionskirche (inMitte, directly acrossthe street from Carlo, Normisa and their young son Matheos apartment), every Tuesday

for 3 years, always promptly at 7:30 p.m. Each concert featured the premiere of a new10-minute solo piece (plus the rotation of one of the pieces of Nicolaus' sculpture

which consisted of stone posts of various lengths laid on the old wood floor of thebalcony). Although some friends outside the group wrote works (including amongstothers, Peter Ablinger and Wolfgang von Schweinitz), the overwhelming majority of thenew pieces came from Wandelweiser composers. Id venture to say that if you see a ten-minute solo piece in the EW catalog from 1997 to 1999 it was written for this project.Cumulatively over the three years, thousands of people came to the concerts, and hadtheir first experience of this music. Peter Ablinger once described to me his pleasure at


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taking an hour ride in the U-Bahn to hear a ten-minute concert (with a trip to a caf orpub afterwards where often long discussions would ensue).

In any case, even in Germany, we had to exist on a shoestring. All the discs and theperformances (after the initial round) only happened because individuals in the groupfound a small opportunity to do something. A free space close by; the interest of a fewcreative performers; a little grant money: in sum nothing that would come close tofunding an average size music festival, would be enough for several densely packed

Wandelweiser events. (A typical example would be a week in Dsseldorf with concertsevery evening and two on Saturday and Sunday with new pieces being rehearsed by

various groupings of the ensemble.)

When I look back over all the events that took place over the years (certainly in thehundreds, with probably close to one thousand pieces performed) I am amazed by howmuch can be done with little or no money (still pretty much the case) and relatively littlepublic attention.

Different aesthetics under one roof

At this point I think I need to mention that Wandelweiser does not embody, as far as Imconcerned, a single aesthetic stance. To be sure, from the outside there appear to be aset of shared characteristics, including an interest in silence, duration and radicalextension of Cagean ideas and the work that followed from it. In fact, fourteen years ago,these might have been terms more easily applied to (much of) the music but even thenthere were lots of different ideas about where the music was going as well as importantdifferences in taste and philosophical stance.

Here is a list of some of the things I can remember discussing with people in the firstyears (and this might help to suggest how diverse the set of influences and conditionswere):

There were several different ideas about which works of Cage were most valuable. Itwasnt only 433, but the number pieces, 000,Roaratorio,Music for __, theVariations,Empty Words, Cheap Imitation, theString Quartet (in Four Parts). Whatseemed to be at stake here was not only the status of silence, but of the relationship

between silence and noise (the noise of the world), and the function of tone within thatcontinuum. Beugers important essay Grundstzliche Entscheidungen(1997) dealsdirectly with this issue.


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The music of Wolff was critical for many of us. Christian was at the meeting in Boswilin 1991, where Antoine met Jrg Frey and Chico Mello. (Jakob Ullmann, Urs PeterSchneider, Ernstalberecht Stiebler and Dieter Schnebel were also there. Manfred

Werder was in the audience for one of the performances.) Wolff has also been a greatsupporter of our music and many of us have worked closely with him on his (and our)music. Much of his music attempts to tap into the creative power of performance in anexplicit way. Christian had been close friends with Cornelius Cardew, had worked with

the Scratch Orchestra and had played with AMM but this feature had been present inhis music already quite early on, for instance in hisFor 1, 2 or 3 People(1964). While I

would not call what happens in this piece improvisation, it does involve on the spotdecision-making that people who have worked in improvised situations wouldimmediately recognize. At the root, and this I think applies even more to Wolffs music(where it has been pursued in many different ways) than Cages, there is anunderstanding of a composition as a stopping point, as opposed to an endpoint, in the

whole process of creating music. For many of us (all of us?), Wolff proved a deepersource of inspiration for making new work than Feldman. (Which is not to say thatFeldmans work is not beautiful or helpful for some of usit is.)

There was, early on, and continues to be an ongoing curiosity about the depth andbreadth of the experimental tradition, American or otherwise, with a special interest insome of the radical and obscure works. Antoine is especially gifted at uncovering littleknown, radical work. I first learned of Tomasz Sikorski, Michael von Biel, MariaEichhorn, Robert Lax, Alain Badiou and even Douglas Huebler from him (this list couldgo on much longer). Thanks to Antoine, at one recent Wandelweiser event, TerryJenningsPiano Piece(1960) was performed and seemed to be right at home amongstpieces by some of us. At a concert in Neufelden (near Linz) this summer, the

Wandelweiser Composers Ensemble played Toshi IchiyanagisSapporo(1962) and italmost felt as if it had been written for us to play.

We have had occasional (but ongoing) discussions about the various directions jazz

and improvised music has taken in the previous 30 years. This was important in thesense that it intersects in so many ways with the notions of indeterminacy. Radu, havingworked his way from Jack Teagarden to Paul Rutherford and then beyond, brought a lotof experience and opinion to these discussions. But for myself as well, growing up inChicago, playing jazz guitar, and hearing so much of the music of the various AACMcombinations, this was an especially important issue. At the beginning there was littleidea that what we were doing had much in common with what was going on improvisedmusic this would come later.

There was a definite awareness of the importance of the German avant-garde:especially Helmut Lachenmann (with whom Kunsu had studied) and MatthiasSpahlinger (with whom Thomas Stiegler had studied). From early on, some of the

thinking about instruments and the use of sound, and above all, instrumental noise, wasinfluenced in audible ways by these important figures.

As kind of a counterbalance there was an interest in many various small and strangethings: art and music made by the various members of Fluxus, odd bits of poetry (HansFaverey, Robert Creeley, Fernando Pessoa), the work of the Gugging artists and poets(especially Oswald Tschirtner) or, especially in my case, American vernacular music ofthe 1920s and 1930s (Harry Smith territory). For me these various oddball streamscame together in the one-of-a-kind poetic work of Italian/Austrian poet Oswald Egger


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(who was introduced to Antoine through the publisher Thomas Howeg, Zurich).

Over the years there have been many discussions amongst us concerning fundamentalissues in making music. Because some of the ideas in the pieces attempt, in their own

way, to get to the root of a particular musical situation, sometimes it has been helpful touse thought from outside. As Gilles Deleuze points out, philosophy has been, over the

last three millennia, the main source of concept creation. (Science and mathematics inhis view create functions, and art creates percepts sensuous objects to beperceived.)

Each of us, without being anything like a professional philosopher (were more like non-professional philosophy readers), has drawn inspiration from philosophical work. Thisis very hard to talk about in depth without sounding pretentious, so Im not going to.However, not mentioning it also seemed wrong its an important part of the

Wandelweiser atmosphere.

The conceptual background is present in a lot of the work we have shared (again,

especially at first). I think it partially explains why, over certain periods an intenseamount of activity was centered in one particular area of musical creation.

For a period in the mid- to late 1990s there was a lot of work done, by several differentcomposers, on the solo piece. Behind it is, I think, an interest in the number 1. This ledto a great number of very diverse pieces: exploring the unit of time structure (first music

for marcia hafif, stck 1998,fr sich), being alone (tout fait solitaire), the sonicfeatures of one instrument (die geschichte des sandkorns, kammerkomplex, mind ismoving, die temperatur der bedeutung), an expanse of limitless time (calme tendue,ein(e) ausfhrende(r)) or the disappearance of perceived time altogether (insungebundene, a certain species of eternity) to mention a few of the many works. Onething that has always been striking about this work to me, is the tangible presence of the

performer when notplaying. This is something that is never communicated on arecording the continuity of the sound and silence is borne by the particular person,

whose singular presence is more important than anything written on the page.

At some point the duo (or twoness) came into something of a focus (early on, mostly inthe work of Jrg Frey, but then most recently by Beuger). Looking at the pieces, one seesa world of difference between 1 and 2, in musical terms. Its hard to avoid the idea thattwo in music always implies, at the very least, relationship if not love. [Lovaty,

zwischen, dedekind duos, 2 ausfhrende, and two/too.]

The most important conversation

Many important exchanges happened during the rehearsal process. We all spent a greatdeal of time getting to know each others music by playing it. The WandelweiserComposers Ensemble is a group of sympathetic performers who nonetheless bring theirown styles of playing and thinking. One writes for individuals rather than instruments.

When Antoine, Jrg, Radu, Manfred or Marcus play on one of my compositions, I knowthat their musical character will permeate the work. And I know that their way ofplaying it will tell me things about my own piece that I could not have known withoutthem. Even the simplest looking piece takes on a curious afterlife, as one sorts through

what happened to it in the hands of one's friends.


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As Jrg Frey has said: the most important conversations took place not in words, but inthe music itself, from one piece to another; with one person going a different direction

with very similar material to what the other had used. Seen in this way, it is only bygetting inside the individual works that one sees the energy that is at play amongst thisgroup of musicians: where notions of what is similar and what is different are replaced

by much more complicated (and interesting) trajectories and tensions.

Radu brilliantly summarized to me the coming together, the commonality and thedifferences in this way:

I think that these things [i.e., the ideas of what we were doing] are there anyway andthat "creative" people are only those who pick it up earlier then the rest, or hear it, or

feel it sooner. In the Wandelweiser situation: Who started it? Who is a "follower"? Ithink we all started to become interested in similar things, even coming from verydifferent angles and directions and therefore we met and got together and felt amutual understanding right away.

A river delta

Thats the image I can best use to describe what has started to happen as a result of allthese conversations over the years, as our work has developed. What might have seemed

at first like something of a single narrow stream, has proved to be capable of somevariety. Early on, I took pleasure in the fact that I was never quite sure exactly whosepiece I was hearing. The overlap and the sense of a truly shared language was excitingand inspiring. Now I take pleasure in being able to recognize, sooner rather than later,

whose piece it is even as it continues to be part of the same stream.

Art

Antoine introduced me to the monochrome painting of Marcia Hafif, an American artist.


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The idea behind this work was that one kind of material (that is, one color and kind ofpaint) was already multiple. It is, abstractly, one color, but in reality, when the paint isapplied to the canvas by hand, there are many miniscule variations in tone and texture.The fact that the description was simple but the reality complex, did not fall on blindeyes or deaf ears. It is interesting how revealing a choice of a favorite artist can be. JrgFrey loves the still life painting of Giorgio Morandi: and thus it becomes possible to seein his work the subtle, careful, endless shift of the same basic material each timesomehow just new enough to engage you, and to make you more deeply aware of the

possibilities for expression with limited means. It wont surprise anyone that ManfredWerder is fascinated by the conceptual artists. I can remember him reading LucyLippardsSix Years: The dematerialization of the art object from 1966 to 1972like it

was a suspense novel. Carlo Inderhees has been influenced by the work of On Kawara.(That makes sense, doesnt it?) Although I love all this art, recently my own tastes run toJames Turrell, Juan Muoz and some of the installations of Sarah Sze. As theseexchanges started, I had the sense that much had happened in the realm of the visualarts that had no parallel with developments in music (Carl Andre, Donald Judd, SolLeWitt, Dan Flavin, Agnes Martin, etc.). Perhaps, with all of the interesting work donein experimental music in the last 15 years, this has started to change.

The presence of one artist-musician and two great artist friends of Wandelweiser is avery significant (if in the US, seldom visible) part of the group.

Mauser introduced himself to Antoine at a concert of John Cages in Cologne in the early1990s. His work, which kept evolving right up until his death in 2006, was a significantpart of the Wandelweiser environment. Entering Mausers studio for the first time in1995, I at first thought it was devoid of art. As we sat and talked, the sun shifted and I

became aware of very light, somehow luminous squares on the walls. At some point itwas clear that they werent just effects of the light, but artworks: very fine translucentpaper had been fixed to the wall, and the paper caught light to varying degrees,depending upon the angle with which the light hit it. Could anything be simpler? Butnothing is as easy as it looks. The art appeared and disappeared magically and seemedto have its own un-emphatic duration. It had taken Mauser decades of very hard work,filled with uncertainty, to arrive at this solution: at once clear in concept andunbelievably sensual (you took it all in with your eyes before your brain started

working). It became a model for musical work for some of us.


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The artist Christoph Nicolaus has been a close friend to several in the group for nearly aslong as it has existed. Christoph does many kinds of work: drawing, photography, videoand other media. Much of his work is durational in nature: collecting single drops of

water from various sources every day and storing them in glass containers (where theycreate beautiful clouds of evaporation); photographing the same location at the sametimes every year (in spring, summer, fall and winter); making a daily drawing using thesun and a magnifying glass to burn narrow, straight lines onto paper (dark brownimages which nonetheless retain the luminosity of the sun). With his ongoing seriesGaronne, he is making a very large set of videos of rivers (having already covered muchof the world to do this) according to a very simple principle: finding a bridge and filming

directly down on both sides, using autofocus, as long as the battery holds out (thuscreating a series of ca. 60 minute videos, paired for each river, with water flowing fromthe top to the bottom of the screen in one, and from the bottom to top of the screen inthe other). An installation presents a collection of 2 to 6 rivers shown simultaneously,chosen at random from the pile. The differences are astounding: the colors (all shades ofgreen, brown, black, orange and blue), the flow, the wind and weather, the kinds ofdebris one would never imagine how singular each river could appear. One of myfavorite Wandelweiser events was the exhibition of these videos in Berlin in 1998,simultaneous with Carlos solo cello piecefr sich. Carlos music and Christophs videos

were in profound harmony something multi-media art often strives for, but rarelyachieves. Nicolaus has installed a beautiful collection of Mausers work in his largeapartment in Munich and hosts monthly concerts there under the titleKlang im Turm.

It is one of the central current locations for Wandelweiser events.


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The least classifiable member of Wandelweiser is Marcus Kaiser. He is a cellistpainterarchitectcomposerbuilder/designermaker of sound piecesvideo artist.Marcus does not juggle these activities he works on all of them simultaneously as ifthey were part of some vast rhizomatic assemblage. He paints jungles the way theygrow: adding layer after layer of green until it is nearly a monochrome. He recordsindividual layers of sound regularly over the course of many days, until, whensimultaneously played back, these recordings reach a point of near saturation (in which,however, sonic features remain distinguishable). He designs desks that serve as

workspaces in a communal environment. His work is grand in scope, but not oversized;it is bold, but presented with gentleness and humility. (These last two are deeplypersonal qualities that anyone who knows Marcus will recognize.)

Mild weather / distant thunder (Wandelweiser events)

Although over the years there has been great variety in the location, structure andpersonnel involved in the concerts, the character of a Wandelweiser event has someconstants: A great deal of music; many discussions; the feeling of good-naturedfriendship and community.

A strong reaction from someone else (I really did/did not like that, and heres why.)can serve to clarify ones own thinking. However, in my experience the interactions thatemerged from Wandelweiser events, have usually taken place in an atmosphere ofgeneral support where it is a given that one would continue to care about and for the

other, regardless of aesthetic differences.

Antoine, who in Dsseldorf has staged more large-scale Wandelweiser events than anyof the rest of us, has always been particularly clear in his feelings about this matter (andis himself a good model for the attitude): people should not feel wounded bypresenting their work or ideas. Critique does happen, but to me it has seemed rather fardown the list of things to accomplish during one of these gatherings. In any case, with agroup of close friends, one usually knows how they feel about one's work. Over the longrun, sympathies and differences will make themselves clear in the decisions made in the


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work itself (as if individual works were part of larger picture). For instance, starting inthe mid-90s one could follow the use of the bass (or low) drum duo from work to work,composer to composer: Ohne Titel (fr Agnes Martin)(Frey, 1994/95),fourth music formarcia hafif no. 3(Beuger, 1997), time, presence, movement / one sound(Pisaro, 1997) finally becoming four such instruments in Malfattis l'effaage(2001). A close look atthese four apparently similar pieces would reveal subtle but substantial differences inapproach. Although each piece can stand alone, there is also a (wordless) discussiongoing on between them. There are many such discussions in the Wandelweiser catalog.

None of this means that striking events are avoided quite the contrary. But these tendto be shocks produced by the works themselves. If I think about some of these: the firsttime I experienced Beugers nine hour composition, calme tendue; the endless (andoccasionally hilarious) stream of Swiss birds and valleys in Jrg FreysLovaty; the waythe density of Marcus Kaisers incredible jungle paintings permeates his cello playing;the radical juxtaposition of control and freedom in RadusDsseldorf Vielfaches; the 15-second summary of the orchestral experience contained in Manfred Werders 2008-1(just to mention the first five that come to mind), shook me as an artist in a way noharsh words could ever do. Im still dealing with these events. (In part, my summer two-

week festival, the dog star orchestra, is an attempt to find some kind of North American/ West Coast parallel to these concert meetings.)

Beyond the creative impetus received from discussions and exchanges of ideas, therewas, above all, the pleasure of wonderful performances of the music. In addition to themembers of the Wandelweiser Composers Ensemble, we have each been very lucky to

work with performers whose dedication to the music and to the people making it isresponsible in part for the continuity of the work being made.

Here I tip my hat to a special group of musicians who have kept faith for many years in aspirit of friendship and generosity: pianist John McAlpine, percussionist TobiasLiebezeit, oboist Kathryn Pisaro, speaker Sandra Schimag, accordionist Edwin

Alexander Buchholz, the Quatour Bozzini (Clemens Merkel, Nadia Francavilla andIsabelle and Stphanie Bozzini), violist Julia Eckhardt of Q-02 and Incidental Music,


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flutist Normisa Pereira da Silva, cellist Stefan Thut, percussionist Greg Stuart, pianistJongah Yoon, pianist Guy Vandromme and saxophonist Ulrich Krieger. I cant imagineour music without the creative participation of these people.

A few statements about composition (concepts, structures, sounds)

Let us call a musical concept an idea or thought about music at some remove from theembodiment of the thing itself.

A written composition contains a concept of how a particular music should be made. (Inthis way, all written music is conceptual.)

In a composition, a small, clear concept might be preferred to a large, overarching one.(For this way of thinking, better a piece that takes up the simple coincidence or non-coincidence of two players than one that seeks to redefine orchestration.)

There is greater diversity to be found in a collection of clear concepts than in a collectionof overarching ones.

Clear concepts can sometimes lead to perplexing results: results that test the powers ofperception on some level and are conscious of that test. One kind of sonic pleasure isconnected to the effort the mind of the listener makes to understand (or properly hear)the sound situation initiated by the composition.

The musical situation will get somedegree of its structure from the composition; but thecomposition cannot account for everything. In the written work, something might besaid about the time, or sound, or player or instrument (or all of these), but it is essentialto keep in mind that much (most?) of the sonic reality will occur in the situation itself.

The performers of the work are capable of being aware of the concept and the structuregiven by the composition, and of making active decisions at the same time.

There is no clear and logical way to affix a percentage of creation or responsibility to anyone of the musical actors. The music arises as a result of a whole set of circumstances,almost as if, once set in motion, it is doing the acting and the thinking.

The process described here is independentof conventional notions of what might ormight not sound good, what is easy or difficult to grasp, or what is easy or difficult tolisten to.

At its best the surface of the music (i.e., the sounding result) will be engaging enough todraw a listener into the world of the piece. It is insidethis world in that significantartistic events (moments that can alter the way we hear and understand music)

transpire.

There is nothing wrong with a beautiful surface, placid and composed, despite itscontact with musical upheaval.


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Where are we now?

Over the years the network of people associated with Wandelweiser has expanded. Theregular concerts taking place in Aarau, Dsseldorf, Munich, Zrich, and Los Angeles,along with semi-regular ones in New York, Berlin, London, Vienna, Chicago and Tokyohave done a lot to make people aware of the music and to draw people to it. Given thatnew music is being written constantly and then performed, the concerts are still the

frontline of activity (and represent much more than could ever be recorded andreleased).

As is probably already clear, the openness of much of this work to environmental sound,its more than occasional extended duration, and the frequent use of indeterminacymeans that in most cases there is no such thing as a repeat performance: the secondperformance of a piece (in a different context or with different performers) can feel likeanother premiere. So we all, even after all these years, continue to find many reasons toperform each others work, and often serve as advocates for it (which seems to be a rarething it was at least seldom found in the contemporary music environment in which Igrew up).

Now, mainly through personal contact and involvement in performances, there are alsoa number of musicians of a younger generation who take Wandelweiser as one of theirstarting points. As influence is such a tenuous thing, it would be hard to know where to

begin or to end a list of these musicians. Its probably best to say that, for a group ofyounger musicians, the music of Wandelweiser is a part of the experimental musicatmosphere in which they learned to breathe.

The recent compact disc recordings are, as in the past, not an extension of, but acomplement to the concerts. As mentioned above, many of the more interesting EW


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discs represent things that could never have been performed as such. To choose recentexamples, both Antoine Beugers too, with recordings of separate duos made inDsseldorf (Jrg Frey and Irene Kurka), and Tokyo (Rhodri Davies and Ko Ishikawa)combined to make a new piece out of two other pieces and the duo field recordingperformance disc by Manfred Werder and Stefan Thut do not represent possibilitiesavailable in a concert space (Im Sefinental). My two most recent discs on the label arealso examples: both realizations of an unrhymed chordwere specifically designed asrecordings, and hearing metal 1is a work for recorded percussion to begin with.

It is here perhaps that the music of the Wandelweiser group shares something withsome interesting recordings on labels such asErstwhile,Improvised Music From

Japan,Slub Music,Hibari,Another Timbre,Manual, Cathnor, Confront,Potlatchandothers that seem ostensibly more concerned with improvised music. Recent releases onthese labels also often confound notions of live and recorded means, and blur the line

between what has been spontaneously invented (or improvised) and what is composed(or assembled) in the studio. Perhaps this sense of shared territory is one of the reasonsthat EW releases have found a successful outlet in the US in Erstwhile distribution(erstdist).

Ive recently started thinking about how much overlap there is between these apparentlydifferent enterprises. It is not uncommon for improvisers these days to limit or fixaspects of their performance before playing. One might set a total duration beforehand(as Radu likes to do), or bring only a certain limited set of materials or an (apparently)limited instrument (such as Sachiko Ms sine wave sampler). Or perhaps animprovisational work might find itself in a context where composed works have also

been played (a practice which AMM has long engaged in). Recently in concerts and onrecordings, works by Sugimoto or Cage might be understood as belonging torepertoire of an ensemble that most often improvises. While I think its fair to say thatsomething is being shared by these various musical streams, I would prefer at themoment not to name what that is (in part because I have no idea what to call it). At themoment I feel that this unnamed area has a tremendous potential going forward.

Non-national music


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Despite its base in Germany, Wandelweiser is not a national style or trend. It wasremarkable that people from Austria, Switzerland, the Netherlands, Germany, Brazil,Korea, Japan and the US felt they had much more in common musically (and oftenpersonally) than they did with their own countrymen. The American experimentaltradition was gone (or at least, not a part of our generation) and this was being replaced

by something else. Whatever it might be called, it was certainly not the province of onenational way of thinking about music or making music. Outside of the countries wherethe members of Wandelweiser live, there have been a couple of strong developments in

the last several years.

For nearly ten years now a set of shared musical activity has existed between manymembers of Wandelweiser and experimental musicians in the UK. My wife Kathy and Ihad the opportunity to get to know something of the scene in London in 1996. As she

was there doing her dissertation research on the Scratch Orchestra, we had the chanceto meet and talk to John Tilbury, Howard Skempton, Michael Parsons and many others(and we heard AMM live for the first time in Chicago not long thereafter). During ourstay in London, I learned of the music of Laurence Crane, who I managed to meet on thenext trip over. Shortly thereafter, Manfred Werder came into contact with twocomposers with whom members of Wandelweiser have since often worked: TimParkinson and James Saunders. (To this list of UK collaborators, I would also addcomposers Markus Trunk and John Lely, though this list is growing rapidly.) Membersof Wandelweiser have performed at INSTAL (Glasgow) in both 2008 and 2009, and thishas led to more contact with the vibrant experimental improvisation community in theUK and elsewhere.

Radu Malfatti had of course lived once in England, but is, as usual, a special case. Sincehis musical shift, many of his friends from that earlier era were no longer on speakingterms with him. However a whole new set of associations with a younger generationdeveloped mostly improvisers, in London and Berlin, who looked to him as atrailblazer in a new style of making music. (There are simply too many names here tomention!)

The Tokyo Connection

To close this section, Id like to say just a little about the relationship that has developedin recent years between Wandelweiser and some musicians from Japan.

Some of these, in retrospect, had something like an aura of inevitability. Certainly, tochoose one example, Toshiya Tsunodas somewhat hands-off approach to fieldrecording (already present in the very beautiful recordings of 1997) something I thinkof as steady state recordings of silence are not so far away from thinking we in

Wandelweiser might have recognized (had any of us known of it then).


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When Taku Sugimoto first contacted Radu Malfatti in July of 2000 it might have comemore or less out of the blue, but if one looks for a moment at the music coming out of

Tokyo from at least the mid-90s onward there is a sense that there too somethingradical, having to do with the fundamental nature of sound and silence, was at work.The world of Oppositeis not so far from that ofBeinhaltung, that of The World TurnedUpside Down not so far from the one ofDach. In any event, as their work together (suchasFutatsu) amply demonstrates, there was a quick understanding between these twogreat musicians.

When Taku Unami began distributing Wandelweiser discs through Hibari in 2004, themusic became much better known (and apparently, appreciated) amongst experimentalmusicians in Japan. Both Radu and Manfred (starting in 2004) have worked thereseveral times, along with, most recently, Antoine. In a short time some beautiful musicalprojects between these musicians have developed including most recently some

wonderful recordings: Manfred Weders 20061on Toshiya Tsunodas Skiti label,AYoung Persons Guide to Antoine Beuger(produced by Sugimoto for his Slub Musiclabel), and kushikushism, a duo project by Radu Malfatti and Taku Unami (also on SlubMusic).

Antoine told me a story that may or may not be symbolic of the way in whichWandelweiser is understood in Japan, especially amongst younger artists. WhenManfred, Radu and he visited Tokyo in November of 2007, Antoine received many discs,often without any labeling, from young musicians. One particular musician gave him afew, explaining in each case, which ones were more Wandelweiser and less

Wandelweiser. On one of the more Wandelweiser discs, there appeared to be no

sound at all.

As Ive become acquainted recently with much more of the music made in Japan byexperimental musicians from the onkyo group and its offshoots, Ive returned to thethought behind Radus comment above many times. Sometimes the concerns, if not themusic, seem so similar as if to be almost identical: as if a group of ideas was circulatingof which no one was directly conscious as if they had no real point of origin and wereable to place themselves anywhere they could find a host.


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In the music of Sachiko M and Toshimaru Nakamura there is (or can be) such anintense stillness. Where does it come from? How available is it to others? In the work ofthese musicians with Keith Rowe I find an inspiring parallel to some of the music I gotto know with my Wandelweiser friends. To be sure, there are many differences: theprevalence of electric over acoustic instruments, the fact that the music is improvised,and the various lineages that the musicians have within their traditions, to name the

most obvious. Nonetheless, the stillness, the silence and the serene beauty; the sense oftaking your time and trusting your audience to take the time with you; the evolution ofthe work and the sense that an active exploration is going on; to me these suggest adeeper kinship. Perhaps the most representative (and beautiful) example of this is the

work of these three (with Otomo Yoshihide) at the incredible concert in Berlin on May14, 2004, documented onErstLive 005 particularly on the final disc.

When I think about our group now, and especially the large set of friends of this music, Iwonder if some of the most fragile seeds planted in the mid-century, by Cage and theexperimental tradition, by the certain subgroups within free jazz and improvised music

communities, and by the quiet experimental tendencies in Japan (Toshi Ichiyanagi, YujiTakahashi) have, after spending many years underground started to spring to life:invisibly everywhere.

Summer/Fall, 2009

I would like to thank Jon Abbey, Manfred Werder, Radu Malfatti and Antoine Beugerfor their help with this article.

photos/credits:

1. the wandelweiser composers ensemble (joachim eckl)

2. antoine beuger (hartmut becker)3. john cage (ben martin)4. jimi hendrix (photographer unknown)5. desert plants (unknown)6. stones (CD cover/ida maibach)7. zionskirche (unknown)8. christian wolff (unknown)9. gilles deleuze (still from French TV)10. radu malfatti/mattin (yuko zama)11. mauser in his studio (marianne hambach)12. sonnenzeichnungen (nicolaus) (kathryn pisaro)13. marcus kaiser (in sook kim)

14. kunstraum (with eva-maria houben, john mcalpine, michael pisaro) (renatehoffmann korth, ew website)15. wolff.beuger.frey (silvia kamm-gabathuler, ew website)16. sachiko m/dan flavin installation (yuko zama)17. taku sugimoto/radu malfatti (eleen deprez)18. keith rowe/sachiko m/toshimaru nakamura/otomo yoshihide (yuko zama)at 11:02 PM
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Richard Pinnellsaid...

This is superb Michael, thank you so much.

September 24, 2009 at 7:14 AM
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