Füting’s Present Reflections on “Distant Songs”

from the Amazon.com Web page for digital download

At the end of last year, New Focus Recordings released its second album of works by German composer Reiko Füting. The title of the album is distant song, which refers to the composer’s technique of drawing upon sources from the past and “transplanting” them in the “soil” of his own grammatical and rhetorical techniques. In our “brave new world” of distribution, Amazon.com is currently making the album available only for digital download; but those who prefer the physical medium can purchase the CD through Naxos Direct.

Füting tends to draw upon pre-Baroque composers for much of his source material. The first two compositions on distant song, “‘als ein licht’/extensio” (as a light) and “‘in allem frieden’” (in all peace), appropriate from the choral music of Heinrich Schütz; and the source of “Weg, Lied der Schwäne” (journey, song of the swans) is a madrigal by Jacques Arcadelt. On the other hand, the final selection, “versinkend, versingend, verklingend: fernes Lied” (sinking, singing, sounding: distant song), from which the album takes its title, draws upon both a fifteenth-century German folk song and Claude Debussy’s piano prelude, “La cathédrale engloutie.”

Performing resources are similarly diverse. The vocal selections involve both solo singing and part songs. Instrumental resources are kept on a chamber scale but with a tendency to include diverse passages for percussion. On the other hand the two pieces that appropriate Schütz draw upon the resources of the Art d’Echo consort of four viol players joined by Klaus Eichhorn on positive organ. Both of those pieces involves settings of texts by the poet Kathleen Furthmann.

The accompanying booklet provides Furthmann’s poems. One quickly discovers that the very layout of her words is a significant element of her capacity for poetic expression. This is particularly the case in “‘in allem frieden,” where the layout encourages an indeterminate approach to reading that can be either horizontal or vertical. In a similar manner Füting’s instrumental music tends to be organized as a constellation of moments, allowing for an interplay of simultaneities and sequences embedded within the flow of “real time.”

From a rhetorical point of view, one might be inclined to approach the music of Arvo Pärt as an “orienting point of reference.” However, Füting’s overall strategy tends to reflect some of the approaches to indeterminacy that one can find in the music of John Cage. In other words, no matter how many sources may provide context for Füting’s music, each of his compositions definitely speaks to the listener in is own voice, as unique in its expressiveness as it is in its syntactic foundations.