My journey through the albums in the Nicolas Horvath Discoveries series has now led me to a second album of music that was already familiar. Readers may recall that the first of these was the album of two short compositions by John Cage, which I discussed this past Tuesday. Today I shall turn my attention to the German composer Hans Otte and his extended (twelve-movement) suite for solo piano entitled Das Buch der Klänge (the book of sounds).
Otte completed this suite in 1982. In November of the following year, he recorded a performance in the building that is now known as the University of Music and Performance Arts Munich. That recording was then released the following year as a CD by Kuckuck Schallplatten, distributed in the United States by Celestial Harmonies. This was a time in my life when I was doing computer research for Schlumberger-Doll Research in Ridgefield, Connecticut. I decided that my non-work time would best be served in New York City; and, as a result, I chose a lengthy drive to Ridgefield that would allow for easy commuter-train access to Grand Central Station.
It did not take me long to become a regular listener to John Schaefer’s radio program New Sounds. At that time I had become familiar with composers like John Cage and Philip Glass, and Schaefer’s programs allowed me to extend the boundaries of my knowledge. At the same time, however, I spent a fair amount of time browsing in CD shops (often with my wife-to-be), frequently taking home a new recording because the notes on the back cover struck me as promising. So it was that Otte’s Buch der Klänge became part of my collection, making for several highly-satisfying listening experiences.
The notes on the back cover were brief. Nevertheless, they told me enough to pique my curiosity:
This “Book of Sounds” rediscovers the listener as a partner of sound and silence, who in the quest for his world, wishes for once to be totally at one with sound.
This “Book of Sounds” rediscovers the piano as an instrument of timbre and tuneful sound with all its possibilities of dynamics, colour and resonance.
This “Book of Sounds” rediscovers playing as the possibility of experiencing oneself in sound, of becoming at one in time and space with all the sounds around one.
This “Book of Sounds” rediscovers a world of consonant experience which could only now be written because of a totally changed consciousness of sounds on earth.
To some extent the rhetoric of those four sentences reminded me of some of the “ritualistic” techniques that Cage would take when asked to write about his music-making practices. However, the second sentence about the piano itself was the one that drew me into deploying my capacity for attentive listening. That capacity has expanded over the following decades, but I still feel that Otte’s album provides a valuable exercise in attentive listening.
That exercise served me well when I then had the opportunity to listen to Horvath’s “discovery” album of Das Buch der Klänge. One of my first impressions came from observing that Horvath tended to give lengthier interpretations to almost all of the individual movements in the suite. As a result, the overall listening experience is about half and hour longer than Otte’s performance.
My guess is that Otte knew that he would be limited to an overall duration that would fit on a single CD. Horvath, on the other hand, seemed to relish taking a more leisurely journey. This may have afforded him opportunities to “play” with the different relationships between foreground and background that one can tease out of Otte’s score pages. As a result, I suspect that I can now distinguish one performance from the other, not on the basis of duration, but, rather, on what I might call “highlighting” strategies that encourage those rediscovery processes that Otte’s notes had enumerated.
The one misgiving I have concerns the booklet notes that Bertrand Ferrier prepared for Horvath’s album, translated from French to English by Horvath himself. Ferrier develops a lexicon of paradoxes in order to unfold an extended treatise. While I am certainly impressed by the armory of background scholarship that led to Ferrier’s essay, I have to confess that I find his style a bit too microscopic for not only my own tastes but quite possibly for those of the composer as well. Personally, I would prefer to live by a motto that is even shorter than Otte’s own manifesto:
Just listen.
That is all I know on earth and all I need to know to enjoy not only Otte’s music but the two alternative approaches to performance that are now at my disposal.
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