Klaus Hinrich Stahmer

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Klaus Hinrich Stahmer

Klaus Hinrich Stahmer (born June 25, 1941 in Stettin ) is a German composer and musicologist . He gave impulses to the development of serious music in the 1980s through his multimedia work (including music with sound sculptures and musical graphics ). He also opened up new artistic territory with his compositions for non-European instruments, which can be attributed to world music .

biography

Klaus Hinrich Stahmer was born in Stettin. In 1945 the family fled to the west from the Russian military. During his school days in Lüneburg from 1947 to 1960 he received instrumental lessons (violoncello, piano) and worked as a singer in oratorios and choir concerts. After graduating from high school, he completed a wide range of music studies at the Dartington College of Arts (England), at the Trossingen University Institute for Music and the Hamburg University of Music (artistic maturity examination for music theory, private music teacher examination for violoncello, 1st state examination for school music / grammar schools) as well as at the universities of Hamburg and Kiel (Doctorate Dr. phil 1968). From his academic teachers, the musicologist Constantin Floros encouraged and stimulated him in the combination of musical practice with intellectual penetration as well as unlimited openness to contemporary music . From 1969 to 2004 Stahmer worked as a university professor for musicological subjects (music history, history of instrumentation, theory of forms and ethnomusicology, etc.) at the University of Music in Würzburg , since 1977 with a professorship. Major impulses came from his collaboration (1970 / 80s) and management (1989–2004) of the Studio for New Music . In 1976 he founded the festival “Days of New Music” in Würzburg, which he directed until 2001. He expanded his commitment to contemporary music beyond the university radius to the city of Würzburg and beyond to all of Germany. In cooperation with the Hindemith Institute in Frankfurt , he curated and organized an exhibition entitled "Musical Graphics". The graphic scores by John Cage , Earle Brown , Dieter Schnebel and many other pioneers of "graphic notation" , which were shown in Würzburg ( Städtische Galerie ) and Frankfurt ( Paul Hindemith Institute) , were tonally implemented and realized in concerts. Mention should also be made in this context of the organization and implementation of an exhibition of around 40 sound sculptures , produced and developed by 22 artists from four European countries, which were presented as a traveling exhibition in Würzburg ( Städtische Galerie ), Bonn (Kulturforum), Heidelberg ( Heidelberger Kunstverein ), Düren Leopold-Hoesch-Museum ) and Dornbirn / Austria ( Spielboden could be seen. Works by Bernard Baschet (Paris), Edmund Kieselbach , Gerlinde Beck , Stephan von Huene , Martin Riches, Peter Vogel were composed by composers (including Anestis Logothetis , Klaus Ager and Siegfried Fink and musicians such as Herbert Försch-Tenge, Peter Giger and Hans-Karsten Raecke were used in compositions, brought to life in improvisations and finally documented in an LP edition. In addition to his work as a university lecturer, festival and Concert organizer, he published books, articles and essays on topics from the field of new music and worked as a journalist for various radio stations and magazines. Stahmer has been a member of the Free Academy of the Arts in Hamburg since 2013 .

In terms of cultural policy, Stahmer was active in several committees such as the German Music Council, among other things for the interests of contemporary music, and was President of the German section of the International Society for New Music (IGNM) from 1983 to 1987 and from 2000 to 2002 . He saw the focus of his public work in the deepening of relations between Germany and Israel and in the rapprochement between Poland and Germany.

Since his retirement from university, Stahmer has worked primarily as a composer and travels to the countries of the Near and Far East on lecture and study trips .

Work overview

After Threnos for viola and piano (1963) and other early works, Stahmer found new forms of expression in collaboration with visual artists, sometimes using electronic means. Key works such as Transformations (1972) and the drum duo I can fly (1975) show Stahmer as an experimenter who, in addition to visual means of representation, also makes use of contemporary poetry and in chamber music pieces such as Quasi un requiem (Text: Henry Miller ; 1974) and Tre paesaggi ( Texts: Cesare Pavese ; 1976) created music with a high symbolic content . Since the mid-1970s there have also been stage works such as the ballet Espace de la solitude, designed with electronic means, choreographed by Zaga Živković and premiered on January 18, 1980 by the “Studio za suvremeni ples” in Zagreb with Siegfried Behrend as guitar soloist or the ballet Die Nashörner (based on Eugène Ionesco ) , created in cooperation with jazz saxophonist Bernd Konrad . Larger chamber music cycles such as the eight night pieces (1980), the stage one-act act Singt, Vögel (1985/86; productions on the stages of the state capital Kiel , in the Marstalltheater Munich and in the Gasteig Munich) or the three bagatelles - in memoriam Igor Stravinsky (1992) show a feeling for larger dimensions.

In addition, Stahmer explored the tonal possibilities of Elmar Dauchers sound stones and installations by Edmund Kieselbach . He had previously worked with similar sound sculptures mostly improvisationally, but now he systematically developed sound structures in which sound stones are brought together with conventional sound bodies such as the string quartet ( crystal grid ; 1992) or the accordion ( To lose is to have ; 1999). Since 1994, the influence of non-European forms of music has become increasingly noticeable, as can be seen in the three Songlines (1994) or the one-hour piano cycle Sacred Site (1996), which premiered in Australia . Pieces such as There is no return (1998) show that Stahmer's preoccupation with foreign ethnic groups not only has an inherent influence on his composing, but also includes political commitment to the victims of white tyranny. The tape piece (with vibraphone solo) Che questo è stato (1999) is shaped by compassion for the victims of the Holocaust . The duo for the Chinese mouth organ Sheng and the Chinese zither Guzheng Silence is the only Music (2004) opens a series of pieces in which Stahmer uses the playing style and tone of non-European instruments to represent his musical ideas. In the cycle Gesänge eines Holzsammlers (2009), created in collaboration with the Lebanese poet Fuad Rifka , Stahmer uses the Arabic instruments zither qanun and frame drum .

Stahmer's compositions, including numerous vocal and instrumental solos, were often created in artistic collaboration with musicians such as Carla Henius (vocals), Siegfried Behrend , Reinbert Evers and Wolfgang Weigel (guitar), Kolja Lessing , Herwig Zack and Florian Meierott (violin), Stefan Hussong (Accordion) as well as specialists for non-European instruments such as the Sheng player Wu Wei , Xu Fengxia and Makiko Goto ( Guzheng / Koto ), Gilbert Yammine ( Qanun ) as well as Vivi Vassileva and Murat Coşkun (oriental frame drum).

stylistics

Stahmer: The landscape in my voice (excerpt)

"Klaus Hinrich Stahmer is one of the generation of composers who were shaped in their youth by twelve-tone music, the musical aesthetics of Theodor W. Adorno and the musical avant-garde of the sixties and seventies, but who then looked for and found their own path." Initially influenced by Hindemith , Bartók and Berg , he looked for new ways of expressing himself and developed his own diction by studying the visual language of contemporary painters and sculptors. In multimedia works he dealt “with the color and spatial relationships of music and musical graphics.” Since 1972, he has been integrating instrumentally and electronically realized timbres into temporal processes in which diatonic or chromatic scaling makes no more sense than the search for motifs -thematic criteria. This inevitably led to the dissolution of the classical-romantic type-oriented form thinking and experiments with the so-called "open forms" , which Stahmer presented in some of the forums for new music at home and abroad. “The role of one's own participation in such performances should not be underestimated: Often sitting and acting at the mixer or with his violoncello in the midst of the performers, he was able to sense his acoustic material directly and directly without having to go through a score and not infrequently the boundaries between the composed and the improvised blurred. ”While the instrumental sound was noisily expanded and broken up, vocal works like The Landscape in My Voice (1978) also turned towards the phonetic possibilities of the mouth and vocal cords Sounds from (see illustration).

After a creative phase dominated by sound experiments, from 1980 Stahmer looked for ways to transfer these experiences to the more traditional playing and singing techniques, e.g. B. in unaccompanied solo compositions such as Aristofaniada (1979) and Now (1980). This resulted in a notation that was based more on the stylistic retrospective , but only conveyed the model in broken form, and which was increasingly oriented towards ideals such as sound beauty and joy of playing. At the same time, however, starting with the musical graphic birthday canon for John Cage (1982) and more clearly recognizable with the tape piece The Stuff of Silence (1990), there was a countermovement. He now countered the tonal opulence more and more decisively by reducing the means and withdrawing expression. The sound gestures appear short and clear in the two piano pieces Musik der Stille (1994/98) and the Duo Ima (2007), which is reminiscent of Japanese Nô theater .

While Stahmer had turned away from the melodic and harmonic models of the Schönberg School in the early 1970s and given space to a renewed form and sound thinking in his work, a return to tonality can be observed in recent years , but this tonality operates beyond all functionally harmonious sound connections with the modal sound concepts of Arabic “ maquames ” (modes) or Far Eastern moods and sometimes includes pure ( Pythagorean ) intonation . In addition, there is the special sound world of non-European instruments such as Qanun , Sheng , Koto , Shakuhachi, etc. a., which due to their special moods and playing techniques ensure unusual sound structures in modern sentence structures. According to Stahmer, a tendency that was already apparent in earlier works increased, as the musical forms unfold more and more out of sonority with increasing expansion of the sentence structure and the lengthening of the course of time. This means that the pieces of music often come close to archaic forms of music, which Stahmer has discovered in the course of several years of preoccupation with so-called "primitive cultures". The fact that his music still sounds rather “western” is thanks to a clear demarcation from any form of style copy. Rather, Stahmer sees his goal as “enriching European music through the inclusion of Asian [and other] elements.” By reacting “seismographically in his music to the development of a global culture” and “for a deeper understanding of non-European music” as well as the Engaging in “equal dialogue with musicians from Africa and Asia”, he has succeeded in opening up “new horizons for the art of composition”. This aesthetic position of the composer can best be described with the term "transculturality" introduced by Wolfgang Welsch .

Topics and content

Extract from the score Mobile Actions for Strings, 1974

With a few exceptions such as For example, the Fantasia for violin or the solo for double bass, Stahmer's compositions do not belong to the type of works in which a game takes place for the sake of playing. Rather, they are charged with an extra-musical sense and only become fully understandable through semantic decoding. Most of the time, the topics and content are revealed to the listener through the set texts, because “almost half of his works are closely related to language.” Time and again, Stahmer has discovered “new possibilities”, “a relationship between the different artistic means of expression music and verbal language to manufacture. The spectrum ranges from text scoring in the conventional sense to musical interpretation and paraphrase of a linguistic model that is understood only as material . "

The list of texts used for setting ranges from biblical texts to Greek tragedy poetry to the present day, with a clear focus on contemporary poetry. It contains big names in contemporary German literature such as Erich Arendt , Nelly Sachs , Hans Erich Nossack , Hans Magnus Enzensberger and Erich Fried , but also poets such as B. Jürgen-Peter Stössel , Hans Georg Bulla , Wolfgang Hilbig and Jürgen Fuchs . Often the poems and prose texts come from Anglo-American authors such as u. a. Henry Miller , Dylan Thomas , Edward Estlin Cummings , Wystan Hugh Auden . The richness of images and the linguistic sound of poets from the Mediterranean region such as B. Cesare Pavese , Giuseppe Ungaretti or Vicente Aleixandre created pieces that were pleasant to sound and play. In particular, however, it was texts by Eugène Ionesco and Samuel Beckett that led to pieces that were novel in terms of sound language and important in terms of content. A striking number of poets come from the African culture such as B. Sandile Dikeni, Dikobe wa Mogale or Jean-Felix Belinga Belinga. A particularly close collaboration existed with the Lebanese Fuad Rifka . In addition, Stahmer also resorted to anonymous text sources such as the grave inscriptions of a Jewish cemetery.

In many of his works, Stahmer conveys ideological ideas. Shaped by his own experiences of war and flight, he developed a pacifist attitude, which he expressed in works such as Quasi un requiem and Singt, Vögel . If it was a rather general pacifist attitude in the works mentioned from earlier times, for which he looked for appropriate linguistic images in literature and set excerpts from The Colossus of Maroussi by Henry Miller or the Trojans by Euripides to music, the statement on the indictment later became sharper against the building of the Berlin Wall (in Wintermärchen ), against the book-burning of the National Socialists (in Gerettete Blätter ) and against South Africa's apartheid policy (in There is no Return ). Here, too, Stahmer relies on texts by poets such as Heinrich Heine or Sandile Dikeni. He awakens memories of the Holocaust in pieces like … che questo è stato… and Mazewot. The ballet music created in collaboration with Bernd Konrad The rhinos after Rhinocéros by Eugène Ionesco is an appeal against the spread of fascism .

Stahmer makes a more spiritual statement in pieces whose connection to the canon of Christian church music is initially still quite obvious (e.g. in David's hymn of praise ), which, however, was replaced in later years by the turn to Far Eastern ideas (in WU , MING, etc.). Magical-mythical experiences of nature by indigenous peoples have found their expression in the piano cycle Sacred Site and the Songlines. With their ritual form of presentation and long performance, these works leave conventional concert practice and unfold their effect preferentially in connection with dance and image projections. Both in Stahmer's politically committed pieces and in compositions characterized by the pursuit of spirituality, a basic attitude emerges that is based on openness to the world and exchange.

Works (selection)

Orchestra and stage works

  • The Rhinos (ballet music, with Bernd Konrad / 1983)
  • Sings, birds (one-act play / 1985/86)
  • May they come, may they disembark, may they stay and rest awhile in peace for large orchestra (1997)

Piano music:

  • Sacred Site (1996)
  • Music of Silence (1994/98)
  • Four Poems (2000/07)
  • Ghinna'û Hattab [songs of a wood collector] (2009)
  • People out of Nowhere for two pianos (2000)

Chamber music

  • Quasi un requiem for speaking voice and string quartet (Texts: Henry Miller / 1974)
  • I can fly for 2 percussionists (1975/81)
  • 8 night pieces for flute, guitar and violoncello (1983/90)
  • Nocturne for Enzensberger for guitar solo (1984)
  • Music for the White Nights for guitar and string quartet (1992)
  • Em-bith-kâ [The eagle calls] for string quartet (1998)
  • Mazewot [Gravestones] for violin solo (1998)
  • There is no Return for flute, 2 percussionists and piano (1998/2005)
  • Our Music is so sweet for violin solo (2002)
  • Redland for cello solo (2005)
  • Fleeting moments for accordion solo (2008/09)
  • Solo for double bass solo (2014)
  • Weiss for clarinet solo (2014)

Vocal music

  • Tre paesaggi for speaking voice, guitar, drums and tape (texts: Cesare Pavese / 1976)
  • The landscape in my voice (musical graphic / 1978)
  • Now 4 songs for solo voice (Texts: EE Cummings / 1980)
  • Winter's Tale for 3 speakers, clarinet and string quartet (texts: Heinrich Heine and others / 1981)
  • Snapshots for speaking voice and instrumental ensemble (1986/89)

Music with sound sculptures

  • Memories from the Waters of the Deep for guitar and tape playback (live electronics ad libitum) (1978)
  • Crystal grids for string quartet, computer-controlled stone sounds and ring modulation (sound stone by Elmar Daucher / 1992)
  • Lord of the Wind for flute and CD playback (sound panels by Edmund Kieselbach / 1997)

Music for non-European instruments

  • Ning Shi [Frozen Time] for Sheng and accordion or piano (1994/2007)
  • Silence is the only Music for Sheng and Guzheng (2004)
  • Pulip Sori [Grass Song] for Gayageum , Violoncello and Janggu (2006)
  • Marthia [funeral song] for cello and qanun (2009)
  • Zikkrayat [memories] for Qanun (2009)
  • Feng Yu [Lord of the Wind] for Dizi and playback CD (2007)
  • WU for sheng , clarinet and violoncello (2010)
  • Baram Sori for Daegeum and tape CD (2010)
  • Taqasim for qanun , violin and violoncello (2011)
  • Aschenglut for oriental frame drum and piano (2014)
  • MING for sheng , accordion and violoncello (2015)

Discography (selection)

  • Sacred Site . Interpr .: Philipp Vandré (piano); Kreuzberg Records CD kr 10021 (1998)
  • silence is the only music . Chamber music (6 works) for Far Eastern and European musical instruments. Interpr. u. a .: Wu Wei, Xu Fengxia, Makiko Goto, Andreas Gutzwiller; WERGO CD ARTS 8116 2 (2009)
  • Chants of a wood collector . Interpr .: Fuad Rifka and Horst Mendroch (recitation), Pi-Sien Chen (piano), Murat Çoskun (frame drum), Gilbert Yammine (Qanun); WERGO CD ARTS 81092 (2010)
  • Light . Chamber music (including "Ming" and "Aschenglut"). Interpr. u. a .: Wu Wei, Wen-Sinn Yang, Vivi Vassileva, Stefan Hussong, Pi-Hsien Chen, Maruan Sakas; Kreuzberg Records CD kr 10112 (2016)

Fonts

  • Notes on the string quartet composition after 1945 ; in: Hamburger Jahrbuch f. Musicology Vol. 4, Hamburg (Wagner) 1980, pp. 7–32.
  • Mahler's early work - A stylistic investigation ; in: "Form and Idea in Gustav Mahler's Instrumental Music", ed. v. Klaus Hinrich Stahmer; Wilhelmshaven (Heinrichshofen) 1980, pp. 9-28.
  • Music in the residence. Würzburg court music ; Würzburg (Stürtz) 1983
  • Closer to classical than to classicism - Stravinsky’s string quartet compositions ; in: Hindemith-Jahrbuch Annales Hindemith Vol. 12, Mainz (Schott) 1983, pp. 104–115.
  • The myth of sound - progress or regression? in: Exhibition catalog "Sound Sculptures", ed. v. Frankfurt Feste / Alte Oper, Frankfurt 1985.
  • Arrangement as interpretation - on the reception of Gustav Mahler, Hans Zenders and Friedhelm Döhl as well as between nostalgia and utopia - music about and about Gustav Mahler by Peter Ruzicka, Helmut Lachenmann, Wilhelm Killmayer, Vittorio Fellegara, Detlev Glanert, Michael Denhoff, Walter Zimmermann, Babette Koblenz and Thomas Jahn ; in: "Franz Schubert and Gustav Mahler in contemporary music", ed. v. Klaus Hinrich Stahmer, Mainz (Schott) 1997, pp. 25-62. u. Pp. 93-106.
  • New sound world of the guitar , in: nova giulianidad 11/88, p. 126 ff.
  • Fifty years of new music in Israel ; in: Yearbook of the Bavarian Academy of Fine Arts, Vol. 12. Munich 1998, pp. 526–523.
  • Between radio play and musique concrète - Klaus Hashagens radiophonic music ; in: Composers in Bavaria, Volume 42; Tutzing 2003; Pp. 75-90.
  • With Papa Haydn on Kilimanjaro - African string quartets ; in: NZfM 2006, H. 5, pp. 18-23.
  • Wind Rises - Comments on "Angin" ; in: “If A is, is A” - The composer Dieter Mack , ed. v. Torsten Möller; Saarbrücken (Pfau) 2008, pp. 101–110.
  • The foreign and the own - thoughts of a companion on the non-European-inspired music by Peter Michael Hamel ; in: Composers in Bavaria Vol. 61; Munich (Allitera) 2017, pp. 62–87.

Honourings and prices

Literature (selection)

  • Brockhaus Riemann Musiklexikon (supplementary volume). Mainz 1989, ISBN 3-7957-8300-3 .
  • Contemporary composers. Edition Text & Criticism, Munich (Loseblattsammlung since 1992), ISBN 3-88377-414-6 .
  • Peter Hollfelder : International Chronological Lexicon of Piano Music. Noetzel, Wilhelmshaven 1999, p. 205.
  • The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians. Vol. 24, 2001, ISBN 0-333-60800-3 .
  • Music in the past and present ( MGG ). 2nd edition, Vol. 15, Kassel 2006, ISBN 3-7618-1135-7 .
  • Peter Päffgen, Klaus Hinrich Stahmer: Can you actually learn to compose? Interview with Klaus Hinrich Stahmer. In: Guitar & Lute. Volume 6, No. 6, 1984, pp. 8-14 and 50 f.
  • Riemann Musiklexikon 13th edition, Vol. 5, Manz (Schott) 2012, ISBN 978-3-7957-0006-5 .
  • Theresa Henkel and Franzpeter Messmer (eds.): Composers in Bavaria. Vol. 60: Klaus Hinrich Stahmer. Munich 2016, ISBN 978-3-86906-909-8 .

See also

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ WERGO SM 1049/50
  2. ↑ Guitar and Lute. Volume 2, Book 1, 1980, p. 5, and Book 3, p. 7; and Päffgen / Stahmer (1984), pp. 10-14.
  3. ↑ See the complete catalog raisonné in: Theresa Henkel, Franzpeter Messmer: Klaus Hinrich Stahmer - Composers in Bavaria Volume 60, Munich 2016, pp. 118–129
  4. ^ Theresa Henkel and Franzpeter Messmer, Klaus Hinrich Stahmer - Composers in Bavaria Vol. 60, Munich 2016, p. 7
  5. ↑ Article "Klaus Hinrich Stahmer", in: Riemann Musiklexikon Vol. 5, Mainz (Schott) 13th edition 2012, p. 95
  6. ↑ Christoph Taggatz: Klaus Hinrich Stahmer: Lebenslinien , in: Theresa Henkel u. Franzpeter Messmer (Ed.): Composers in Bayern Vol. 60, Munich (Allitera) 2016, p. 14.
  7. ↑ Constantin Floros: Passion Music; Mainz (Schott) 2017, p. 77. ISBN 978-3-95983-540-4
  8. ^ Theresa Henkel / Franzpeter Messmer (eds.), In: Composers in Bayern, Vol. 60, Munich 2016, p. 7
  9. ↑ Wolfgang Welsch: What actually is transculturality? in: Cultures in Motion, Contributions to Theory and Practice of Transculturality, transcript 2010, pp. 39–66.
  10. ↑ Kilian Sprau: "écoute-les s'ajouter all words" - for language-related music Klaus Hinrich Stahmer. In: Composers in Bavaria. Vol. 60 (edited by Theresa Henkel and Franzpeter Messmer). Munich 2016, p. 65.
personal data
SURNAME Stahmer, Klaus Hinrich
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German composer
DATE OF BIRTH June 25, 1941
PLACE OF BIRTH Szczecin