Wandelweiser: Disappearance in Celebration
by
Marc Medwin
"Our poetry now is the realization that we possess nothing.
Anything therefore is a delight (since we do not possess it)
and thus need not fear its loss …”—John Cage, Lecture on Nothing,
1950
Imagine what happens between a sound and its absence, the many
shades and multiple possibilities accompanying each gesture
as the sound is born, transformed and departs. There is something
of this process uniting the music emerging from the collective
and label known as Wandelweiser.
Wandelweiser—The word is as enigmatic as the music on this Düsseldorf-based
label is transcendent — has existed for nearly twenty years.
Of the word itself, long-time member and composer Michael Pisaro
writes:
“Edition Wandelweiser was the name Burkhard Schlothauer gave
to the fledgling publishing and recording company he formed
with Beuger in 1992. I guess it means “change signpost” if one
understands it as a combination of Wandel with Wegweiser;
or perhaps more literally, “change wisely”– (or, if one understands
the second part as Weise: wise man of change?) Whatever
it means, I was never completely comfortable with the name,
but have always understood it somewhat humorously – as something
that just popped out of Burkhard’s linguistically inventive
mind, rather than as a description of any kind of aesthetic
program.”
For me, the word has become magical, evoking universes in long-breathed
phrases adorned with crystalline silence. The chain of syllables
evokes all manner of sounds existing in and for themselves,
gracing the music with their presences before evaporating. Yet,
each release is a self-contained vision, a unique manifestation
of the deepest mysteries listening imparts to those willing
to engage.
Much of what I perceive as a label aesthetic comes from my conversations
with Dutch composer Antoine Beuger. His latest offering, Keine
Ferne Mehr, is a double disc comprised of no other timbre
save his whistling and room ambience, fashioned into compositions
of stunning clarity and intense beauty. Experienced in a quiet
environment, at low volume, each pitched exhalation blooms and
then fragments, surrounding itself with tiny airy bells, a phenomenon
resultant from a very close recording but which yields many
subtle rewards on repeated listening. The compositions evoke
ghostly shades of scale and tune flecked with more immediate
but nameless timbres of human survival, such as the myriad ways
in which we breathe. Beuger's voice shares the introspective
qualities of his music; he answers each question in low tenor
range, each word resonating but never puncturing the silence
unless there is an absolute need.
“You know …” he begins. There is a pregnant pause. He ponders,
draws breath, seems ready to resume, pauses again. “I went to
my first symphonic concert with my father, and I must have been
around eleven or twelve. They were playing Beethoven’s Pastorale.
I knew the piece by heart from recordings, and the anticipation
of actually hearing the music in concert was almost unbearable.
I remember the incredible moment of silence just before the
piece started, and then the first notes. I was absolutely thrilled
to be hearing it live, but I was also feeling a profound sense
of melancholy. I realized, without being able to put it into
words, that, essentially, music appears to disappear again.”
Many have come to a similar realization, and, just as one example,
composer/performers such as Eric Dolphy even articulate the
phenomenon. However, very few subsequent compositional aesthetics
are shaped by the experience in such a fundamental fashion as
happened to Beuger. The realization ultimately led him to perceive
that music’s transient nature must not only be embraced, but
it must be celebrated.
Beuger was aided in this epiphanic development by his discovery
of post 1950 John Cage, where silence and non-intentionality
come to the fore. Beuger’s new discoveries were met with indifference,
even hostility, by his composition teachers, but the impediment
only strengthened his resolve. In 1993, he and friend Burkhard
Schlothauer formed the publishing company that would become
Wandelweiser, the label emerging two years later. Beuger remembers
that there was no conscious decision to form the label around
any kind of aesthetic. “We found each other by accident, and
that is the real magic and mystery of it all,” he muses. “Even
if the few of us beginning the project had what we thought was
a clear aesthetic vision, we felt that we were alone.” He laughs,
“I think each one of us thought we were alone in the world,
until that moment, when we came across somebody else and thought,
my God, someone else is considering all these things to! The
first six or seven years entailed a series of discoveries of
that sort, “Hey, there’s another one!”.”
Synchronicity was at the heart of the collective’s formation.
One of the more geographically disparate examples involved veteran
trombonist Radu Malfatti, who had grown frustrated with what
he saw as the limitations of “free jazz” improvisation, giving
a concert of his gorgeously acetic music in Athens, Greece.
After the performance, a shy young man approached Malfatti:
“Mr. Malfatti, I was wondering if tomorrow morning, I could
give you a CD of my works, which you might find interesting
…” The composer was Anastassis Philippakopoulos, and the two
of them spent five hours of the succeeding day in intense coffee-shop
conversation. Similarly, California Institute of the Arts composer
Michael Pisaro, at that time based in Chicago, was introduced
to the burgeoning Wandelweiser community by former member Kunsu
Shim, and it might be said that his initiation came in the form
of long and equally engaging phone conversations with Beuger.
For a fascinating and thorough history of the collective’s development
and early aesthetics, Pisaro has written an essay which can
be found here:
http://erstwords.blogspot.com/2009/09/wandelweiser.html
At the heart of the new collective stood the music of John Cage.
“We didn’t see Cage as a philosopher,” Beuger is quick to assert
“We saw him as a composer.” While superficially obvious, it
is Cage’s philosophy that has determined the discourse around
his work, while its musical ramifications have gone largely
unexplored. For the Wandelweiser composers, Cage’s works proved
to be a treasure trove of live wires with loose ends, ready
to be radically retied. It was an evening of Cage music, when
Beuger was fifteen, that cemented his plans to pursue the life
of a composer. “In one sense, it was chaos,” he reminisces.
“Cage was onstage in my small Holland hometown, in front of
maybe ten people, and he was telling stories while people worked
with contact microphones. It was intense, and yet, it was also
somehow understated, and in being so, much more effective and
affecting than any sophisticated and complicated theatrics could
ever be.” Beuger saw and heard the trajectory of his life in
Cage’s subtle but poignant recreation of life itself, in all
of its disconnected, direct and profound totality.
It was natural, given such a deep experience, that Cage’s music
should be inextricably linked with Wandelweiser’s advent and
development. In fact, the label’s first CD release, a double
disc performed by accordionist Edwin Alexander Buchholz, contains
an excellent rendering of Cage’s “Cheap Imitation,” along with
pieces by Beuger, Pisaro and the Swiss composer Jurg Frey. It
is the radical nature of the performances that set Wandelweiser’s
Cage interpretations apart, imbuing the music with fresh vigor
by plumbing the depths of the soundworlds, or landscapes, that
Cage was continually imagining. Other Cage offerings from Wandelweiser
include a stunning realization of “Branches,” apiece for amplified
plant material performed by Ensemble Daswirdas, recorded in
a huge and acoustically complex Swiss dam. Brief sounds shock
the system with their immediacy, while an unimaginably long
and natural reverb imbues others as they fade toward silence.
As often happens with Cage, the piece is an extension of, or
series of variations on, a slightly earlier work, “Child of
Tree.” Daswirdas would also record a version of Cage’s “Cartridge
Music” for the label.
The Cage influence comes to a fitting kind of fruition in this,
his centenary year, with the release of the monumental “Empty
Words,” composed in 1974. “This is a very special piece in Cage’s
works,” observes Beuger, a reverent tone entering his voice.
“After 4:33, which I see as a cut into the existing musical
continuum, Cage’s compositions are more like cross-sections,
or states of being, without the structural turning points of
his earlier works or of earlier music in general. “Empty Words”
is different in that, over its ten hours, there is significant
change, represented by omission, or even departure.”
Very briefly, “Empty Words” is constructed, using chance operations,
from Henry David Thoreau’s journals. The first part uses only
phrases, words, syllables and letters, with no complete sentences;
the second part omits the phrases, the third sees words disappear,
and the fourth has only letters and sounds. “It is an irreversible
process, and this is something you don’t find in any other Cage
pieces,” explains Beuger. “Another thing that disappears is
the notion of extremes. In the first two parts, the speaker
is instructed to use all manner of inflection in the delivery.
In the succeeding sections, a much more centered approach is
required as the text grows sparser and the silences longer.”
Sylvia Alexandra Schimag’s inspired reading of the varied, phrases,
words and syllables is supported by music from Wandelweiser
composers, treated by Beuger to reflect the textual changes.
The first two parts were taken from Daswirdas’ “Branches,” fragmented
to eliminate the longer and more continuous passages of pod-shaking,
reflecting the disappearance of sentences in the second part,
to cite one example. The change to a more nocturnal feel in
the third part—Cage preferred that the piece be performed overnight—is
bolstered by an as-yet unreleased piece by Beuger entitled “oborozuki,”
which means “Drowned Moon” in Japanese. The fourth part is accompanied
by Label cofounder Burkhard Schlothauer’s “Ab Tasten,” a luminous
piano meditation originally released in 2001. In this way, Wandelweiser’s
recorded history becomes integral to Beuger’s conception of
“empty Words” and its trajectory. While not recorded in conjunction
with the music, Shimag’s voice blends beautifully with the various
acoustic environments, every consonant and vowel clear and large
while remaining intimate. The ten-hour journey through rapid
motion, its decay and, ultimately, through the regenerative
revelations afforded by silence and centering is one of the
most remarkable I’ve ever experienced on disc.
While it might be said that Cage set the table around which
the Wandelweiser group gathers, there is no dogma in the way
the composers approach his legacy. “It’s what I really like
about the group,” says Radu Malfatti. “There’s none of the proprietary
competition you get from establishment composers—no, you can’t
use that, it’s mine!” Malfatti is, in a fundamental way, Beuger’s
polar opposite where personality is concerned. The words flow
out of him in undulating torrents, his voice rising and falling
with the myriad emotions behind every phrase. “A leftover from
my free-jazz days,” he smiles, remembering his stints with seminal
British and South-African improvisation units such as Brotherhood
of Breath and the Spontaneous Music Ensemble with a fond distance.
If his turn to composition in the 1990s brought a reduction
of notes to his music that matches Beuger’s, it did not diminish
his energy or render him a follower. His sole offering on Edition
Wandelweiser is rife with silence, but it also teems with vigor,
explosive non-pitched shocks abounding at every turn amidst
reflectively pregnant pauses that seem to lead rather than follow.
His work is simply symptomatic of the group’s diversity, even
evident before Wandelweiser existed as an entity. Listen to
Jurg Frey’s piano pieces from the late 1970s, as recorded by
John McAlpine, and there is the simple but deep desire to hear
each sound bloom and fade, woven into a soft blanket of tonality.
His later piano works, stripped of earlier tonal implications,
engage space and the way it is filled, a radical coming-to-terms
with sound’s fundamentals. Whether in interpretive ensembles,
such as the one that recorded a beautifully subtle versions
of Christian Wolff’s “Stones” in 1996, or in their own compositions,
Wandelweiser is about moving forward and savoring each moment
of the journey as it vanishes and then becomes, documenting
a solution while posing the next question.
As “Empty Words” was being prepared for release at the end of
2011, a fire ravaged Edition Wandelweiser’s Düsseldorf office,
destroying half of the label’s CD inventory, driving the concept
of disappearance home with staggering finality. As might be
expected, for Beuger, the aftermath has been a time of reflection.
“Of course we lost things,” he ruminates, “but I am realizing
that Wandelweiser is not contained in this office, or even in
this geographic area. It is a regenerative spirit of discovery
that a fire cannot destroy.”
Marc Medwin
