Michael, thank you so much for accepting our invitation.
Although today we’ll be focusing on your music for guitar, I’d like to begin by asking: how did your passion for composition begin?
It began for very practical reasons, because I had to conduct a chamber choir whose singers always wanted to perform contemporary pieces, so the repertoire was quickly exhausted and I began to write choral pieces, some with instruments, for everyone according to their abilities. I never really wanted to be a composer. It was a big surprise for me that the path led me there after all my studies.
Your background also includes studies in mathematics—how has this influenced your compositional approach?
This is not so easy to say, lest we fall into the cliché that mathematics and music are very closely related, from the old Pythagorean perspective.
Perhaps the most important thing was the mathematical method of always asking about the preconditions when forming theories and always starting from the beginning with the fundamental questions.
I actually always ask these kinds of questions at the beginning of working on a piece, starting from the mother of all compositional questions: what is the task of the composer today and what can music look like today?
Your music seems deeply shaped by the discovery of external factors that affect sound, timbre, and instrumental dynamics. Was there a specific moment when you realized that this would be your artistic direction?
External only if one thinks from the pitch world, if one starts from the sound complexes, is it my task as a composer to find the interesting parameters within (internal) that make musical ideas possible and compositional concepts viable.
In several interviews, you often use the term Klangkomplexe to describe your interest in giving a new trajectory to noise music—understanding its complexity and analyzing its characteristics. Could you tell us more about what you mean by this concept?
I created the term sound complex in order to have a strong concept of material that enables complex structural formations beyond pitches. In principle, the term noise tends towards “sub-complexity”. So with sound complexes, the musical richness lies within the sound itself and not, as within pitch-organized music, in the external relations of the pitches in the vertical and horizontal relations.
Let’s turn now to the guitar. When did you first become interested in the instrument, and how did you get to know it? Were there any pieces from the repertoire that helped you understand its potential?
In 1996 and 1998 I wrote already pieces for electric bass (Bagatellen für Brahms) and “rostfrei” for elctric guitar. For me, the electric guitars and basses were no different from other non-amplified instruments to integrate into a composition, no difference at all, even if they needed electricity.
As listeners, it’s often surprising how difficult it is to tell whether certain material was written for a specific instrument. I wonder: how much does the performer of a given instrument influence your understanding of its possibilities? And how important is the figure of a more “neutral” interpreter in your works?
I usually have the instruments in my studio and I love to make my own experiences over a longer period of time. I’m not really interested in adopting a performer’s materials or what the music business thinks is interesting at the moment.
I don’t want to be deprived of the adventure of exploration, even at the risk that a material already exists, which is not a problem, because music is not material alone, but the formal decisions are almost more important today. For a while in the 20th century, the mere presentation of a material was revolutionary. It’s different today, where equally strong formal decisions are necessary.
The “neutral” interpreter doesn’t really interest me at all.
But it usually takes a long time for the musicians to master the material before they devote themselves to the interpretation, there is usually not enough rehearsal time, but that has always been the case, even in Bach’s time, and we would be surprised how raw the performances were back then compared to today’s highly developed culture of Bach interpretation. So the interpretations come with time. But with solo pieces in particular, I see the possibility of being so familiar with the material that interpretation can emerge.
In this respect, the solo piece also takes on a new importance for me today, especially when it comes to new playing techniques.
Speaking specifically about your music for guitar: what were the main challenges you encountered when working with the instrument?
And in your view, what is the most significant difference between the classical and electric guitar?
No different challenges than with other instruments, but with the incredible advantage with the electric guitar and electric bass that the amplification is already part of the instrumental design. I find that very ingenious and that’s why the instrument has such great appeal and future.
We have the pleasure of premiering the work splitting 76 and in the process a couple of questions on your relationship with performers appeared: Together with the score, you sent us a video of you already performing the piece. I imagine you are often already able to perform a great part, if not all, of your works by yourself. What importance do you give to the performer in playing your music? How do you deal with the correlation between neutral performers and subjective interpretation of your work from others?
I’m not actually a performer, because I would have to practise all the instruments, which is impossible, but to speed up the performers’ working process a bit, I make these very rough video recordings. On the one hand, this trains my ability to notate the music suggestively and simply. And playing the piece on my own helps me to proove and develop and clear up the musical ideas. When I play the parts myself, I also notice the problems with the notation very clearly and I can search of simple and clearer possibilities. I really enjoy making the score very easy to read, creating complexity with as simple means as possible, as economically as possible, so to speak. Also because I want to make it much easier for the musicians to work my pieces.
In Splitting 76 the use of light has a fundamental role during the piece, even at the level of ending the piece just with the action of lights in relation with the projected guitars. Seems to be that light has come to a very important place in your last works being Splitting 70 perhaps the most radical in this sense, where sound is not involved at all as an element. How light becomes music in your work?
Actually, the light comes into my music through my preoccupation with pauses.
I use 3 types of pauses:
1) the sound pause without action (standstill pause)
2) the sound pause with action, the musicians perform movements that produce no sound and
3) the preparation pause, to set up the next playing action.
During the sound pause with action, I always noticed that the rhythms of the silent movements could always be read musically. So you can create a kind of musical idea even in soundless contexts. The light came with EXIT F (2012), the hot air balloons generated huge light object rhythms in addition to the combustion pressure noise. Then I found these high-end LED flash lights, which, with their high lumen count, made strong lighting effects with on-off structures suitable for the stage. The required reaction speed of the light source is only possible with LED technology, which is not so long widely available.
Sometimes I prepare the LEDs with spotlight foils, the green light then provides a second level alongside the normal white light.
In splitting 76.3, the musical material of the electric guitars is very reduced, the tuned sonic motor blocks permanently set the strings in vibration (which the guitarist usually has to do) and the players mainly shape the sound via the guitar infrastructure (EQ, pick ups), side damping and motor controls. But the most important is that the guitarists have their hands free to control the light layer, which is actually notated like a percussion part. Ultimately, the light layer is much more complex than the sound and forms the necessary counterpoint to the continuous guitar sound. So splitting 76.3 is a duo with four voices, so it is actually musicwise already a quartet.
Now we are in the context of the blurred edges, a great festival that probably requires a lot of work. Congratulations for this instance! What is coming up next for future projects?
I am preparing my next home-opera #6 “Diva” where its all about recording devices.
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