Contemporary music has always been driven by the urge to go beyond — to look back with care while constantly seeking to cross the lines that have already been drawn. Yet this very impulse can sometimes carry the risk of forgetting what has been achieved so far.
For an instrument like the guitar — whose history has been profoundly reshaped by the advent of technology — a systematic exploration of existing materials becomes a crucial step in understanding its evolution.It is from this awareness that Yaron Deutsch’s initiative takes shape: the opening of the archives of the Darmstädter Ferienkurse für Neue Musik in Darmstadt, an institution that laid the foundations for postwar musical thought.
From this research emerges the publication of a series of vinyl records, enriched with extensive photographic material, analyses of official documents, and a window open onto the future.
Yaron, thank you for accepting our invitation.
When you start working with this kind of material — decades of archives, concert recordings, rehearsals, and lectures — where do you begin? What’s the first step? How do you decide what to preserve and, above all no less, what to leave out?
Well, I’m not a scholar or an academic professional well trained in archival research but as a guitarist, the entry point seemed a bit easier to manage. Eventually when one deals with such magnitude of material, finding a story line is a helpful tool both for the archivist as well as the receiver. For the archivist (myself) it gives focus and ability to differentiate between what is more and what is less relevant for the story. Then, if successful, it results with a coherent path for the receiver to absorb and follow as matters logically unfold. Concretely, as I was going through all, I noticed four critical phases of the electric guitar evolution into the contemporary music repertoire as took place within the activities held at the Darmstadt Summer Course. In a roughly chronological order they were:
- Treating the electric guitar as an amplified classical guitar (Stockhausen’s Gruppen for example)
- Acknowledgement and appliance of the instrument’s electronic quality on top of its “classical” features (Kagel’s Sonant or the music written for the French group L’Itinéraire by composers Hugues Dufourt or Costin Miereanu)
- Exploitation and incorporation of the sociopolitical and contextual affiliation that were the “baggage” of the electric guitar (such was highly reflected in the music written by composers who grew up in the 70’s/80’s)
- Maturity. In this phase the compositions performed in Darmstadt reflect an organic mixture of all above phases in which composers treated the electric guitar as a natural member in the ensemble (“post exotiscm” I would call it) all the way to the extent where its sound became so generic that one didn’t even need to have the instrument on stage in order to produce “the sound “(check out Simon Loeffler’s “B” using only open jack, pedals and an amp as a perfect example to such).
Coming to the above, I knew I had a story line and as I went through endless letter correspondences, concerts programs, festival booklets, recordings or photographs – all meticulously stored in hard copy but also digitally (making the search naturally easier) at the IMD (International Music Institute Darmstadt), a few protagonists started to emerge. Whether individual interpreters or ensembles, conductors or composers, the presence of a process paired with key figures were making it easy to solidify all into a coherent parkour that was paved over 18 months of work and receiving the title: The electric Guitar Diaries.
Your project was made possible through collaboration with two important institutions. How did the Internationales Musikinstitut Darmstadt and the Musik-Akademie Basel work together on this?
On one side there was the fabulous IMD team who offered me full access to all materials along with guidance, knowledge, reference and then later on the handling of licensing, credits, royalties affiliation and all the massive aspects that come with the issue of publishing material that spans almost 80 years of creative output and involves endless amount of people and structures. On the Basel Music Academy side we mainly benefited from the curiosity and talent of our students – guided by philosopher Christoph Haffter from our research department who also contributed an essay titled “The Intruder” – as they took on the task of writing program notes to all curated works. That is all of course a reduced description to all but as you can imagine there were many great people helping me on both sides and on so many levels – from good advices, ideas, factual references or even the chance of having update meetings with all parties, nurturing a smooth healthy progress as the road unfolded.
Looking at the playlist of this first box set, one discovers names that have long been forgotten in the musical landscape, yet were crucial to the history of the guitar. I’m thinking, for instance, of Karl-Heinz Böttner, featured on sides A and B of the records and rediscovered by you through recordings of Sonant (for guitar, harp, double bass, and percussion), his related piece 4 Teile, and Paradigm by Lukas Foss. In addition, the booklet includes letters with then-IMD director Ernst Thomas, along with documents showing collaborations with Mauricio Kagel, Sylvano Bussotti, Bernd Alois Zimmermann, and Bruno Maderna. Those were years of extraordinary transition, when many of the most important figures of the twentieth century played a decisive role in shaping change. How would you summarize the direction music took in those years — a direction that has led us to where we are today?
As mentioned earlier, to tell this story, having a protagonist is really useful. New music has always depended on individuals who believed in it and promoted it within cities and festivals and in our case, a key figure was guitarist Karl-Heinz Böttner. In my research I traced letters from Böttner to Ernst Thomas suggesting the start of a guitar course in Darmstadt already in 1963; I found Letters from composers inquiring about Böttner’s availability to play their pieces; At the Paul Sacher Stiftung, I encountered score sketches by Kagel where he addresses Bottner’s guitar set up and of course the numerous photos and recordings of this figure are very symbolic to both the musical activity in those years and the direction it took which in short I would summarize as a move from formalized avant-garde to hyper experimentalism that embraces: improvisation, performance (in the performative sense), mockery (Listen to how the audience is laughing in Lukas Loss’ Paradigm), technology and though sounding obvious, the versatility of its participants. Our project, in this regards, tries to offer listeners clear traces to such transition while listening to spectacular (in a quite literal sense almost) music.
The booklet also features texts by Assaf Shelleg and Christoph Haffter, who take the playlist selection as a starting point for analyzing the instrument’s history. Shelleg in his text also refers to works that mark possible future developments through addressing pieces from your solo career, such as FPP I by Andreas Dohmen and DA’AT by Sarah Nemtsov (I would also add the pieces born from your collaboration with Pierluigi Billone), as expressions of a need to move beyond an already established horizon. In your view, does this new repertoire suggest that the image of the electric guitar — one that has shaped entire musical genres — is now giving way to something deeper?
In my opinion the electric guitar is dead but in the most beautiful and healthy sense of the word. This sounds like a paradox and to clarify let me explain that in “dead” I mean that the age of electric guitar as a “cool-hip” instrument is breathing its last breaths. It is simply because for the last 30 years the most adventures genres – rap and electronic music are ones that are not associated with the electric guitar. Connect that with the fact that many of today’s composers grew into this post glam-rock musical world and you easily come to the understanding why contemporary composers treat the guitar as an electronic supermarket that also utilizes centuries of traditional and contemporary playing techniques both as an acoustic instruments (hundreds of years) and as an electric instrument (A century already). And that is fantastic. With that in mind I find both Dohmen and Nemtsov to be two sides of the same coin (the “maturity” phase I was referring to) and for me to play their pieces resembles the feeling of doing something very new but at the same time extremely familiar. Therefore I wouldn’t say “giving way to something deeper” but actually giving way to something more profound and heavy simply because of the mixture between technology, tradition and forgetting (forgetting in the healthy sense of the word as we’re letting go of our esoteric past).
All the works in this collection are live recordings, considered an integral part of both the compositional and collaborative processes, featuring the participation of young students and composers. It also seems to reopen an important chapter in the role of teaching within the Darmstadt music courses. I’m thinking, for example, of influential musicians such as Magnus Andersson, Jürgen Ruck and Tom Pauwels. What have you learned from them, and how do you think pedagogy at Darmstadt has evolved over the years?
I have never studied with any of these wonderful musicians but am fortunate to have met them all (with Tom Pauwels I have a long and meaningful friendship) and appreciate their great contribution. As of pedagogic developments over the years, it is important to note that the concept of instrumental studios is a relatively late addition to the Darmstadt Summer Course especially when compared with what was available for composers from the beginning of the course. Though being a student in Darmstadt in one edition (2008), I allow myself to point a significant pedagogic change which I also encounter at the Music Academy in Basel (Deutsch is a professor for contemporary music interpretation at Sonic Space Basel, G.M.) which is the transition towards peer to peer learning as oppose to hierarchical exchange of knowledge that was ruling the dome and still is in many place when we speak of music education. As such, students in Darmstadt are treated to numerous expression options that are an organic extension to what they are working on in their instrumental studios. May it be “open spaces”, class concerts and even taking the stage in prime-time slots within the festival program, instrumental students are an expressive factor no less than the guest artists performing in the festival. The credit for that goes to IMD director, Dr. Thomas Schäffer, and as a teacher, I experienced in first person, Schäffer’s welcoming approach to projects involving students. Among those, I recall the “12 electric guitar etudes (Darmstadt 2018) featuring premieres by Chaya Czernwoin (Included in the box set), Rebecca Saunders and Jose Maria Sanchez Verdu to name a few; The hour long electric guitar sextet by Elena Rykova (Darmstadt 2021); or the electric guitar-violin project featuring violinist Irvine Arditti as additional tutor (Darmstad 2023). A piece from each of these projects made its way eventually into the Sonicals release (works by Czernwoin, Sheehan & Rykova)) simply because they don’t only mark where the electric guitar went but also how the Darmstadt Summer Course developed and maybe most relevant a reflection to where lies the students interests which often serves as the best marker to where the wind is blowing next.
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