Nineteen Musicians

I was given a very rare and precious treat yesterday, coincidentally, one day after my birthday. The Museum Ludwig in Cologne currently shows a collection of Gerhard Richter's abstract paintings, about 40 of them, mostly very large ones. Now Gerhard Richter is a big fan of Steve Reich's music, and because the museum also shows an exhibition about the sixties (beat poets, hippies, minimalism) that contains some Steve Reich material, they thought it would fit in well to book him for a concert.

So yesterday, Steve Reich actually showed up, and was accompanied by the Ensemble Modern.

Their first piece was the first section from Drumming, played by four people (yesterday, one of them was Steve Reich, of course wearing his black baseball cap which is probably permanently adhered to his head) on 8 tuned small drums. They were playing in the hallway of the Museum Ludwig which was crowded with Steve Reich fans (I don't know if the museum has ever been so full of people), watching the show from everywhere on the same floor, from the floor above, and from the stairways. The performance was stunning, lots of rhythmically difficult phase shiftings, lots of energy, wonderful.

After this short piece we had half an hour to walk around in the museum, and of course, take a look at the huge Richter paintings. This one called "Atem" (Breath) was the one that I liked most. I have no idea how he does that, technically - the result of his layering and scraping is very three-dimensional but in a slightly unsettling way, my poor little mammal brain was not able to really understand what the eyes saw. I liked that :-)

Then through a door in the basement into the wonderful Cologne Philharmonie which sits right next to the Museum Ludwig. The main act for this evening was none other than Music For Eighteen Musicians, a piece that is by far my favorite piece of music ever. In the early eighties (I think 1980, but I'm not sure), I saw the European premiere of this piece and I remember that it was almost a religious experience for me - and not only for me, but apparently for many people in the audience. I have never again experienced something like that - being lifted up by that pulsating rhythm, then going through a series of beautiful rhythmic/harmonic variations, and finally landing again. It stills brings tears to my eyes every time I remember the ending of the 1980 premiere - the audience was completely stunned after this trip, there was silence for almost 10 minutes ... and then standing up and cheering for a long time ... the presence of gratitude was overwhelming.

Yesterday's performance was very close to that, it was almost perfect technically, good enough to transport the audience to that transcendental place, and back. For some reason I always think of this piece as a giant shimmering spaceship, not unlike the mothership from Close Encounters. It takes us slowly up, goes through these permutations, rotating and twinkling like a huge diamond, and then slowly getting down again after an hour. It is fuelled by the presence of the audience; the musicians are its engine - and they have to be totally present and totally committed to make this happen. This spaceship image was even more appropriate yesterday because the beautiful interior of the Philharmonie seems to have some similarity to the mothership.

What an evening, what a beautiful treat. This time, the silence after the piece lasted not 10 minutes, but only a few seconds - one person started to applaud, and the spell was broken and everyone started clapping and cheering. Maybe people are different today than they were 30 years ago, and also, the piece is a classic today, maybe the largest musical monument of the 20th century (for me it is), and many people know it and it is no longer so surprising.

While listening, I couldn't help but noticing how my mind stayed in control most of the time, preventing me from being truly moved. Strange that so few music lovers talk about this, it is the most striking thing to me when listening to a concert like this (but maybe many people don't have such a problem with their heads?) - how difficult it is to get beyond the mind and beyond thinking, analyzing, comparing, commenting, and to really listen with an open heart, and to be really moved. I found myself noticing this, and trying not to stay in the mind, and noticing that of course this doesn't help.

Fortunately, at least for a while, my mind finally stopped yesterday, and as always when this happens, it happens completely on its own, completely beyond my control. Some sudden change in the music triggers something deep and before my mind can react, it is pushed aside, making room for being moved, being present and still. Then the tears flow, what a relief, I can finally be here without being encaged in my head. This is the "religious" aspect for me - that this powerful piece of music with its merciless beauty, when executed so well, can stop my head, opening the door to what is real.

Now why is this blog entry called "Nineteen Musicians"? because yesterday, there were 19 musicians playing "Music For 18 Musicians". Beyond all the stuff that was going on in my head, it was simply wonderful and very interesting to see the musicians at work, to watch how they managed to play these multiple interlocking rhythms, how they exchanged their positions at the various instruments during the various parts of the piece. Seeing this made the structure of the composition much more transparent - I wish there was a DVD showing the making of, maybe looking at the ensemble from an above position. But I bought a DVD showing the Ensemble Modern playing Reich's City Life - looking forward to that!

Flashback: Askesis 1992

A couple of days ago, I found an old videotape from January 1992. It contains a short passage where I practice Askesis, a Guitar Craft piece written by Tony Geballe. Tony was Robert Fripp's assistant on the first Guitar Craft course in Germany, back in 1987 - a week that changed my life. One of the GC pieces I eventually managed to play, mostly together with my GC friend Leander Reininghaus, was Askesis. I loved it for its relentless angularity.

Too bad the final seconds were cut off for some reason on this old tape!

A little bit later, I participated in two GC courses, held in 1995 and 1996 in Andreis, a small place in the Northern Italy mountains, and led by Askesis composer Tony Geballe. Tony is a wonderful teacher. We learned a lot and had big fun - I remember how we stood in a circle, stepped back and forth in fours, and at the same time, clapped in sevens or even more exotic meters.

Shortly after the Andreis courses, Leander, Markus and me formed Trio Gitarristik, a GC/livelooping oriented guitar/Chapman stick trio that stayed together for a year or two - we had a number of gigs, and played Askesis every time.

Leander, Markus, Andre, Cathy, Tony, Udo

Tony Geballe, 1995

Markus, Andre, Leander - 1995 in Venice

the house in Andreis

Un tissu de mensonges

Gray rainy Sundays are good for going to a museum. Sabine and Gisela wanted to go to a Tomi Ungerer exhibition that can currently be seen in the Max Ernst museum in Ernst's town of birth, Brühl near Cologne. Ungerer's work is fun but I hadn't been to the Max Ernst museum before and decided that I was more interested in Ernst's work.

The Max Ernst collection in Brühl contains most of the sculptures, many of the collage books, the wonderful annual birthday paintings he created for his wife Dorothea Tanning, and much more. What mesmerized me instantly was a huge 1959 painting called "Tissue Of Lies" that belongs to the Centre Pompidou and will soon be given back.

Yes, it had nice colors and shapes, and the size (2 x 3 meters) was impressive in the entry hall, but there was something special about that painting that touched my heart. Usually, paintings don't touch me very much even if I like them a lot, but this one did - there was some kind of joy and awe without having any thoughts while looking at it. I remember having the same heart feeling two or three years ago standing before one particular Jackson Pollock ("Number 4, 1948: Gray and Red") - the other Pollock paintings were nice too but only this one touched me in this way. I really have no idea why and what happens when I feel this, it is a feeling of its own. Strange.

After buying a Max Ernst book and getting coffee and cake, back to the car through light rain along the magnificent Brühl palace and ponds that had been frozen and were now unfreezing, displaying nice fractal cracks.

Paradise is a state of mind

Our latest technological household item is a DVD recorder, several years old and bought used from eBay last weekend. It will eventually replace our crappy VHS tape recorder, and one of the wonderful things it can do is digitize VHS tapes and back them up to DVD.

The first tape to digitize that I grabbed this morning happened to be a 35 minute video by Albert Falzon, called "Excerpt from The Kumbha Mela - Same As It Ever Was". Falzon (who got known many years ago for his surf movie "Crystal Voyager" with a Pink Floyd soundtrack) went to India in the early eighties to film various religious festivities, one of them being the famous Kumbha Mela, a Hindu festival and possibly the largest religious festival on Earth. This particular video shows part of his travel towards that place: on a boat across the waterways of Kashmir.

For an inhabitant of cold Europe like me, this magical landscape seems very close to paradise. Falzon's movie is completely filmed in slow motion, and he often uses a fish-eye lens - and there is of course the soundtrack by Harold Budd and Brian Eno. There are no words and there is no action - there is only a lush jungle landscape slowly drifting by, light reflections on water, people moving in slow motion. This stuff seems to come directly from a dream, from a timeless place.

How strange to enter this state of mind, watching this movie, while knowing that Kashmir has been the center and subject of wars for a long time, and is still far from being peaceful on many levels.

If you like the state of mind induced by Budd's "The Pearl" or Eno's "On Land", you will like this video. You can get it used on VHS tape if you search for it. Apparently it was also rereleased on DVD under the title "Same as it ever was", together with a movie about the Kumbha Mela festival.

Cat Silence

It's slowly getting a bit warmer, the snow melts and everything is wet. Muckel is not amused. Last week while it was very cold he hardly went out to hunt mice and birds. He stayed in most of the time, but he was clearly in a bad mood.

Muckel belongs to our neighbours but since they are both away for work during the day, and I am at home in my office, pretending to work, he regularly comes to visit me in the morning and curls up in my lap for half an hour. When that gets too boring, he eventually goes out again.

I open the back door and let him out. We both listen without moving, Muckel sits on a dry spot under a chair, I stand at the door. We are alone. It is quiet, a far away plane hums, there are some birds trying to sing a spring song. There is a silence there that is much more than the absence of noise. It is palpable, there is the presence of silence.

Win-Win Situation

This morning, another company called me, wanting a Klaus Bürgle painting for the cover of their traffic/transportation magazine. This has been going on for a while now, once or twice a month, somebody wants to publish a Bürgle painting for a website, a CD, a newspaper article, a magazine. This makes me feel really good - I don't earn anything with it but all of the money goes to the painter, Klaus Bürgle, aged 82 now. I know that he is not terribly rich, and that he is glad to get a little additional money on top of his little pension. It is good for him, good for me because I feel good about it, and good for the magazine and its readers too of course.

These Bürgle paintings were a part of my childhood in the early sixties. I was endlessly fascinated by these visions of a bright future in space, under the sea, in futuristic cities. I sort of forgot about these images but about two years ago, I started searching for them on Google, and was disappointed that there was almost nothing there. Very few people seemed to know him nowadays although he was somewhat popular in the fifties and sixties as an illustrator for books and magazines.

Eventually I found a collector in Berlin (Dr. Ralf Bülow) who had all the magazines with Bürgle images that I had loved in my childhood. I talked to him and suggested to set up a Bürgle website and he was enthusiastic about it. We contacted Bürgle and although he is not online, he gave us permission to create the website. A very nice and friendly man!

Bülow then actually sent me a big package with all his material, some of the images were even original paintings (most of the originals have disappeared, so there are only the magazine prints). I spent some days taking digital photos, scanning, photoshopping, and setting up the website - that was big fun.

The rest is history, as they say. The website took off at a breathtaking speed. There were articles in big magazines and on many websites. Retro-futurism is clearly en vogue! Today, if you google for Klaus Bürgle, the web is full of his images. I'm a little proud :-)

www.retro-futurismus.de (German language website)

Postcard Weevil

got my postcard weevil today. Big fun !! this is similar to a cracklebox, but with different options ... like a mini synthesizer. Handbuilt by its inventor ... here is his presentation:

I love these things. Why do I love them? And why do other people not love them? My wife and my neighbour looked at me as if I was insane while I played with it. :-)

Winter Wonderland

First post on Blogspot ... still confused with all the options, and not really knowing why I do this ... as an experiment, I guess.

We're having an unusually cold winter. This night, it was very cold and foggy ... in the morning, dark blue skies and white trees ... took a long walk in winter wonderland ...