8 Love and Parting 1 (Interview)
Reinhold Urmetzer talks about his song cycle “Maienzeit” [Maytime]
Why did you decide to compose “art songs”, which are almost an anachronism in our time?
An anachronism? Why? We still have evening concerts in which art songs are performed, as well as newer ones in the International Style.
What do you mean by “International Style”?
As the Bauhaus of the twenties had an international influence on modern architecture, and even today dominates in large parts of the world, so also is the influence that Schönberg and his atonal school has over concert evenings with contemporary music.
But you don’t use any atonal melodies in your songs.
True. New pitches or noise-experiments – that is, the deliberately avant-gardist in the arts, roughly in the sense of Helmut Lachenmann – that occurs in my music less often. I quote serialism, isorhythmic motets, musical graphics, or bitonality. However, only in fine, almost homeopathic dosages.
That’s why your songs sound almost like pop music.
Perhaps. I want, coming from classical music and its performers, as well as the traditional concert forms, to make a music that can reach both target audiences. And the many voice students in this world can also get to know a different audience, that deals with their art of song differently.
Which audience do you mean?
There are many people who can enjoy and appraise pop music (which need not necessarily always be unaspiring) as well as modern classics (which need not necessarily always be laborious to the point of over-complexity).
Are you in favor of complexity in the arts?
I’m against overcomplexity in the arts. But it’s also there occasionally. In language, or in philosophy, overcomplexity might have a certain justification. If language atrophies, then so do people. We become creatures of Bild,1 or of texting. But in music, I don’t see it as absolutely necessarily.
You occasionally speak of musique dépouillée.
Disrobed music, yes. I believe the term originates with Eric Satie. Music reduced to the simple, perhaps to the essential. Without any romantic excesses, which I sometimes even hear in the music of Olivier Messiaen (whom I very much admire, by the way). Without harmony in the sense of a Riemannian harmonic model, without jazz chords, serial structures, noise experiments, buffoonery …
You base your work on the æsthetic of Umberto Eco, which he developed for literature.
Umberto Eco’s novel The Name of the Rose works with a popular, almost primitive genre as its basic form: namely the crime novel, including its erotic accouterments. However, this work is not only simple to read and exciting, i.e. mellifluous, but also enriched with quotes, reminiscences, and clever digressions, even in Latin, so that a fascinating mixture (for me) of the past, present, complexity, and simplicity comes out as a result.
You’re coming out of the art of folk songs in the late Middle Ages.
I distilled most of the songs out of the three-voice choral arrangements of the Renaissance composer Clemens non Papa. All nine songs work in the piano part with music-historical quotations taken from the 13th Century all the way to the present day. The texts might disturb the pop-musical enjoyment. I’ve left them in their Old German, which leads to a certain ambiguity in the interpretation that nevertheless could be useful.
The themes are tragic: again and again departures, divergence, and all of that in such a lovely “Maytime”.
They’re songs of love and departure, indeed: love-song songs. In the collection of Hubertus Schendel – he collected more than 300,000 German-language songs from every age in an archive in Canada – I didn’t find a single cheerful title among that Franco-Flemish composer’s titles (he died in 1556). It’s spring, such a lovely season. But again and again, only love songs and departure dominate.
Your personal love song?
Everywhere around me, I observe a period of departure and separation, also of losing oneself. But my family and my marriage are doing, relative to the circumstances, quite well. For me, the songs are more about the departure from a stage in my life that’s coming to an end. The passing of time always makes me reflective and melancholy. Even my 30th birthday was a dramatic break for me.
Why are you having two recording productions done right now in the sound studio of the Stuttgart Music Academy?
The first version is intended for the classically trained musicians of the opera houses and opera schools. At the same time, you may also want stylistic variety; we all grew up with pop music, after all.
There are also many contemporaries of mine who have problems with operatic vibrato. So for this target audience, I had a recording in the style of early vocal music made. This version can be arranged with computers, auto-tune, rhythm tracks, etc. for that other audience. At the same time, there’s already yet a third version for countertenor in the style of early music, in which Alvaro Tinjaca, from Columbia, must take his leave from his most beloved. Why not? We see that in the pop world quite often these days.
For many years you were a critic for new music in the Neuen Zeitschrift für Musik, in Orchester, in daily papers, radio broadcasts, have yourself presented works of new music. Why have you now so radically separated yourself from this music in your new compositions?
James Stirling, at the inauguration of his monumental New Wing of the Stuttgart State Gallery, quite literally said, “People didn’t like modern architecture any more. Thus I had to consider doing something else.” The two Russian performers of the Saarbrücken première, Enni Gorbonosova and Evgeny Alexeev, both 28 years young, were excited about my art songs, pushed me again and again to compose more of them. They apparently speak to the Russian soul. I also didn’t have to explain anything about their performance. That naturally really pleased me, and motivated me to write more.
I observe and accompany the developments in classical music, of the traditional concert-life, of symphony orchestras, etc. for more than 30 years. There are problems that can’t be overcome any more. I think that there is even something of an epochal shift occurring. The musica reservata, i.e. classic, is withdrawing ever further into a niche. Our age of historicism, that finds the styles of every bygone century to be good, seems to be approaching an end.
Now, in this fast-living and globalizing world, the change in listening habits – which has always depended to a certain extent on a sort of conditioning – will likely proceed faster than before. Previously it would take decades, during which musical styles overlapped and then replaced previous ones.
You are caught up between two stools. Is that comfortable?
As a young musician I played in rock bands and new-music groups. As a journalist I was the first in all Germany to write, for the nationwide feature pages, simultaneously rock criticism and to discuss concerts with new or early music, as well as extravagant opera productions. I’ve always composed, written books as well as did many of my world and generation. But I haven’t let myself settle on one direction.
Whether that’s comfortable, I don’t know. In any event it makes one solitary or (more positively stated) individual and self-willed.
Karel Goeyvaerts probably had some influence on your switch.
In a long interview for the Berlin taz and the Neue Zeitschrift für Musik on Brussels Radio in 1985, he told me a lot of background information about his multi-year work with Karlheinz Stockhausen in the Cologne Radio Studio and about the emergence of serial music. It wasn’t just a music-sociological, but primarily also psychological background that played a role in the development in serial music. The anamnetic work related to this remains to be carried out by the musicological institutes. But that’s another subject.
What are your further projects?
In light of the surprising success of the songs, I want to dig up my old dance theater Nine European Adieus – it also has text and musical insertions. One of its songs was already incorporated into the Maytime cycle.
Where can you buy your music?
The songs will be for sale on the iTunes Store. You can also get a signed and numbered CD from the publisher, that is, a sort of one-of-a-kind item, for €14.99.
In conversation with Alexandre Herrmann
Love and Parting 2 ( Program Text)
Enni Gorbonosova (Soprano) and Evgeny Alexeev (Piano) perform
Renaissance Songs arranged by Reinhold Urmetzer
Almost all of the love songs this evening come from the late middle ages. In the Renaissance they were widely distributed both as art and as folk music. Reinhold Urmetzer found them as three-voice choral arrangements by Clemens non Papa (ca. 1550), distilled and re-harmonized them. The originals set the cantus firmus in the middle voice, without a modern listener recognizing it as such.
The new arrangements performed in the present concert for soprano and piano use numerous musical-historical quotations in the piano part, extending from the 13th century to the present. Only the first and eighth songs are similar in their piano accompaniment.
Alongside the influence of Karel Goeyvaerts, Reinhold Urmetzer recalls the æsthetics of Umberto Eco, who proclaimed the end of the avant-garde and rejects shocking artistic experiences. The composer also speaks of musique dépouillée, (“disrobed music”), “without romantic excesses, without harmonization in the style of Riemannian Harmony, without jazz chords, serialism, noise-art, or buffoonery.” This music is thus less an intellectual music, of construction or experiment, than a music of feeling and reminiscences.
The “Winterlied” is a well-known German folk song that is nevertheless performed with the melody in the original church mode, which gives it a wholly different character. The Old English “Scarborough Fair” likewise uses harmonies from the late Middle Ages, accompanied in the piano with rhythmical accompaniment drawn from the American minimal music tradition and isorhythmic motets.
“Niemand weiß” (pop song) comes from the composer’s dance-theater “Nine European Adieus” and is the only song that originates in the 20th century.
The “Tagelied” was a beloved music form in the Middle Ages. Nightwatchmen and tower wardens would wake people in the mornings with such songs. With the accelerating decline of morals and customs, they would include more and more moralistic messages, especially as free love and extramarital affairs affected daily life towards the end of the Renaissance. Arabisms recall the Moorish influence on music from this period.
In the “Ballade,” death comes into play for a single instance. Goethe modified the idea of the Golden Cup later in his “König von Thule.” “Ach Sorg” lives within the opposition between soloistically-employed piano and voice. This is countered repeatedly by a very restless and almost breathless piano.
The linden is the exemplary German national tree under which lovers can be found. In our case, it nevertheless still means parting; musically connoted with the oldest German-language church-song of all, from the 13th century. However, it’s only hinted at in the piano interludes. Reminiscences of Japanese pentatonics find their parallel in the “Tagelied,” and its Arabisms.
“An einem Morgen” introduces for the first time dissonances in the style of New Music in the soloistic piano interludes. After the bitonality at the beginning comes in the second interlude a serial construction in the melody (the original row of which comes from Pierre Boulez), which strives to underscore the plangent character of the text.
“Ich sag ade” concludes the song-cycle with a perhaps conciliatory finish. “Semplice,” simple, unadorned, is the performance instruction. For the first time one hears major tonality. The plaintive melancholy yields now to a certainty of love, that despite all “distress and anguish” remains steadfast and nevertheless believes in faithfulness and reunion.
1A somewhat lowbrow daily paper in Germany, similar to English tabloids like The Sun and The Daily Star.
Translated by N. Andrew Walsh
