Walking together, hand clasping hand, history and writing bound down in metronome; and it's only when you turn and look that you see they share a face and form, are identical twins. The phrase ‘written history’ is a pleonasm: the first word is already contained in the second. History means written history; history begins with writing and record, whether daubs of red paint on a cold cave wall, lines chipped out of a heavy stone slab, or the black blobs and squiggles inscribed in ink above a text in Latin. In the modern era, with the invention of the phonograph and the advent of Information Technology, our means of acoustic recording and inscription have exploded. Correspondingly, the grounds of Western Art Music – of the ‘literate tradition’ – have shuddered and shifted, have rippled, broken and realigned, and the features of music's landscape have been reshaped.
It's hard not to see Bernhard Lang as a signal figure in this context. At no other time in history would it have been possible for his music to be written. Lang's music is usually based on the repetition of small cells or ‘grains’ of sound taken from previously written music, which he samples and analyses on computer, splicing, blending, deranging the sound, and then orchestrating or otherwise scoring the result. Often that result can sound like a skipping vinyl record or like the musical equivalent of the experimental films of Martin Arnold. Running a scalpel against the surface of a musical record means, naturally, making an incision into the body of music history; in the two ongoing cycles of pieces that Lang is composing alongside each other – Differenz/Wiederholung and Monadologie – the Austrian composer has been making his way through the compositional Pantheon, cutting into the past so that the future can leak out (to misquote William Burroughs, one of Lang's points of reference).
Despite the chin-stroking implications of his music, in person Lang is refreshingly down to earth and cordial. When he came to City University London to give a guest seminar earlier this year, he stood at the front of the room, confident and comfortable in black jacket, black t-shirt, jeans, trainers and dark-circled eyes, meeting theoretical questions with practical answers, open about his influences, his discussion ranging from destructivism to the mixed reception his music received last year at Donaueschingen to his specifically devised computer program with which he composes. (And the following evening he cooked everyone a big dinner.)
The string quartet The Anatomy of Disaster is a recomposition of Joseph Haydn's The Seven Last Words of our Saviour on the Cross, also for quartet. Aurally it comes across as a nightmare of that work, for the most part harmonically discordant. Where Haydn sings, Lang gives a croak; where Haydn glides gracefully, Lang tumbles around in a Saint Vitus' Dance. In Lang's immediate style there is something of Ligeti's machines-breaking-down; a touch, too, of Christian Marclay's experimental turntablism. In Lang's process of writing you could make connections (as has been done) with Cage's generation of musical material by mechanical chance operations, or even Scelsi's process of improvising-recording-transcribing-tweaking. These references notwithstanding, Lang's style is distinct and his outlook quite new. Although the results are not always successful – some sections of The Anatomy of Disaster, you feel, could have been edited out by the composer – the looping processes of the music exceed the material's original reference, transporting the listener down strange unforeseen corridors into anonymous spaces of great musical interest. A typically crisp, lively reading is given by the Arditti Quartet, for whom the piece was written.
The Anatomy of Disaster will not be to all tastes. It is repetitive (obviously) and its seventy minutes don't pass by quickly, but if your concentration can hold it is thought-provoking music, if not always the most beautiful.
Founded in 2001 by Stefan Eder (piano), Uta-Maria Lempert (violin) and Matthias Lorenz (cello), the Dresden-based Elole piano trio has a particular focus on performing music by new-generation composers and, since its inception, has commissioned over forty new works. One of these is Lang's Monadologie XX … für Franz (2012), which features on Elole's new album alongside three other first recordings.
EXIT E (2010–11), by Michael Maierhof, is aurally about as far from a traditional piano trio as it's possible to imagine. What begins as a noise piece comprising a trialogue of scrapings, grindings and brushing, over time opens out to admit to the party some rhythmic pulses on the piano; the whole captivating event is rendered in all its ugly beauty by the performers. The delicate touch, sparseness of gesture and quiet dynamic of Benjamin Schweitzer's Marraskuu (1998/2004) follows, presenting an interesting contrast.
Chris Newman's Weird Words in a Language Which We Understand (2008) quotes extensively the Fate motif from Beethoven's Fifth Symphony. Conceptualism isn't absent here, nor Kagel's Ludwig Van, but this in no way takes away from Newman's bizarre genius, which turns Fate knocking at the door into a sick absurdist joke of the ‘knock-knock’ genre. Weird Words in a Language Which We Understand is a fantastic composition, here played with vim (as are all the pieces on the album).
Which hovering on the margins of history's pages brings us back to Bernhard Lang. The last work on this album is Lang's Monadologie XX … für Franz, a recomposition of Schubert's Op. 100 Piano Trio in E flat, D.929. As with The Anatomy of Disaster, your enjoyment of the piece may hinge on the degree to which you are familiar with the original Schubert of which it is a palimpsest. That isn't to say, though, that the Schubert raises its head above the parapet very often: it is basically destroyed to make way for Lang's work.
Curiously, at times Monadologie XX … für Franz sounds like a cousin of Grisey's Vortex Temporum: specifically, the second section of Vortex Temporum's first movement, and also its third movement. Grisey's piece stretches and contracts a snatch of Ravel's Daphnis et Chloë; Lang does something similar to the Schubert; and the scoring of both pieces features a piano trio (with additional instruments in Grisey's case). Listening to Monadologie XX, the subtitle of Grisey's Talea comes to mind: la machine et les herbes folles (the machine and the wild grass). An image appears – of the charred husk, its metal frame sunk into the ground, of an automobile in the countryside through which is growing, with more and more abandon, the wild weeds and flora of a much later time – a time and place of which the original had no knowledge.
