Fritz Hauser understands percussion instruments from their internal grain outwards, and the work documented on Different Beat – five pieces for percussion ensemble written between 1996 and 2015 – is exactly the music you might hope to hear from a composer/percussionist who collaborates regularly with improvisers. Hauser is not especially motivated to impose abstract compositional theories upon percussion, instead allowing meticulously defined processes to s(w)eep inside gongs, cymbals and temple blocks with the aim of giving voice to their innate echoes and resonances. As lamestream percussion concertos from the likes of James MacMillan and Jennifer Higdon remind us, percussion instruments become expressively impotent when retracing the rhetorical contours of Romanticism; in that regard, Hauser finds himself entirely on the right side of history.
His material has been presented with due care and diligence by the Barcelona-based Neu label. The two CDs slot inside a paperback-sized wallet that encases a rotund booklet which includes your code to download a digital version in high-definition stereo and/or 5.1 surround sound. On the cover, and then dropped in throughout as a visual leitmotif, are stylised representations of colour spectrums that meet in the middle to form a visible horizon – an apt metaphor for Hauser's structures. If you're prepared to sift through his overripe impressionistic turns of phrase, Thomas Mayer's booklet notes contain some useful information. There's no excuse, however, for skirting around the basics: it would have been helpful to know, for instance, what specific instruments the final piece, Rundum, is scored for; and whether electronics were involved in sustaining its drone-like sonorities.
An argument could be made that these pieces tell their own story. Second Thought (2011) is conceived for three percussionists at one marimba who, over a seven-minute duration, systematically reduce an enveloping mass of chromatically interweaving lines down to scalic atoms as metal percussion joins in the fray. The second piece, As we are speaking (2004), is scored for four percussionists playing temple blocks which, in the context of that opening work, retains the sound of wood as pitch becomes noticeably more relative than absolute. The remaining three compositions, Double Exposition (1996), Schraffur (2015) and Rundum (2011), all check in around the 30-minute mark and follow a general trajectory: the importance of functioning internal note-on-note pitch relationships is gradually reduced as Hauser puts a compositional frame around natural vibrating phenomena – the ‘different beats’ of colliding cymbal harmonics and the sonic boom of a bowed and scraped gong.
A line from a letter written by John Cage in 1940 (as plucked from the newly published Selected Letters of John Cage Footnote 1 ) describes Edgard Varèse's percussion ensemble Ionisation (1929–31) as ‘an expressive organisation of sound as opposed to tone’ – let that distinction between sound and tone stand as the litmus test of all good percussion music.
As the linear chatter of Hauser's Second Thought begins the process of thinning itself out, a naked chromatic incline pokes out of the texture like a clumsy sound bite in an otherwise erudite paragraph of writing. Roger Reynolds's magnum opus for percussion ensemble and electronics, Sanctuary (2003–08), kicks that same issue into touch by notating precise movements for all ten fingers as they tap and caress unpitched instruments; patterns and structures are fixed while the instruments speak their own pitch. AMM percussionist Eddie Prévost's 2006 album of improvisations for bowed tam-tam, ‘Entelechy’, similarly warms the sonic pot by stimulating his instrument into sounding, then pursuing a dialogue with the resultant harmonics and clusters of tones. Aesthetically and technically, Hauser positions himself pretty much equidistant between these two approaches.
Hold firm to the idea that musical narratives really ought to be spelt out by landmark moments of harmonic arrival and you might find Hauser's vision a struggle, but disorientation, and then the enlightenment that comes with discovering how to listen to ‘Different Beat’, is very much part of the fun. By the time you reach Rundum, which Hauser describes as ‘a concept for percussion ensemble’, not only has pitch been comprehensively removed from the equation, he has also managed to eliminate rhetorical gesture. Even the idiomatic inevitability of an initial point of attack, as sticks or hands touch instruments, has been convincingly wished away.
That Rundum's seamless continuum of sounds exists at all feels more significant than figuring out its constituent parts. Is the music purely acoustic? Are electronics discreetly bolstering this quiet but insistent hum? The sounds are too richly fascinating to avoid posing such questions, but there comes a point where such analytical listening fades away and your ears dive willingly inside Hauser's fine-grained adjustments of harmonic interference and minute alterations of timbre. Listening, therefore, becomes a pro-active experience. Double Exposition makes good on the promise of its title: a forest of cymbals are pushed deeper and deeper into an ever-closer union of resonating harmonics as looping crescendos and diminuendos turn the heel; and, just as that process feels like it's reaching an endpoint, a swarm of disruptive woodblocks sends structural certainty flying, leaving stunned cymbal strokes moving gingerly through newly disembodied space.
Hauser himself performs on Schraffur, playing gong, with his vividly sculpted overtones freefalling against the rhythmically flat, unchanging responses of the ensemble. Part of me wishes this material had been presented on DVD: on the Mode label, for example, seeing what you hear adds a whole new level of understanding to Reynolds's Sanctuary. Then again, getting the measure of the space Hauser has clawed open with only your ears to guide you is valuable too. I realise I've managed to reach this final paragraph without mentioning the performers once, but in work where sound matters far more than interpretive personality, that the top-notch ensemble We Spoke, directed by Serge Vuille, play this music without particularly drawing attention to themselves is the sign of a job well done.
