The Flickr Karlheinzstockhausen Image Generatr

inside light 3 by This Week in New York: twi-ny.com

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inside light 4 by This Week in New York: twi-ny.com

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inside light 2 by This Week in New York: twi-ny.com

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inside light 1 by This Week in New York: twi-ny.com

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Obsidian Rain by Lucia di Nicolantonio lusi@

Alzare lo sguardo cambiando prospettiva.

(senza post-produzione)

Gesang der Jünlinge, Karlheinz Stockhausen, play

Cave bureau, didascalia

www.cave.co.ke/

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A Deutsche Grammophon Sample by Gianni Motti Assistant

Avant Garde Volume 2

⚫️

6 CD Boxset :

Avant Garde
Volume 2
Deutsche Grammophon
2022

Design . Holger Matthies

Featuring Gruppe Nuova Consonanza . Bernd Alois Zimmermann . John Cage . Dieter Schnebel . Mauricio Kagel . Gottfried Michael Koenig . Zoltán Pongrácz . Rainer Riehn . Karlheinz Stockhausen

Use Hearing Protection

GMA

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apparati effimeri by Lucia di Nicolantonio lusi@

play

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Walter_Ricciarda1 by walterprati

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Musik in Deutschland 1950-2000 by Die Welt, wie ich sie vorfand

This is a look into a brochure that introduces a collection of 130 CDs, called "Musik in Deutschland 1950-2000", published by the "Deutscher Musikrat" two decades ago.

But who, may you well ask, is the "Deutscher Musikrat"? The name sounds uncannily Orwellian, as if it were a secretive government agency that dictates what kind of music should be made and heard in Germany. The reality is not quite that sinister. "Rat" doesn’t mean "rat". It is an NGO, they have a website and they have even answered my e-mail. But they do have the mysterious smell of a secret society. After 20 years I still don’t really know who they are and what they are up to.

I know only one thing: The CDs promoted here constitute a monument to German post-war music and I am proud to own the whole set. No other country has done that. It would take almost a week to listen to the 1750 pieces of music - 6 days and 17 hours non-stop. If these were vinyl records the set would comprise of more than 200 LPs. Every CD comes with a booklet of up to 32 pages with informative text, scores of scores, photos and almost all the lyrics. The booklets alone would be a valuable document for everybody interested in modernist culture. Reading them I learnt a lot not only about music, but also about poetry, literature, dance, theatre, film and other forms of art.

The curators of the collection were careful to present composers from both German states without bias and prejudice. Thanks to this you can hear many gems that would otherwise be forgotten and impossible to find, even in the age of the mouse click. Where else can you hear "Socialist Realism"? I knew examples of Socialist Realism in painting, sculpture and architecture but never heard Socialist Realism music before – but, hey, now I can listen to recitals of Stalinist propaganda as well as speeches of Lenin and Honnecker put into grandiose song arrangements.

Where else can you hear music from an electronic opera, written by the Chinese-born composer Boris Blacher in 1966? And where else can you enjoy a live recording of a hilarious Wolf Vostell performance of 1969?

This is all good news. Now for the snags.

It is always easy to complain about the selection on a music compilation. It goes without saying that not all 1750 pieces are good and there a hundreds that I don’t care much about, but let’s not dwell on this, because there are less forgivable problems:

Every booklet starts with an introduction that says that the curators had to do a "strict selection", but it does not disclose what their selection criteria were (secret society again!). May there be a clue in the title of the collection "Musik in Deutschland 1950-2000" perhaps? No! All criteria in that name are violated. Many of the featured musicians and composers are not German, some recordings were made in other countries and some works were created long before 1950. The most recent work is "Fälschung" by Orm Finnendahl - written in 2003 (but a great piece, so it’s fine with me)! Some tracks are not even music. At one point Oskar Pastior is reading his poems, one of the aesthetic nadirs of the set, if you ask me.

Could it be that the selection focuses on what was widely heard by the people of Germany after the 2nd World War? Wrong again! I am sure that 99% of Germans have never listened to any of the music in this collection. This is because it has a strong focus on what most people would call "classical music" (I personally would prefer to call it "music by modernist composers" or "art music" because much of it is not "classical" at all) which is enjoyed by only a small minority of music lovers. True, there is one box with jazz and one with pop music, but the jazz is mostly of the "artsy" kind (often not very different from the “classical” music of the same period) and the pop box is only an afterthought and not really part of the set (it is, for example, not mentioned in the brochure shown above). I have no problem with this, but I still don’t know what the selection criteria were.

The worst mistake in any music compilation would be to include a song more than once, particularly when strict selection criteria are claimed. But even this mistake has been made - twice: The "Fünf Neapolitanische Lieder" by Hans Werner Henze are presented twice, and so are 2 "Hölderin Fragments" by Wolfgang Rihm, although on different CDs and performed by different singers.

Even worse are the editing problems. The booklets are informative and well written, but look cheap. A terrible sans-serif typeface is used throughout and typos are not unheard of. Formatting is awful. The captions are printed onto the photos with disregard of the background and often impossible to decipher. It is obvious that the authors are experts, but no professional editor was involved. The beautiful line "it was evening all afternoon" by Wallace Stevens is clumsily translated as "Es war den Nachmittag über Abend" instead of the more accurate and elegant "Am ganzen Nachmittag war Abend", to give just one example of the many mistranslations.

The whole set is organised in a complex multi-layered system, which is explained at the back of each CD. It says that there are 19 boxes of CDs, structured in 6 categories and 26 sub-categories. That sounds simple. But the actual CDs are difficult to align with this system. At the same time there is another underlying structure: Every category (or sub-category?) is sub-divided into „Serie“ and „Portraits“. Don’t waste your precious time trying to understand the difference, because whatever the rationale behind this is, it brakes down with the box "Angewandte Musik", if not earlier. It is obvious that the concept of this project has changed several times during its short lifetime and there were multiple attempts to categorise the music - all failed. The names of the categories and the discs must have changed several times as well, and some CDs were announced but have never materialised (e.g. "Musizieren im Alltag") whereas others do exist but seem to never have been part of the plan (e.g. "Free Jazz" - appropriately, because free jazz abhors planning). The names of some CDs even change between the cover and the disc inside. A CD called "Solo & Klavier" contains a few songs with guitar (instead of piano).

It seems that the publishers were overwhelmed by their own complex system and the multiple layers of categories they tried to establish.

However, by far the worst problem with this collection is the marketing - how it was sold. When it all started at the beginning of the millennium the discs were sold one by one. I first bought one, to see if it is any good and then more and more. When I had a few dozen CDs they stopped selling them individually and you could only buy whole boxes, containing 5 to 10 discs each. At that time I had decided to collect the whole set, which meant that I had to start buying boxes with CDs that I already owned. That was annoying - but it got worse. In 2010 they stopped selling the boxes and you could only buy the whole set. I had already bought 14 of the 19 boxes at that stage.

So, with a heavy heart and after long hesitation, I bought the whole set in 2011 although at that time only a third of the CDs were still missing in my shelf. Shortly after that, the whole series was taken off the market and became unavailable in any form. I don’t regret the purchase, it’s a great thing to have, even in a time when CDs have become an obsolete format. Today some of the CDs are sold on the second hand market for more money than I paid for the entire set of 130 items, even if you include the money I wasted on the single discs and boxes.

Any reference to this comprehensive compilation has been deleted from the Musikrat’s website although this must have been one of the most impressive and interesting projects they have ever done. I cannot imagine how many hours of hard work went into this, but in the end it must have been a huge financial disaster for everybody involved. I’m sure they had a grandiose vision when it all started, with ideas aplenty, but the implementation lacked continuity, leadership and there was no demand. Although they finally managed to publish all 130 CDs it is, in hindsight, an excellent case study of an over-ambitious and failed endeavour. We can learn from this, not only about business and project management, but about human nature.

Some statistical analysis: The most extensively featured composer is Hans Werner Henze with 57 works, adding up to more than 5 hours playing time. Paul Dessau comes second with 50 pieces in the set, but they are mostly short (3½ minutes on average) so he comes only 7th when considering playing time (a bit less than 3 hours). Friedrich Schenker is second in terms of time (3½ hours of his music can be heard in the collection) and the Argentinian Mauricio Kagel comes third with 3 hours and 17 minutes. He and Wolfgang Rihm both have 36 pieces of music in the compilation.

Mr. Karlheinz Stockhausen, the most famous German post-war composer, is an also-run with only 10 works in the set. They add up to 2 hours, which is not much, if you compare him to less-known composers like Georg Katzer (2½ hours) and Friedrich Goldmann (3 hours). I can think of 2 reasons. One is probably the restrictive copyright protection of the Stockhausen œuvre (the same reason why Kraftwerk is conspicuously absent in the pop box). But I believe another one to be the determination of the curators to represent both German states equally, which led to an over-representation of the East-German music scene, simply because there was less of it. Just as Wartburg would be more dominant than Borgward in a book about the German post-war car industry that tries to represent both German states in a balanced way.

Having listened to the whole set several times, I am now able to draw wide-reaching, sweeping and judgemental conclusions about German post-war culture. Here are examples:

(1)
At first the differences between the cultures of capitalist West Germany and the East German one-party-state seem obvious. A superficial listening suggests that the East was being restricted by political diktat and a closed society, while the West was open for experimentation and inspiration from everywhere and everything. But after a while you realise that the reality was more complicated and on this compilation you find surprisingly daring works from the East as well as a fair share of conservative dullness from the West. Overall, I found it more interesting to note what the two states had in common. For example:

(2)
The old prejudice that German culture is heavy and humourless is, all in all, confirmed. It is difficult to find any light-hearted melody in this set. Admittedly, there is some humour, some of it by composers of non-Germanic provenance (Ligeti and Kagel), but this is clownish stuff that hasn’t stood the test of time and wasn't really funny in the first place.

(3)
More than in any other epoch, in post-war Germany composers felt the need to put their works into a political and sociocritical context – on both sides of the fence. Even creators of completely abstract instrumental compositions tried to express sophisticated views with their music, which is, most of the time, not obvious to the listener until he reads the booklet.

(4)
In the West as well as in the East two types of artists dominate: Leftist intellectuals and confessing Christians. And surprisingly it’s the Christians who are often more daring in their musical experiments. Even more surprisingly, Marxist views are as dominant among western composers as they are in the East. An opera about free trade, entrepreneurship and representative democracy would have been as taboo in 1960s Western Germany as it would have been in the East. I know why, but I stop now. I talk too much...