Do you notice a mistake?
Peter Ablinger enjoys quoting something Claude Debussy supposedly once said: “I start with all the notes, keep out the ones I don’t like, and let in the ones I do.”1 To Debussy, composition was a process of subtracting from a whole, similar to what a sculptor does with a block of marble. Ablinger, who trained in the visual arts, is drawn to this idea of creation by subtraction, which he has made his own – and unlike Debussy, he does not consider that “block of marble” to be limited to the chromatic scale of a piano’s 88 keys. His vision of music extends to the entire perceptible universe – and particularly to white noise, which superimposes all audible frequencies at equal intensities: “das Ganze gleichzeitig“ … everything, always, and all at once.
Ablinger has often spoken of the meaning and the significance of white noise in his work, and it is useful to attend to the two words together. In his essay Metaphern (“Metaphors”), Ablinger wrote, “For me, white may be the most seductive word of all.”2 And indeed, white is the color of totality - the result of adding together all the other colors of light. It is no coincidence that his opus 1, composed in 1980, the first piece in a vast cycle titled Weiss/Weisslich(“White / Whitish”), consists of a descent followed by an ascent on all the white keys of the piano. These scales, reduced to their simplest expression, reappear throughout his work; each time, they are associated with the expressive neutrality of the color white. As for the word “noise,” the German language makes a distinction between two forms of noise, similar to the distinction in English between “a noise” and “noise,” or between “noises” and “noisiness.” The first,Geraüsch, signifies a noise in the sense of something occurring (as in a noisecoming fromsomething) or the noises or sounds that make up a piece of music. The second,Rauschenis used to describe white noise (Weisses Rauschen), and tends to refer to static or ambient noise - buzzing, rustling, murmuring, humming - that is more or less consistent and continuous. The opposition between these two words is the bedrock of Ablinger’s poetics: “Noises [Geraüsche] that emanate from musical instruments do not interest me at all. Static noise [Rauschen] is something very different. For me, it’s almost the opposite. Static noise is probably one of the first sounds of which humans were aware.”3
This static noise is always a kind of overflow: to make it perceptible, one must subtract from it, or filter it. The first and simplest form of subtraction is simply to delineate it; that is, to define a frame for it. In Quadrat (1994), the first version of the seventh piece in the Weiss/Weisslichcycle, the white noise is intentionally left in its rawest form. The only question that interests the composer is its duration, and, by analogy, the visual form to which it is anchored: how long must the static last for us to perceive a square, and not a rectangle? The piece simply presents an answer to this question: 4 minutes. Anyone can create their own version ofWeiss/Weisslich 7. Similar to 4:33 by John Cage, the question of framing is a kind of window thrown open to the world: “A window is not there in order for us to dwell too much on its construction and carpentry. It is there to be looked through, or to let in the light. Art is one such window.”4 The other pieces in this cycle are like so many opening windows, offering to the listener a minutely detailed palette of whites. Weiss/Weisslich 12 (1994-1995) is a compilation of recordings of the ambient noise in 18 silent churches, while Weiss/Weisslich 18 (1992-1996) consists of recordings of the wind blowing through different types of trees – birch, rowan, ash, alder, willow, etc. – an anthology of “natural” noises that offers a view, in the negative, of the thinness of the human ear’s ability to make distinctions that the eye captures in an instant.
In his first instrumental pieces, in the early 1990s, the “everything, always” approach inherent to white noise inspired in Ablinger a profusion and a nimbleness that did not in any way cede to the influence of the instrumental noise music in vogue at the time. In Verkündigung (“Annunciation”) (1990), named for the eponymous painting by Domenico Veneziano and inspired by the architecture of the Ulm Minster, Ablinger wrote independent pieces for three musicians, each of which requires such a degree of virtuosity that they are a kind of aporia, a musical conundrum that musicians can resolve only by making their own choices, by improvising, by approximating. Paradoxically, the music that emerges from this dedalian work is lively and unusually light-hearted, a feeling to which Ablinger nods in his dedication: “for the masters of flying: Franz Liszt, Alexander Scriabine, and Cecil Taylor.” Grisailles (1991-93), a work for three pianos inspired by three grisaille stained glass windows in a 13th-century Cistercian monastery, is also built around a similar tension with the idea of overflow. The composer begins by overlapping structures (ornamental, rhythmic, harmonic), pushing the complexity of the score to the point that all control over the material is lost when it is played. Ablinger then proceeds to a second phase of writing, this one subtractive, in which he traces a path through this “underbrush” (Dickicht), cutting out notes and adapting the material to the piano’s idiom. In this piece, as well as in Der Regen, das Glas, das Lachen for ensemble (1994), and in Anfangen (:Aufhören) for violin in viola-tuning (1991), the composer introduces a tonic as a constant, a single note insistently repeated. This supremely intentional gesture creates a hierarchy, building a surface into which a netherworld of little sounds has been indented, a kind of musical residue that, by contrast, seems unintentional or “accidental.” It is the listener who creates the final filter for the music, navigating among its different and densely packed layers and structures and choosing when to shift from the surface to the indents, from vertical to horizontal listening. Marcel Duchamp said that a painting is made as much by the viewer as it is by the artist; for Ablinger, it is the listener who actually brings a work into existence, giving it its true form – a form that is infinitely renewed and varied. The work thus resembles an unchanging space that is modified by the way we occupy it, depending on where we stand, the path we choose to walk through it, the details upon which we decide to dwell.
A space through which we move… at times, Ablinger pushes this notion into the realm of the literal. In Ohne Titel for 3 pianos (1992), for example, the criterion of pitch is reduced to a single note; each musician plays in a different tempo, and this desynchronization draws the listener’s attention to the location of different attacks within the performance space. In 22 Kanons für Peter Lackner (2012), simple ascending scales are repeated in a canon by six pianos located at graduated distances from the audience – the further the instrument from its listeners, the faster it is played. Metaphorically, the horizon of the space created by the music eradicates time. In Weiss/ Weisslich 22 (1986-1996), Ablinger uses electroacoustics to “condense” symphonies by Beethoven, Schubert, Bruckner, and Mahler. Stripped of their temporal dimension, the symphonies are condensed to pure sounds qualities. In a series of pieces titled IEAOV (Instrumente und ElektroAkustisch Ortsbezogene Verdichtung, or “Instruments and Electro-Acoustic Site-Specific Verticalization”), Ablinger applies this process of “temporal verticalization” to instrumental performances recorded in specific sites, “condensing” them, as the title implies, to create a series of completely static monochromatic pieces: from the different 4-minute-long “squares” of white noise, each of a different sheen and color, sprouts the memory of an instrument, its timbre and its field of resonance condensed into a kind of sound fossil. Time’s organizing grip is released and falls away; nothing replaces it: no narrative, no beginning, no end. Similar to Rauschen, this ambient noise, present since the dawn of time, extends beyond listening, preceding and following it.
Rauschenrefuses to take part in any musical language; instead, the composer is inviting us to listen to it for what it is, to experience it in its continuity and its phenomenological totality. And yet, many of Ablinger’s pieces play with two ontologically distinct fields that he holds in tension with each other: that of recorded noise and that of sound. In most of the pieces in the cycleInstrumente und Rauschen,this tension between noise and music becomes a conflict. With the eponymous Instrumente und Rauschen (1995-96), Ablinger upends the traditional hierarchy of sound interference and musical discourse: in each of the 24 pieces, the listener hears some 20 seconds of intentionally “elementary” instrumental music that is almost completely hidden by a kind of curtain of white noise that is broadcast continuously over loudspeakers. The composer has returned to this idea of masking several times: Orchester und Rauschen (2003-2006) draws on a repertoire of existing orchestral works by composers including (Stravinsky, Schönberg, and Boulez, while 4 Weiss for string orchestra and white noise (2018-2019) is played at a volume approaching that of a rock concert or of noise music (during its premiere, the audience at the Vienna Konzerthaus responded with booing that was nearly as loud). Ablinger’s intent, however, is not merely to provoke: he is making a radical invitation, gesturing to the listener to “seek out sound within sound within sound.”5 Orgel und Rauschen(Diaphanie 3) (1998-2000) is a long piece that draws the listener into a similar experience, albeit less aggressively, with different layers of sound and white noise that create the musical equivalent of luminous diaphany. Elsewhere, noise regains its bursting quality, as in Two Strings and Noise for violin, cello, and loudspeaker (2004), where the piece is whittled down to a “pop” – as short and loud as possible – that bisects a note sustained by the string instruments. The listening experience is in this way maximally disrupted by the contrast in volume, an almost graphic opposition between an unwavering horizontal (the sustained tone) and the shock of a sudden vertical downstroke (the pop). Other pieces systematically explore this notion; for example,1-127, for electric guitar and CD (2002), features a calm, placid descending scale that, in each of its 127 subtle rhythmic variations, is interrupted by the chaotic ambient noise of Berlin. Here, by contrast to other pieces in this cycle, this immutable repetition sketches out a landscape of relative predictability.
The relationship between sound and music in Ablinger’s work is not limited to their apparent lack of connection. In 1997, Ablinger became fascinated by the idea of seeking a musical equivalent to photorealism, an acoustic photograph – or “phonograph” – and began imagining situations in which music might function as a kind of matrix for a rational mapping of reality. Just as photorealism mobilized age-old painting techniques to reproduce photographs, Ablinger used classical instruments to reproduce the sound spectrum of recordings of various noises as closely as possible. For this project, Ablinger worked closely with the Institüt für Elektronische Musik und Akustik (IEM) in Graz, which provided him with the tools he needed to conduct these spectral analyses, creating a grid in which frequency (f) and time (t) were the abscissa and the ordinate, thus breaking down a continuous sonic phenomenon into pitches and rhythms that become the musical notes of the score. This “translation” or “transposition” might take wildly different forms depending on the instrumentation, as well as on the grain of the “grid” (of frequency and time) used by the analysis tool.
Quadraturen IV, (“Selbstportrait mit Berlin”) for ensemble and CD (1995-1998) offers a marvellous illustration of the gap or disconnect that this operation can produce. The work opens with a steady series of dense, complex chords, layered over with a phonograph of ambient city traffic noise. Several times, the series of chords stops and starts again at a different tempo; at other times, the urban noises disappear and leave the bare chords to be played on their own. It takes some time for the listener to notice the literal and necessary link between the two layers of sound, which seem at first to be diametrically opposed; the first abstract and seemingly abstruse, the other concrete and anecdotal. As this realization occurs, it ruptures the way one listens to the piece – the listener hears at a different level, on a new plane, as with a three-dimensional image.
Subtitled “Wirklichkeit” (reality), Part III of Quadraturen is a stand-alone cycle, a series of pieces at whose center is a computer-controlled key-playing “Vorsetzer” (player) for piano specially built by Winfried Ritsch. The frequencies of the instrument are set to the 88 semitones of a classic piano – the same 88 notes Debussy used as his “block of marble” when composing. Unlike any piano Debussy used, this instrument is able to play all 88 notes at once, on an extremely fine-grained time grid (16 units per second), far beyond the capabilities of any human player. This monstrous creation can thus reproduce any type of sound, without any limitation with regard to polyphony, from murmurs from outside captured in real time (as in the sound installation Quadraturen IIIe (Schaufensterstück)) to the speaking voices of Fidel Castro (“Fidelito / La Revolución y las Mujeres”) or Arnold Schönberg (“A Letter from Schoenberg”). Speech has particular significance in this cycle, in which speaking voices are transformed into pieces for player piano that have unexpected mimetic power. The pliable nature of the instrument makes it possible to transform each variation in elocution into a pianistic event: consonants (the transients) become fleeting, high-pitched clusters, while vowels are transformed into unstable movement in the middle register. The effect is all the more striking when it is accompanied surtitles – the illusion of hearing a human voice “through the piano” is complete.
The expressive richness of speech also inspired what is no doubt Ablinger’s most celebrated series, Voices and piano (1998 - …). In it, Ablinger adapts research into the musicality of speech - from Leos Janacek and René Lussier to Steve Reich - to his own ends, creating a series of recitals for piano and loudspeaker that offers vocal portraits of celebrated people, including Bertolt Brecht, Gertrude Stein, and Ilya Prigogine. The piano music is written from spectral analysis data so that the pianist is never accompanying the voice in the traditional sense of that term – instead, the music creates a kind of synchronous doubling. Ablinger describes it as “comparison” – “language and music are compared.” The variation in filters from one piece to another is supple enough that unexpected reminiscences are twined into the composition, as pianist Nicolas Hodges, to whom the work is dedicated, wrote, “ghosts of jazz, Chinese folksongs, or pastoral dance.”
Whether it is mobilizing reality in the form of a phonic document or reproducing a musical restitution of it, Ablinger’s work seems to exemplify a turn toward what philosopher Harry Lehmann has called an “aesthetic of substance” (Gehaltsästhetik6). The composer is practicing “situated” art to an extreme degree; that is, he is creating works steeped in consciousness of the place and time in which they occur, giving rise to a certain indifference to traditions bequeathed by the past. When Ablinger began composing operas, first (Stadtoper Graz (2000-2005), then Landschaftsoper Ulrichsberg (2007-2009), and then City Opera Buenos Aires (2006-2011)), he stripped the genre of all its theatrical conventions, retaining only opera’s multi-form nature, as a kind of Gesamtkunstwerk. Nothing could be further from a traditional opera than Ablinger’s open constructions, in which different aspects of his work – music, visual art, literature, performance – intersect with each other in ways that are always changing, always new. The places in which these works are performed are their only “theme” – each time, in close collaboration with their inhabitants, Ablinger creates a portrait that is at once acoustic, architectural, and social.
Behind this desire to “situate” the work is a critique of the traces of the aristocracy that remain in musical institutions. In his notes for Wachstum, Massenmord (Growth, Mass Murder) for orchestra and subtitles (2011), Ablinger is particularly biting in his description of the mechanism of the symphony orchestra: “The orchestra is almost as anachronistic as new music itself. Its structure is an intrinsically anti-constitutional scandal – its sexism, disenfranchisement, anti-democracy, and anti-collectivization. The authoritarian structures that it celebrates are an attack on human autonomy, on a free intellect, and on every conception of art beyond that of a totalitarian regime.” 7 The work itself is a kind of riddle, caught between refusal and acceptance of a largely despised tradition, which is resolved through the video subtitling. By making the words of the title, “Wachs-tum, Mass-en-mord” appear spray painted in red on a wall, the screen transforms the orchestral interjection into fragments of language. It is by “situating” the music that Ablinger allows it to escape its status as mere art object.
Ablinger’s work finds itself caught on the horns of this dilemma, producing art that seeks to function as a critique of art. In an interview with Trond Olav Reinholdtsen, he explains, “the reason that visual arts, or, more directly, reality, have been (and remain) my best teachers is my desire to do something that is not immediately art, and cannot be easily categorized. If I had to write for a string quartet, the lid would come down over the box even before the first note was played.” 8 A literal illustration of his words may be found in the ironically titled Zweites Streichquartett (Second String Quartet) (2009-2013). In a first version of this video installation, a fixed shot shows a quartet of veiled women musicians in a street in Mesr, Iran, seated and ready to play. The image is a politically charged one, since women are not allowed to play music in public there. But are they actually playing music? For the entire length of the video, the eye and the ear wait for the first notes of this hypothetical “Second String Quartet” by Peter Ablinger. Nothing happens, though – not a single note, no sound at all but the imperturbable sound of the wind in the microphone. A more recent version of this video shows a split screen with these same images alongside three other string quartets that are just as silent and immobile, in other places and times: the Silesian Quartet seated in the sand by the sea, Neoquartet on a patch of grass beside a busy street, the Sonar Quartett in an indoor passageway. What was disappointing in the first version becomes an arrangement, a composition in the second one. Multiplying this situation of instrumental “silence” by four amplifies the surrounding activity: the background noise, of course, but also the unexpected, unplanned visual accidents. Beside these still and silenced musicians, everything seems incredibly lively: tree leaves quivering in the wind, cars and buses passing in the road, a little girl playing ball and occasionally forcing the musicians in the Sonar Quartett to adjust the positions of their bows… in other words, the here and now is better than tradition, reduced to wax statues.
Is Ablinger entombing musical tradition?, Trond Olav Reinholdtsen demands. Yes, Ablinger responds, without hesitating. If he could, he would. In this we should understand that he is not seeking to destroy the works themselves, but the hierarchies that contain them, the authority figures towering over them, starting with that of the composer. Ablinger’s work might well be dreaming of a world in which being an artist is not the privilege of a handful of individuals, but rather a way of seeing the world in which everyone shares. He quotes Henri Bergson in Laughter: “If reality could come into direct contact with sense and consciousness, if we could enter into immediate communion with things and with ourselves, probably art would be useless, or rather we should all be artists, for then our soul would continually vibrate in perfect accord with nature.”9
Do you notice a mistake?