Repetition/ Change

open doors: 18h30, startt:19h

Concert with Echtzeitmusik and compositions by Ernstalbrecht Stiebler

Ernstalbrecht Stiebler - Composition and Piano

Tilman Kanitz - Cello

Rebecca Lane - Bass flute

Ernstalbrecht Stiebler

Ernstalbrecht Stiebler's inclination towards reductionism was already evident with his first works in the early 1960s, long before the term was coined, and it continued to solidify and articulate itself - until today. To attribute this only to the influence of John Cage, who had already caused a furore in the late 1950s with a more relaxed view of the term music, or of Morton Feldman or Giacinto Scelsi, who in any case only came into Stiebler's field of vision later - and whom he quite explicitly promoted as editor for New Music at the Hessischer Rundfunk - would be to think too simplistically. While the post-serialisms wanted to preserve complexity and recapture expressionism, his first compositions made themselves recognisable by omitting not only tones, but entire creative principles. The breaking of forms - or rather the refusal to form binding narrative forms - lent each sonic turn the grandeur of a musical experience. Less really was more here, and Stiebler preserves this paradox.

In his early works, a closeness to Anton Webern, the great abstractionist of the Second Viennese School, is obvious, but he stood in opposition to the more complex and above all more expressive serialism, whose protagonists such as Boulez, Stockhausen, also Bernd Alois Zimmermann, struggled for a stately, uniquely correct music. A core concept is "space" - the inner and the outer space, that is, what sound does in physical space and equally in the listener - listening is existing. Musician and listener meet in an effort to create a shared moment. Music as a dramatic service is alien to this way of thinking. Stiebler's spaces are formed from extreme precision: in the play of quietness, in the play of the finest alterations of pitch, even in fine variations of seemingly identical sequences. With great concentration, the essence of sound clarifies itself in Stiebler's late work in the prime of his old age, and this has brought his music to the listeners and places of the alternative avant-garde of noise, ambient and the real-time music scene, where a culture of surrendering to sound with body and soul has long existed. That Stiebler's initiation of meticulous listening is also a challenge to the cultivation of classical music has not yet been adequately brought to bear.

Matthias Entreß