Hans Thomalla

If you had to describe what the audience will experience when they enter the space, what would you say?

 

When the audience enters the space, they’ll find themselves immersed in a one-hour, fully acoustic and visual environment. The idea behind the piece was to create music where the audience doesn’t simply observe from a distance, but sits among the musicians. There’s a subtle light choreography involved as well–lights change throughout, essentially shaping the space through light. Once the music begins, the audience embarks on a journey through a slowly evolving soundscape. It starts with ambient-like textures and gradually develops into more complex musical structures. This is, in essence, a short introduction to what the audience will experience.

 

The organization of the piece rests on large contrasts. In the beginning, we get a first glimpse of that: on the one hand, very banal, simple musical structures–slowly evolving piano scales–and on the other hand, almost creature-like screams in the percussion.

These kinds of contrasts carry through the entire piece. On a more direct level, we hear these scales starting at the beginning–musical materials that are almost too simple to be music, commonplace objects, banal objects–and they start to develop. They build resonance, little echoes, little tails that keep sounding after the sound has disappeared.

 

Slowly the music evolves from a landscape of almost found, banal, commonplace objects to more and more individuated, characteristic musical figures. In the first half of the piece, that builds up–a quite long process. And then comes a cut, and we hear very fleeting objects again, motifs. I’m interested in motifs, but they pass by and drift through the form, almost too fleetingly to grab them.

 

The second movement starts with a very loud wall of noise, all instruments creating distorted sounds–really loud, scream-like sounds. But through this wall of noise, little things shine through. And by little things, I mean musical objects, musical memories–quite literally, memories from my musical upbringing.

 

Also from my own music. Not that that matters to the audience, but from a sort of culturally shared memory. These objects come more to the foreground, but eventually they again slip into becoming noise themselves. They become distorted, overpressured. At times, that process repeats. And the second time, it sort of leads to a gigantic outburst of activity–all the scales we heard before, the little figures, now as one large explosion, a nightly firework of materials–until this fades out again into a quiet sound space.

 

But certain objects will be clearly connecting us to the beginning of the piece.

 

I’m describing this in so much detail because the title of the piece is Nachtmusik (Night Music). And I was interested in writing music where objects are not clearly defined right away. They are either not clearly defined because they’re so general–like a scale: it’s not really a melody, it’s too general–or because they are too quiet and fleeting, or because they’re just the result of too much pressure–a scream–or the material.

 

So: to write music with these materials before they even become objects. And, on the other hand, to really go far with the idea of contrast. We know contrasts from all kinds of music–it’s part of the musical repertoire–but in this piece, I wanted to create quite extreme contrast. Not just between loud and soft, and high and low, and so on, or fast and slow, but really between objects that seem to be from completely different planets. And so that was kind of the formal process.

 

It means that the audience doesn’t sit just in the hall on chairs while the ensemble is on the stage–the ensemble sits partly up and among the audience, and the audience sits partly on the stage, so that we’re really sitting between the musicians.

And that is, for me, quite important because it’s not just a spatial concept. It’s really also related to the content of the piece. In classical music, we’re used to sitting vis-à-vis the music, which makes it, in a way, a monologue. The instruments on stage play down to us, in the audience, depending on where you sit.

 

And it’s a one-directional path of information. Of course, in this case, the audience doesn’t play music. But we are sitting in the music, so it’s much more about being surrounded by it. And it’s, in the end, much more democratic. I would almost say it’s an experience where it’s not told to you what you should listen to, but you’re really in a landscape and can focus acoustically, focus on all kinds of things. You’re part of the sound and not in front of it.

 

It was clear for me and the ensemble from the beginning that to have a truly immersive, ambient experience of music, we have to do a bit more work than just move the instruments around. And so the initial idea was a new light setup as a form of support for the experience.

 

That helps us to really let go of this idea of being in a concert in a traditional sense. To broaden the sound space through the aid of light–that was a must-have.

 

A fantastic light artist is involved, too. It’s not just illuminating some instruments from time to time or making the room a bit more ambient, but really staging the space and almost telling a story through the means of light.

 

For me, it’s a bit of a challenge because, knowing that we will have light, at some point I really wanted to reduce the musical activity to make space. I’ve done a lot of opera, I’ve done a lot of theater. It’s something you learn if you work with different media: you have to make space for the other medium from time to time, and do less with the music. So I try to have these moments as well. It also might have to do with the content of the piece. The night is sometimes also very quiet and still and inactive, and to leave space for these dark and quiet moments was quite important.

 

How »spatial« is this as a composition–in what sense is it a special kind of writing, compared to a standard concert setup? What did the spatial dimension make possible musically?

 

The simplest answer is that the spatial setup makes it possible to let musical motives move through space. We know this since Stockhausen and Nono, and from opera, and pieces like Chroma by Rebecca Saunders. I mean, there’s a long tradition of this–simply moving instruments away from a linear scene on the stage into the entire hall. It gives us the possibility to let musical objects move through space.

 

In terms of content, there is, for me, a very deep philosophical aspect tied to this. Almost twenty years ago, I became quite interested in nature recordings–and I’m still doing nature recordings–and there are all kinds of online forums and newsgroups about this. A lot of their users are birdwatchers who record birds, and they have microphones that are extremely directional, where you can, from a hundred feet away, pick out that one bird up in that tree and record that call.

 

And it became very quickly clear to me that I’m not interested in this kind of nature recording. I’m always interested in nature as an ecosystem, where that bird is in relation to the sound that frog down here makes, and the wind over there makes, and my breathing in the center of all of this makes. It was clear to me: I want to record ecosystems.

 

Ecosystems are not linear in front of you–they’re all around you, above you, below you, and inside of you. And so to write music where we experience almost an acoustic ecosystem for one hour is something that interests me.

 

But this is not always a friendly ecosystem, and it’s also one in which human activity is very strongly involved. There is a very strong, aggressive, industrial and mechanically produced noise that is part of this ecosystem.

 

All of these experiences tie back to this form of spatial setup, where instruments are really around us. For us humans, an ecosystem also involves memory. It’s not just physical space in front of me, but also historic space–the space of all the objects that I’ve seen, I’ve heard, and also maybe that I desire and project into the future. These are all part of my ecosystem. And I wanted to kind of create that, and tell the story of what happens in this ecosystem.

 

Night music has a long history–do you feel you’re entering a genre, or questioning it?

 

I have no doubt that I’m entering the genre of night music. And I love a lot of night music–say, Chopin’s nocturnes, which I actually quoted in this music, although that’s probably inaudible. But Bartók’s night music, or Charles Ives’s acoustic landscapes, are all part of my musical history and cultural memory. Of course, I’m also interested in making my own little contribution to this genre.

 

If you think of Chopin’s nocturnes, it’s a very bourgeois genre. That’s people playing at home at the piano, mostly for themselves, or for a small group. My piece is much more public, starting with the ensemble. It’s a large group of musicians, and the instrumentation is much more powerful–closer to a band than to the intimacy of a home piano–with accordion and saxophone and trumpet, very loud trombone, percussion, and so on. And everything is amplified.

 

That’s the other aspect of night music, and for me personally, that’s a quite important aspect as well. There is a relatively new genre of night music, which is club music, of course. And certain aspects of this piece clearly are in relation to that. The idea of almost annihilation–of individual experience becoming part of a more trance-like experience of music–is very much part of this piece as well. And playing with this ambivalence of letting go into an ecstatic experience, but also not fully losing yourself: finding yourself, and pulling yourself back out of it. This is part of the narrative of this piece as well.

 

I wrote this piece at the Villa Massimo, at the German Academy in Rome–beautiful, huge ateliers. And I had a little idea board with photos of the night, and poetry, little thoughts, philosophical ideas.

 

But one photo was from a nightclub: the tape over the camera on an iPhone, the idea that you can’t make photos. And I like this. This is an open, free space for the night, where you’re not watched, where you’re not controlled, not censored.

 

And I felt this is a nice metaphor, even musically, where anything goes in this piece. There are musical materials that are almost too banal, too kitschy, so far outside of new music that it was very difficult to integrate them into a larger narrative. But I felt I should take this photo, where no censorship is expressed. I should take that seriously and try to stay with this in the piece. That was another aspect of night music that I wanted to really pursue.

 

What does »night« mean to you here? Is it more like a place, a time, a psychological state? Or even a political metaphor? Is it more about the safe space, or a nightmare?

 

I would say all of the above. It’s a musical genre with a metaphorical aspect–a genre that is, unlike the sonata, clearly contextualized with some kind of meaning. I don’t write message music. I also don’t write conceptual music. I don’t want to pin it down. But there are clearly certain aspects in there that relate to our world on different levels. Most clearly, I think, in this idea of contrast. And it’s, by the way, not something that I set out to do and then write the music about. It often becomes clear to me in the compositional process.

We live in a time where contrasts are increasingly sharpened and hardened. I come from America–I live more than half of the year in Chicago–and it is so obvious that it’s a society where contrasts are getting harder and harder.

 

And so I wanted to write music that finds a language for this. It’s something that I’m aware of now: I am very interested in very slow developments of material, for a really long time. We are used to musical development–it’s a core category of Western music. How do individual musical figures develop?

 

I think there is something interesting about having a very pronounced figure that develops very, very slowly, almost too slowly to notice. And I think that relates to our world as well, where very important things happen at a speed that is very difficult for us to interact with. From global warming, and the economic development of the last 30 years that has really affected all of us, to large-scale geopolitical developments. Large financial developments or crises affect everybody’s life, but they’re often too slow for us to interact with and interfere with them. And I wanted to write music that is related to that.

 

During my year at the Villa Massimo, I sometimes played grand piano with my neighbor Malika, and we played Bruckner. He’s still from a time of individual development of figures–he’s so close to Wagner–but it sometimes happens on a very, almost pre-modern temporal level. And I’m sure my piece also grew out of our playing Bruckner.

 

These are all aspects of night that I wanted to articulate. At the same time, the night is also, of course, a metaphor for the time where you suspend everything. In the night, all activity stops. Everyday life stops to some degree. And it gives you time to dream, to reflect, to have an idea of more hope in relation to the world–but also to be more vulnerable, and really experience the pain and suffering that is all around you in a much more direct way.

 

It kind of happened. I was starting to write this, working with this very slow development and large contrast, and suddenly it became clear to me: this is a night music. Somehow connected with the place where I wrote it–it has a beautiful park with very quiet nights, where you could hear crickets and trees, but it’s in the middle of a bustling European metropolis, with all this historic contrast that Rome brings. That, I think, had an impact on this piece.

 

The description also hints at an analogy with »dark times«–does Nachtmusik respond to the present moment directly? What does it mean for music to »respond« without turning into illustration?

 

It’s a good question. Respond… I didn’t even think about this category. I don’t think music is particularly good at working through all the contradictions of our time in a discursive, analytical way. Probably essays or documentary films could do this much better. What music can do is sometimes place in front of us the multiplicities of experience we’re in–the contradictions, the contrasts, all the different layers that are constantly part of our lives.

 

I think music is quite good at letting us experience this. And–for me, the most important aspect–it has the ability to let us emotionally express, or at least confront, these experiences. Those are the areas that I try to tangle with, to find my way through with music.

 

We are clearly, in some way or another, affectively, emotionally touched by what’s going on around us. I speak of dark times. For me, living in America, it’s quite obviously living in dark times. And if you’re in Berlin–a city of many refugees who come from places that have become darker–this is also a crucial aspect of our world right now.

 

And music lets us experience this. Not explain it, not give answers, but give affective confrontations with the situation we’re in. And what we then, as listeners, do with that is quite different–and that’s not my job. It’s up to everybody else. I’m really more interested in setting the place up.

 

Also, there is a utopian aspect of music. It doesn’t just describe the status quo or the situation we’re in–music also has the possibility of being counterfactual, building another world through sound. And I think everybody who fell in love with music at some point in their life has experienced music as a different form of organization, a different form of order–not just music as emotional expression, but also as a different world.

 

And I hope that, to some degree, my music–and new music in general–is part of this project: a counterfactual space that I’m quite interested in.

 

Your piece is »for ensemble in space and light«. How do modern composers work with light? At what point did lighting enter your compositional process–from day one, or only after the musical material already existed?

 

I can’t speak about other composers, but I didn’t really work with light in this. It’s Marcel Verba who composed with light. I wrote a piece in which I knew there would be light. And then, at certain points in the process, we started to meet and talk about the project. Sometimes something happens with my sonic ideas in that regard, but that’s the only degree of collaboration we have. A lot of the interconnection of the sound and the light happens quite late in the rehearsal process.

 

For me, collaboration often works that way–leaving a lot of free space for the other. I’m not a Stockhausen/Wagner Gesamtkunstwerk composer who wants to create everything.

 

Does darkness play a role in this space, and in what way?

 

Maybe I can answer this from the sonic perspective. On the one hand, darkness is a kind of silence: we don’t hear any object, we don’t see any object. And on the other hand, extreme loud noise also masks, covers all kinds of individual figures. And this kind of noise plays a strong role in the piece–when the distortion is so strong that it wipes out the possibility for clarity, contour, a face.

 

You’ve written several music-theatre works–does Nachtmusik continue that laboratory, just without singers and text?

 

All my music is connected in some way. The big difference, of course, with the operas–particularly lately–is that they’re becoming really quite narrative. In my latest operas, I really want to tell stories.

 

And that is different from music that doesn’t have a libretto. Nachtmusik is not a program music. I didn’t have a program. I followed musical materials, and I created developments for musical materials. Of course, these musical materials are in relation to our lives, and music is not fully abstract. Often, in some way or another, it relates to our experience–expressions, forms of communication, our physical, bodily activity.

 

So there is clearly something happening in the music that relates to what’s happening in our lives–my life, your life, the life of the audience. But it’s not spelled out as a story. And so, in that regard, it’s quite different. What I’m interested in, of course, is other kinds of experience than just a traditional concert concept. I think that’s probably something I will continue.

 

Also, I feel the traditional concert–with ten-minute pieces, three, then intermission, then three more–is a category that is really difficult to make interesting in our time. Of course, I’ve heard beautiful concerts that still function that way because the musical content is so strong, or the performance is so strong. But I’m more interested in creating acoustic experiences–visual, spatial, light-acoustic experiences.

 

Do you think of the lighting concept as a kind of staging–and the space as a kind of scenography?

 

I clearly thought about it in terms of staging–a stage in a theatrical sense. A theatrical stage is a fascinating place because it puts bodies in context with each other, in relation with each other, but also in relation with an environment, and lets us, that way, experience relations–and learn about them. That is the magic of a stage.

 

We are constantly in all kinds of contexts–personal ones, historic ones, political and social ones. And the stage is a place where these contexts and these relations are acted out. So that is something that interests me musically, of course. And musical objects are also like figures, like characters. Every Mozart sonata is like a mini stage.

 

The entrance of a piano in a piano concerto is like the entrance of a protagonist in an opera, and so on. These relations are real. And so that’s something I’m interested in: to create the staging of musical figures that we, as an audience, can then hear as relations.

 

This happens in traditional concert music as well. But I think in a time of blurred contours, and a lot of unclarity about what things are, it helps to be quite explicit. Maybe that’s the theatre artist in me. I want to make things really clear, explicit, and pronounced.

What did working with Ensemble LuxNM make possible here–technically, sonically?

 

I’m really grateful for LuxNM for the fascinating instrumentation. These seven instruments are completely different characters from different contexts. From the grand piano, the pinnacle of Western classical music, to the accordion which comes from a folk music background but also maybe a more Eastern European background. Then the saxophone, which has such a rich history related to jazz, but also so good in producing sound that cracks open, organized Western pitches into more multiphonics and so on. The brass is usually so exposed in orchestral settings. And so that was my real gratefulness for just having this fascinating setup. And the eighth person, the sound engineer that comes with them.

 

We work with amplification, which for me is the most important category of music in the last 50 years. We’re constantly surrounded by microphones. And it’s something I really want to work with quite actively.

 

The music is sometimes so simple that these tiny details really matter. Details of sound production, balance and so on. It’s very difficult for musicians to play in far distance in a space for a purely acoustic, physical reason. If you’re far away from another, there is a delay in the sound coming to your ears, so it’s very hard to be together and having a ensemble that is quite open to this is wonderful. But also having a ensemble that is open to the technical means that you need–like in-ear monitors with clicktrack–you need really modern, in terms of these technical now-how, group. And I’m quite happy that LuxNM is going that way with me.

 

For someone who knows nothing about contemporary music–why should they come to listen to Nachtmusik?

 

They should come to Nachtmusik because it lets them experience a really rich and wild, but also intimate and quiet sound world that in some way or another has to do with their life and hopefully speaks to and about the experience they have today.

 

That said, it’s not really new music with capital N and and capital M. In the last 10 or 15 years I have moved away from some of the stereotypes of new music. The first half of the piece is quite tonal. I’m more worried of the new music expectations being frustrated than the classical music or pop music concert goers being shocked by what they hear. Of course, that will develop a little bit in the course of the piece, but I think Nachtmusik is quite open to anybody who is interested in hearing affectively, emotionally charged sounds in space.