Improving the practice and performance of contemporary music

Meeting Point

From the 1991 rehearsals:
  • Many texts (like this one) demand continuous music that cannot be attained by using motivic-thematic conventions, pre-existing patterns or musical styles.
  • “I have no style! And especially not the same style in several pieces!”
  • A realisation of MEETING POINT should consider the specific possibilities of a piano that might be included, for example, because it cannot play the required continuous tones played by the other instruments. In this case, the pianist has to work with repeated tones (at the beginning like a slow, irregular Morse-code).
  • Also the inner articulation of a tone, the rhythmic structure of a pitch is part of its character.
  • Avoid conventional triads and “slip out” of these tonal structures immediately (“I never would have written that”).
  • The ensemble has to swing into a common tone after a short time and form “an acoustic sculpture together” that is “fluid, not solid”.
  • Difference: actually being led away by a tone, versus reflex-like, instinctive musical reaction.
  • You should lead away from the tone just as often as you return to it.
  • If you encounter familiar patterns or sounds, then they should be replaced or changed by more abstract intervals (sevenths, ninths, intervals that are clearly larger than an octave, etc.). “Then you insert a crooked edge.”
  • “This ‘do not leave it’ (...) is a suggestion of polyphony in the piano and the synthesizer, because they can play more than two or more tones at the same time. But for the melody instruments it means using the hocket technique.”
  • The ‘do not leave it’ means that “I always also blend in the original tone, so I don’t forget it. It actually means that you have the first, common tone as the second layer when you go somewhere else.”
  • “You have to imagine that a story is being told in a musical, if abstract way, i.e. that an organism takes place during that time: a tone distances itself and then comes back.” This process has to be comprehendible.