Improving the practice and performance of contemporary music

Night Music

From the 1991 rehearsals:
  • The text refers to only two rhythms – that of the universe and that of dreaming. If necessary the transformation process required by the text is something like a third rhythm.
  • About the rhythm of dreaming: This performance instruction is not meant associatively and should be understood just as concretely as similar performance instructions in other texts, which are about the rhythms of molecules and of breathing, for example (CONNECTION, UPWARDS, etc.).
  • A first possibility to understand the meaning of the rhythm of dreaming for a musical realisation is offered by daydreams: A constant vibration is – only – changed in its rhythm, like pictures when daydreaming with eyes closed. In this context, daydreaming means a kind of free thinking that is not bound to a special problem and that is now instrumentally followed with eyes closed. An accent in the vibration indicates that a new picture has appeared in the dream. Each player concentrates on his own, current dream, not on a memory of a dream and its rhythm.
  • About the rhythm of the universe: The rhythms of the universe are the rhythms outside of the human body, for example very slow, non-‘human-body’ rhythms that cannot be sung, as is possible with breathing and walking, for example. They are comparable with the invisible movements of the stars, they are universal rhythms (see also the composition STERNKLANG).
  • The visual notion of a constellation can be – as it is visually imagined – portrayed rhythmically (see star constellations in AWAKE).
  • Rhythms of the universe are also our notion of planet-rotation in the universe transformed into musical shapes.
  • “Everyone ONLY ONE vibration (in the rhythm of the universe)”
  • The performance instruction requires a specific concentration on the rhythmic problem it presents. It is not absolutely necessary to produce an acoustic atmosphere reminiscent of “science-fiction” or an “outer-space-film”.
  • The rhythm of dreaming requires the “honest transmittal of what exists”. You should think about someone with eyes closed, for example, see images pass by in the current performance situation and not retrieve vague memories of the rhythms of your own dreams. But the stellar universal rhythms require a more associative, not exactly measurable transmission into the concretely musical. However, the intuitive texts are not metaphors that suggest improvising in a particular direction.
  • The transformation of the dreaming rhythm leads back to the first rhythm – but not necessarily to the same vibration, the sound can be freely chosen.
  • The rhythm of dreaming is volatile and irregular.
  • The rhythm of the universe is cyclical, periodic and extremely slow/ in large distances (so that there is no impression of monotony).