Tim Rutherford-Johnson: Axel and Bernd, how did you first come across John’s music?
Axel Linder: I was pointed to John’s music by a GIMIK friend. He knew that I was focusing on minimal music at the time, two years ago, and he gave me this [edition rz] CD of instrumental works featuring lots of Cologne musicians. It was particularly one piece that I was interested in, love really, Exchanges for soprano and string quartet.
TRJ: And did you go into the electronic pieces after that?
AL: Yes. Maybe later. There’s a Feedback Studio CD with electronic works [25 Jahre Feedback Studio] which includes Pulse Music 1. That was the next thing.
BH: When I studied in Cologne in the 1990s, John’s music had a certain presence for me because I was in contact with Johannes Fritsch and the Feedback Studio and I mainly studied with Clarence Barlow, a friend of John’s who had founded GIMIK a couple of years before. GIMIK and Feedback were located in the same house in Cologne. That was a venue where there was a lot of exchange among different composers. I didn’t meet John personally at that time, but I was familiar with Pulse Music, which was the most well-known piece of his. He was still working with the WDR electronic music studio, and I was, by chance, in the studio when he was producing A Cappella, with the sound of the voice of his wife [Beth Griffith]. So I had some insight into the production of A Cappella, which was very interesting.
In the 1990s, there were a lot of different influences—not only the local ones but also the global ones. John’s music had a unique standing at that time because it was really different; because if one kind of music was not as influential in Cologne, it was minimal music. The American minimal composers were not as influential in Cologne as, for example, Cage, Feldman.
TRJ: Were you sympathetic to it then?
BH: Yes. Because I was into computer music, I had begun to program, and had studied works by Barlow, but also the older generation like Iannis Xenakis. And from my point of view, John was an early composer who thought in a way like an algorithmic composer would think: very systematic, systemic, deductive, architectural, holistic. He had the bigger picture in mind.
TRJ: Obviously, there’s quite a bit of overlap in how the electronic pieces and the double string trio pieces are structured. But I also think writing for acoustic instruments does something strange to John’s music. There’s a space that opens up: you don’t have the absolute precision of rhythms and timbres, but something different comes to it. What’s your experience of that difference?
AL: I remember when we had the very first rehearsal together, we did Double Bars to start with, we immediately got into it and had a good beginning, so the musicians said, “ah, this is like a Vivaldi sound.” And this is my impression of all three pieces somehow. That they contain musical figures that may appear in Classical or Romantic music, but of course the difference is that they are the only thing that ever happens, all of which makes the form. But each pattern may be heard like a little snippet of Classical music. That to me is the main difference.
TRJ: Do the players respond to that, in the way that they phrase it? Are they playing it as though it were Classical music?
AL: Playground, for example, which was by far the most difficult piece to do, the reference that came up for us there was Beethoven, like a passage that could be a short build-up in a Beethoven symphony. And this piece has a rather unorganic move that the players have to do all the time, this jumping bow figure, with the accents across the bars [gestures] … . It was hard to feel the pulse within the jumping motives. Double Bars has a more dance-like character to it, which made it easier to play and feel a “groove.” These are two very different ways of feeling the rhythm.
In the end, we went for a very Classical approach, a very full sound in all three pieces. There is Classical phrasing I would say on Playground—and maybe on Jump Cuts and Double Bars, where possible we would go for this dance-like, more groovy character with light and heavy articulation.
BH: I would emphasise the similarities, but as an extension of what Axel said, what was very present for me in these pieces, especially regarding instrumentation, is the systematic exploitation of registers. You hear every possible combination of register within the trio. And also the density of events and figurations is always varied in different registers, which also in a way has something to do with his electronic music because it is about this idea of exploiting possibilities.
I would say that the most interesting similarity for me is actually what you might call this synthesis of seriality and tonality, or serialism and minimalism. For me, minimalism doesn’t have to be tonal, but in John’s music tonality seems to be a very important aspect that spreads over all his pieces. But also interesting as an aspect of serialism is his extension of Stockhausen’s idea of the continuity of pitch and rhythm, in the sense that the tempo modulations that John composes are a continuous projection of the interval relations, which you also hear in the tonal relations. He projects the same idea into different timescales. This presented a certain challenge for the strings in the form of the cadences, or the changes between sections. Because there were intonation problems, in the sense that the pieces come from a just intonation background, just as the electronic pieces do.
TRJ: Yes, in the electronic pieces, those cadences are just like flicking a bunch of switches to get into a different harmonic and temporal space. But with an acoustic ensemble, it’s not that easy. Axel, presumably those moments are one of the biggest challenges in putting the music together?
AL: For me, it was a challenge putting together the rehearsals. First of all, getting the patterns right, within the sections, and then doing the tempo changes from one section to the next. It was a bit didactic, actually—there was lots of real practicing, rather than playing. You find these methods to reduce the problems before playing through.
There’s one big difference between Jump Cuts and the other two pieces. In Playground and Double Bars, each voice contains octave jumps, and of course getting the octave right for each player himself is a challenge, and then it has to be perfect with the consonant chords that for with the rest of the ensemble. Jump Cuts at least doesn’t have that problem.
TRJ: After all that practice, when it came time to put it all together was it a case of thinking about the whole piece, and just letting the changes happen automatically?
AL: Yes and no, because we only had the opportunity to play the pieces once. It was a very good idea to have the recording day right before the concert, because that meant we had one really intense day of doing section-by-section transitions and then there was a performance. That was a good contrast. But there definitely was a progression from the first performance to the last, even in terms of feeling the form.
TRJ: What was the background to those concerts? I believe Walter Zimmermann was involved as well?
BH: Walter was the initiator. He had the idea to develop a present for John’s 80th birthday. He was aware that there was one piece [Jump Cuts] of the trilogy which had already been premiered, but premieres had to be organised for the two other pieces. And he wanted to initiate this. Marc Sabat mentioned us; he was joining GIMIK for another project for string ensemble, also conducted by Axel. At that time, we had fourteen players and we had commissioned a piece from Marc and some other pieces. So Walter just contacted me to ask if we would like the idea—and then of course I was interested because I am fond of John’s music in general, and Axel was very much interested. Co-artistic director Siegfried Koepf and Tonmeister Hendrik Manook completed our team to manage the project.
TRJ: And when it came to making the recordings, did you have a particular aesthetic idea behind how you wanted to do this? Axel mentioned the Classical feel of these pieces, that warmth of sound. But there’s also a spatial element mentioned in the scores, with the two trios positioned at some distance from each other.
BH: The first decision was where we would record. And we were quickly convinced that the music would work well in the Kunst-Station Sankt Peter Köln, which is a Romanesque church that is very well known in Cologne for contemporary music and art. John’s music had been performed there many times before, also often in his presence. So he knew the room and he was immediately convinced that we should do it there. It is of course quite reverberant, but we had the idea to place the ensemble right in the middle of the room, so the reflection would be quite far away and we could take the signal with close mics—we wanted a recording where we had quite a lot of direct sound—but we had also spherical mics that picked up all the reflections as well. Basically, we wanted a mixture of a very present, crisp sound but also a very warm, reverberating overall mixture.
TRJ: And what about the spatial aspect?
BH: The legend of the score suggests having some space between the trios, so that the players are arranged in a V-shape—with the conductor opposite or in front of the vanishing point, as it were!—but we couldn’t realise it like this because of the musical communication.
AL: With more time, I think we could have explored that. It was more of a practical decision to sit together, not very far apart. In almost a half-circle.
BH: Recording in the Kunst-Station Sankt Peter, it was clear that its acoustic implications would only make it possible to realise the geometry indicated in the score and a corresponding listening experience to a limited extent. However, we made sure that we had a certain amount of leeway in post-production to create the illusion of a broader panorama.
TRJ: A striking aspect of John’s music is that the individual layers are always very distinct: in the electronic pieces you can hear every pulse in its own register and timbre.
BH: We were aware of this in terms of choosing the right takes for the edit. We really tried to find the takes where the transparency was best, in terms that you could really follow with the score what you heard.
TRJ: Transparency is exactly the right word. Was that a challenge for the players, Axel? I imagine string players are often thinking about creating a homogenous sound, but in this music, they need to be a bit more separated?
AL: Maybe both, actually. We tried to reach the best possible balance between transparency on the rhythmical patterns and a homogenous string sound altogether. For rhythmical transparency, we really worked on what would be the best bow patterns, for example.
TRJ: Something that really intrigues me about John’s music is the beginnings and ends of things—and I asked John about this as well. With an ensemble, the mentality is different from an electronic piece; the way that something begins is different, and that it ends—it doesn’t just stop. You have players thinking “we’ve got four bars to go, we’ve got two bars to go … ” Was that something that you encountered when you were performing and rehearsing, Axel?
AL: Yes. With all of the performances, we practiced getting right into it, as if it was already there before we were playing, and now we jump in with the sound. And the same for the end. And actually a little bit for each passage. We tried to imagine that each tempo segment was running by itself and we were just jumping into it. That was often the challenge of course, sometimes for reasons related to how we were used to doing it, or being tired in the arm, or whatever. We tried to find the balance between the mechanical character and a breathing, organic sound aesthetic. For practicing, we had a very tiny pause before the section changes—and then after a while we said let it get it smaller.
TRJ: John, Jump Cuts is the earliest of these three pieces. What can you share about its background?
John McGuire: The first sketches for Jump Cuts are from 2009. They are not for double string trio, but for a mixed ensemble of clarinets, horns and strings. As ideas for the piece developed the ensemble changed many times. First the clarinets were eliminated, then the horns until I was left with 16 strings, then 12, 8 and finally the two trios. As far as I could tell, this ensemble would be capable of carrying all the ideas I had for the piece. The antiphonal arrangement came from my interest in finding ways to place the listener inside the sound, and from the obvious fact, whose effect I often observed in electronic studios, that we are bilaterally symmetrical listeners. It also stems from my experience with the 16th century antiphonal brass music that I had performed as a teenager every summer for six years playing French horn at a music camp in California. In one way or another that music influenced everything I did in composition later on.
TRJ: And then you were obviously drawn back not once, but twice, to the same medium for Double Bars and Playground. What particularly appeals about double string trio as a setting for your music?
JM: After finishing Jump Cuts I simply wanted to write another piece. I had no idea what it was going to be. I began making sketches, trying out notations and instrumentation until by trial, error and process of elimination to my surprise the double trio returned—this time more quickly than was the case with Jump Cuts. The ensemble seemed adequate for the exploration of the subject that I was interested in at the time: dynamics, in the form of a phase-shifted polyphony of dynamic envelopes. The piece became Double Bars. It wasn’t until the third piece, Playground, that I set out from the beginning with a double string trio in mind.
In other words, I chose an ensemble that I thought could embody all of the subjects I wished to explore: in Jump Cuts it was a special kind of Fibonacci-based time structure, an extension of work I had done in my earlier A Cappella and Exchanges; in Double Bars it was phase-shifting dynamics and in Playground it was a ground pattern whose repetitions take place in twelve different successive keys, moving in sections through the circle of fifths. The ground pattern balances major and minor in a symmetry that I interpret as deriving from the geometry of the circle of fifths.
TRJ: There are clearly other elements from your electronic music that carry over, but could you say a little more about those?
JM: What may be most important to me is the experience of immersion in sound. My first experience of this was as a 10-year-old, seated in the center of the first row in a concert of the Los Angeles Philharmonic. I was immersed in a semicircle of cellos, violas and violins with many other sounds outside the semicircle. I don’t know what music it was, but it brought me an unalloyed joy that I think I may have been searching for, trying to relive, ever since.
And then there were the movies. I grew up near Los Angeles in the 1950s, a moviegoer from age 3. The movie inventions of the time—cinerama, cinemascope, 3D, sensurround, all aimed at audience immersion—had their effects on an impressionable youth. This doesn’t answer the question except perhaps to give some idea of what I tend to look for, be it electronic or instrumental or some combination thereof, in music. Electronics often seems like the most direct way of approaching this but there is no certainty.
TRJ: I have seen you describe these pieces as a trilogy. Is there more to this than the obvious connection in terms of instrumentation?
JM: There are shared characteristics and considerations, some of which I have already mentioned. To name another: There is a deliberate simplicity of instrumental technique which I can only describe in negative terms: there are no “special effects” but also no multiple stops, pizzicati or harmonics. Why this? I don’t really know but it may have something to do with 1966–1968: the two years spent studying with Penderecki.
Apart from the shared characteristics there is no overall design, introduction, dramaturgy, conclusion, algorithm or the like.
When I began work on Jump Cuts I had no idea where the project was going. The idea of referring to the three pieces as a “trilogy” didn’t occur to me until after the pieces were finished. Even then it was nothing more than a simple way to refer to them as a group.
TRJ: I’ve asked Axel and Bernd about this, but I’ll ask you too. Two things that do seem to require a different approach in your instrumental music are the beginnings and endings. With an electronic piece—108 Pulses is perhaps the extreme version of this—it seems easier for the music to start “cold,” as if just pressing “play” on a sequencer. And then vice versa at the end. But an instrumental piece feels like it needs to introduce itself into the world, and depart from it, with a greater sense of intentionality. I wonder how you think about the beginning and endings of your pieces, and whether that differs for an instrumental piece—or do you leave it to the players to work that side out?
JM: In my view 108 Pulses is not a “piece” so much as a loop that I used as a way of searching for the possibilities and implications of the technology being used to make it. The process was all trial and error with no thought of beginning or ending apart from the beginning or ending of the loop—which only lasts a few seconds but whose beginning and ending overlap to such an extent that they are difficult for the listener (including me) to find. What are these beginnings and endings? In this case they are what I call “coincidence points,” i.e., points where two or more sounding layers of different duration, after given numbers of repetitions, come together—coincide. Such points mark beginnings and endings and are identical. The image that I was playing with was that of a rotating crystal within a rotating crystal, continuously exhibiting new facets, new events without recourse to dramatic devices but instead inviting the listener to enter the sound world and to discover his or her own music: I was trying to find what might be called a highly determined indeterminacy, based entirely on perception.
This approach can help to determine not only details of a given music but simultaneously its overall form. In the structure of Jump Cuts, for example, there are six 14-part groups of durations and seven 12-part groups of pitches. In this way the piece is simply a single 6 against 7 phase cycle composed of 84 active sections.
TRJ: When you write for electronics, you can presumably check how the music sounds pretty quickly as you work on it. Is this important for you? Did you look for the same thing (e.g. through MIDI realisations etc.) when writing the string pieces?
JM: One of the things that fascinates me about electronic music is the possibility of designing sounds “from scratch”—i.e., starting with the micro-world of elemental components such as sine tones in a process known as “additive synthesis,” or with pulses as in “granular synthesis” or both in combination. These techniques and others had been researched extensively throughout the 1950s in the Cologne WDR studio where I was working off and on in the late 1970s–1990s. In my case, the reason for this approach was to discover which timbres and combinations of timbres would seem to best embody the time structures that I had in mind, and vice-versa. It requires a great deal of careful listening to the spectra and to the identifying attack transients and their multitude of possible superimpositions. It is a time-consuming process which was made possible by the generous working conditions in the WDR studio.
These kinds of necessities are less acute in music for acoustic instruments, in which sound spectra, attack transients etc. are “preset” and the emphasis in composing has more to do with the “macro-world” than with the scrutinizing of phenomena that in previous eras had gone unchallenged.
TRJ: Are these pieces recorded with a click track, or do you allow a little rubato into the playing?
JM: Sometimes a click track is necessary to hold things together but wherever possible I would rather defer to the ears and sensitivities of humans.
TRJ: Unfortunately you weren’t able to attend the performances that Axel conducted in Germany. But could you say a little about how what it means for you to have these pieces out in the world?
JM: In recent years I have had some difficulties with my health; cardiovascular issues had made extended travel difficult and a little dangerous.
Jump Cuts was premiered in 2013 by the Ensemble Modern in Frankfurt. I had sent the score to Stefan Fricke at the Hessische Rundfunk and he passed it on to the Ensemble Modern who then programmed it. The next pieces, Double Bars and Playground, written between 2012 and 2020, were premiered as a result of my friend Walter Zimmermann having contacted friends of his in Cologne about arranging a concert for my 80th birthday. The ensemble, assembled in Cologne for that concert, later also recorded Jump Cuts. This all turned out very well and has proved to be a wonderful, rewarding collaboration. For me two things stand out: the exhilarating feeling of adventure that comes with composing, and the many shared experiences when the music is “out in the world.” Together they amount to a great (if poorly paid) job.
