MaerzMusik

There’s a marked element of excess thought surrounding this adventurous ten-day Berlin festival of “moderne” composition. Its schedule is loaded with afternoon discussions, panels, laboratories, and general conceptual wrangling, but much of the evening performances are emphatically visceral, jagged, unpredictable, and disobedient toward implied traditional staging requirements of new works.

A few of the highlighted composers appear to border on an anti-academic, almost outsider stance. The reasonably obscure Polish-American Lucia Dlugoszewski (1925–2000) provided the most on-edge material during your scribe’s stay. Dlugoszewski studied with Edgard Varèse, achieving large-scale attention in the 1970s, but with her reputation suffering from time’s erosion down the subsequent decades.

Dlugoszewski was heavily involved with poetry and dance, but the four works chosen for Ensemble Musikfabrik’s gig at the industrially styled Radialsystem maintained a focus on purely aural manifestation. A frosted character crept into Dlugoszewski’s first piece, “Amor Elusive Empty August,” the woodwind quintet (substituting bass clarinet) emitting an aura of harsh asceticism. The bass clarinetist brought some literal light toward the end; initially, your scribe assumed that he was heading for a smoking break, but in the end he was only lighting fleeting matches in a vain attempt to heat up this steely composition.

Following the first of two short pauses, all improved astoundingly, as we moved into three exceptional compositions. “Dazzle on a Knife’s Edge” must have sounded revolutionary in 1968, even when assuming that its partly graphic score has been recently refined. Musikfabrik expanded with two percussionists (Dirk Rothbrust, Ramón Gardella) and Benjamin Kobler, his “timbre-piano” prepared, significantly enlarging sonic possibilities. Trumpet and trombone also led a rhythmic pulse-charge, imbuing the piece with a runaway energy. A snapped metal sheet, whiplash cardboard, and a Chinese pellet-drum widened the scope of active details, as the composition developed a Louis Andriessen insistence, the piano as cimbalom, with its interior spatula hits.

“Black Lake” followed, for trio of conjoined clarinets and violin, all tearing up to slip and slide and glide, while ratchet and bells scattered, along with the continuing resourcefulness of the prepared piano, tiny gestures abounding, forming an abstraction endowed with propulsion. “Cantilever II” climaxed the evening, reveling in fragmentation, and possessed by a cascading rhythmic drive, with a cutting flute trim and aggressively hammering piano like a parody of a concerto, horns punching low with broken fanfare shards, clumping along a twisted, ungainly structural spine. It sounded like Dlugoszewski was hearing a conventional classical progression then actively derailing it into spiky, just-controlled chaos.

The following night’s concert by EnsembleKollektiv Berlin took place at the large Haus der Berliner Festspiele, the hub of MaerzMusik. Titled teeth, the program featured three extended works, Helmut Lachenmann’s “Mouvement (– vor der Erstarrung)” (1983–84) the oldest; the others, by Ashkan Behzadi and Michelle Lou, were contemporary.

Conductor Enno Poppe moved like a puppet, his limbs a-dangling, open to expression, dancing as a mode of signaling. Behzadi’s phrases were individually curtailed during “Convex,” impatiently spilling into overlap, intertwined then accelerated, with tiny violin curlicues weeping and sighing. Prepared piano made ridge-runs, while flute and clarinet found their own runnels.

The Lachenmann epic was delineated by throat-thricking sounds, microscopic points of ensemble unity, bows rough-drawn. Friction knit tightly, with clipped muting of trumpet, horns collectively burred. There was light scuttling, as if pursued by a weakling creature, Poppe swaying as if drunk on the ultra-dynamics of this fragile, chugging sound. There was a chorus of clarinets, minus mouthpieces and palm-slapped instead. The percussion banks woke with some hard blows, although the rest of the ensemble remained subtle, with group strikes made in surrounding space.

After intermission, Lou’s highly ambitious “teeth” chewed through the entire second half. She’s into extended drone accumulations, equally concerned with electronics and acoustic instrumentation. The enlarged spread included electric guitars, accordions and harp, as well as a battalion of huge reed-horns, including contrabass clarinet and the little-seen contraforte (a proprietary contrabassoon). We plunged deeply into a susurrus of animalistic shuffling, akin to a 3D printer gone awry, gruff pulsings hyperventilating within the growing electronic surround. Machinery chimed and tolled, as whorls of modular synthesizer matter forced chitters toward the bass flute, dragging us through a tunnel of scurf. Tympani shot deep missile penetration under sourly fermenting violins. Lou invited a polluted steam emission to wind down toward the end, but this was not the conclusion. Instead, the lights dimmed, and we had a capsule electroacoustic voyage, eyes closed until the fleshly performers’ surprising return. Perhaps a misjudgement, but still ultimately winning over the assembled over. This was a monumental work, but monumental in the underground, burrowing sense, aeons old, and now successfully exhumed for 2024.