 WALTMANSEARLY AND CONTEMPORARY MUSIC |
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STEFAN POHLIT (DE) Aesthetic ideas: My initial motivation impulse for exploring the musics of the Middle East wasn’t based in the music itself: I just felt the need of understanding this music a considerable time after having embraced a spiritual path towards the Middle East. This has been, for now about ten years, a continuous journey away from my roots and back to them, and it has always been much broader than an only musically related attempt. At times, I have had serious ambitions as an Orientalist. I learned Arabic and Turkish (and some Farsi), and I traveled a lot. Thus, I could profit from already established contacts when organizing a first guest semester in Turkey in 2003 for the study of Ottoman court music. This country disposes of an education system in Western music comparable to Europe. In 2006, the Ankara State Conservatory offered me a unique position for foreign teachers, and I combined this opportunity with choosing the very suitable Turkish-American research center MIAM of Istanbul Technical University for the location of my doctoral studies. My dissertation topic – the tuning methods of the French qanûn player Julien Jalâl Eddine Weiss – shall mainly bring me back into closest contact with the historic treatises of Midde-Eastern music from a contemporary perspective. I have become an intercultural composer through my somewhat unusual biography. Until a couple of years ago, I consciously sought for a clearly audible adaptation of Middle-Eastern form principles, and several compositions of that time relate in large-scale format to the structural progression of the Ottoman Pesrev. On the other hand, I have seen a lot of misunderstandings arising from so-called cross-cultural approaches and the way they often advocated a very limited understanding of the innate, somewhat grammatical, potential and evolution of different musical traditions. I do not wish to promote cultural Westernization, and it has always been very interested in the genuine way that cultures transform naturally or choose to evolve. In a similar way, I have gained a lot of more general insight into the structural necessities of my extended harmonic research, and my approach to the Middle East has become more discreet in my more recent works. I have also obtained new methodological tools by the study of ethnomusicology and anthropology, especially through the writings of Gregory Bateson and his “ecology of mind”. My theoretical approach towards intercultural music could, today, be described as a creative critique of intercultural music. I have also written extensively about this topic and participated in a number of conferences, such as the symposium “Modi-Ichoi-Maqamat” (2007) that was held in remembrance of the 1932 Cairo Conference on Arabian music. On the other hand, my main artistic goals have always been located in the solution of formal problems and in a specific interest in harmonic relations. I have been profoundly influenced by the study of Pythagorean Harmonics – as outlined by Hans Kayser in the beginning of the 20th century. My efforts towards discovering a new gateway into a somewhat microtonal harmonic formal process include a profound study of the inherent emotional qualities of a tuning-system and meaning in music. The consequences of an in-depth instruction in all currents of contemporary music and their philosophies have, furthermore, often forced me to very compound explanations and critical analyses, mostly of Adorno’s argumentations. There is more “new” music than the 20th century’s outline of “newness” has offered. I would like to show that there could be a much more fundamental change of listening happen to us. In drawing on immediately perceivable tonal tensions, my music shall touch a listener’s awareness with the directness that music normally includes, and, then, open itself to a veritable catharsis. No doubt, these tensions should highlight tonal relations that have not yet been used in such context. However, I have to admit that this attempt constitutes a very difficult challenge: I do not wish to return to the past idioms of tonality. Moreover, I sense, of course uniquely through my own experiences, a completely new of expression, and, thus, a transformation of the very idea of emotion. To speak in more musical terms, I have been exploring to which extent certain added primary-numeral proportions – currently I limit them up to the 14th over- or undertone – contain an inherent way of psycho-acoustic meaning. I have not only just integrated in scales and chords but used them in every sense as foundational intervals of a musical work. In modulations, they describe their own, virtually spatial, way of progression and, thus, add, in a certain way, new spatial dimensions to harmonic motion. Since 2008, I have been using detuned instruments in order to ease the performance of intervals that differ from the tempered 12-tone scale by either a quarter-tone or a sixth of a tone. When drafting a new score, I often employ Schenkerian back- and middle-ground graphs for defining exact relations between the formal processes at large and in detail. Due to my absence from Europe for now more than two years, my career as a composer has not really suffered but remained more limited than I would desire it. In 2009, one of my less recent orchestral scores was awarded upon a competition of the SWR (South-Western German Broadcast Station) Stuttgart and will be premiered during the Éclat Festival for contemporary music. With the approaching completion of my doctoral degree, I intend to re-intensify all my artistic activities substantially. I I was born in 1976 in Heidelberg and spent my childhood in a rural area in South Germany. I received my first piano lessons at the age of five and, in 1991, became a private student of the Hungarian composer Róbert Wittinger. Between 1993 and 1999, I regularly visited the Société Franz Schreker in Paris where I was working with the invitation of the renowned Argentinian pianist and composer Jorge Zulueta, in 1996 also with a grant from the Ministry of Culture and Education of the State of Rheinland-Pfalz (South Germany). I studied Composition and Music Theory with Theo Brandmüller (Saarbrucken), Detlev Müller-Siemens and Roland Moser (Basel), Gilbert Amy (Lyon), Wolfgang Rihm, Peter-Michael Riehm and Sandeep Bhagwati (Karlsruhe). I graduated between 2003 and 2005 with a Master’s degree in both majors and an additional Concert Exam in Composition. My intensive private study in Oriental languages and Islamic cultures began in 1999. Having become an exhaustive traveller mostly in central and Eastern Europe, I complemented these studies with numerous journeys and sojourns that brought me to the Middle and to the Far East. These stays included intensive learning and working opportunities in the Middle East. In 2007, I enrolled as a doctoral student at the Centre for Advanced Studies in Music (M. .A.M.) of the stanbul Technical University where I pursue my research in Middle-Eastern music besides continuing my career as a composer. Since, in 2009, my position as a foreign expert at the Ankara State Conservatory was suspended for administrative reasons, I live, so far, on the island of Büyükada in the Sea of Marmara opposite Istanbul. Since 2006, my public activities, also lectures at a variety of universities, have increasingly related to intercultural music and Middle-Eastern music theory. Sometimes, I have been active as well in education projects. My work has been promoted, among others, by the German Composers Association (1993),the Barbara Biffar Foundation (1998), the Heinrich Strobel Foundation (2002 & 2005), the State Foundation of Baden-Württemberg, and the DAAD. In 2007, I took part in the jury of the international composition award "Global Music - Contemporary Expression" (Berlin-Brandenburg). 2008, I was guest composer of the international Messiæn-Week at Neustadt an der Weinstraße (Germany). My music has been performed at festivals such as ADEvantgarde (Munich), “KlanGriffe” (Karlsruhe), the European Festival of Cultures (Karlsruhe), the Gaudeamus Young Composers’ Meeting (Apeldoorn), the Daegu International Contemporary Music Festival (Korea), the International Festival of Sacred Music (Schwäbisch-Gmünd), the Heidelberg Biennal, Centre d'Acanthes (Metz), Global Ear (Dresden), Kreutzanbul (Berlin) and others . stefanpohlit@yahoo.de www.stefanpohlit.com |
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