Unsuk Chin: grinning teeth and false magic in Gougalōn

Unsuk Chin (1961) is one of the most successful composers of our time. She won the Gaudeamus Award in 1985, the prestigious Grawemeyer Award in 2004, and was recently honoured with the Bach Prize 2019 of the city of Hamburg. On Saturday 18 May the German ensemble Musikfabrik will perform her popular piece Gougalōn in NTRZaterdagMatinee in Concertgebouw Amsterdam. The concert will be broadcast live on Radio 4.

Chin was born in Seoul, the capital of South Korea, as the daughter of a minister. When she was two years old her father bought a piano for his church services. She was immediately fascinated, but there was no money for piano lessons. She learnt to play the instrument on her own account and from the age of eight she contributed to the family income as a piano accompanist for wedding ceremonies.

From Tchaikovsky to Ligeti

In high school she got to know music by composers like Brahms and Tchaikovsky and decided to start composing herself. When she heard a piece by György Ligeti at the Seoul Conservatory, she was so impressed that she asked him by letter to teach her. He agreed and in 1985 she moved to Hamburg. The acquaintance was a shock: Ligeti rejected all her previously composed pieces. According to him they were well written but lacked personality.

Ironically, it was precisely in this period that she won the Gaudeamus Music Prize with Spektra for three celli, the piece with which she graduated from Seoul Conservatory. Under Ligeti’s tutorship she developed her own style, in which beauty of sound and humour go hand in hand. In 1991 she composed the witty Akrostichon-Wortspiel for the Dutch Nieuw Ensemble and solo soprano, based on nonsense lyrics. Two years later, this piece marked her international breakthrough.

East meets West

Chin tirelessly searches for unheard sounds and timbres. She writes for common western instruments, but manages to elicit eastern sounding sonorities from them; sometimes she also uses Asian instruments. In this way she organically links her Korean background with her western education. In her frequently performed ensemble piece Gougalōn Chin once again addresses her roots.

The idea arose during a stay in China in 2008-09. In her own words she experienced a ‘Proustian moment’ when visiting cities such as Hong Kong and Guangzhou. The atmosphere of the old and poor residential neighbourhoods with their narrow, winding alleys, ambulatory food vendors, and market places reminded her of her childhood in Seoul. This evoked long forgotten images of travelling amateur musicians and actors trying to foist homemade medicines on the common man/woman by means of street theatre.

Clattering teeth and dancing barracks

The title Gougalōn derives from old High German. The word’s meanings range from ‘tampering’ and ‘fooling people with fake magic’ to ‘making ridiculous movements’ and ‘divination’. Chin emphasizes she does not directly refer to the amateurish street theatre of her youth and that the music is not intended to be illustrative; she describes her piece as ‘imaginary folk music’. Yet it is difficult to avoid associations with the subtitles of the six movements, especially since Chin paints hilarious scenes with special sound effects.

For instance, the solo violin plays seemingly completely out of tune glissandi in ‘Lament of the bald singer’, the percussionists suggestively produce rattling sounds in ‘The grinning fortune teller with the false teeth’, in ‘Dance around the shacks’ long held lines of the strings are supported by swaying brass, while in ‘The hunt for the quack’s plait’ a pandemonium bursts loose that would well suit a pursuit scene in an animated film.

Gougalōn was well received by both audience and press. ‘Vivid, extravagant and technically assured to the point of virtuosity’, opined The Guardian; ‘Chin successfully pairs a typically German love of the grotesque with an Asiatic sound world, to hilarious effect’, wrote Backtrack. 

On the programme, too are world premières by Rozalie Hirs and Sander Germanus, and works by Carola Bauckholt and Rebecca Saunders.

https://youtu.be/Gp-dm9OS10M

#Gougalōn #GyörgyLigeti #Musikfabrik #NieuwEnsemble #NTRZaterdagmatinee #UnsukChin

Rebecca Saunders composes music like a sculptor

Women composers invisible? Yes, they are still very much underrepresented in most concert series, though not in this season’s NTRZaterdagMatinee. Of the five compositions the German Ensemble Musikfabrik presents on 18 May, four were written by a woman. Among them the British-German Rebecca Saunders, who was recently awarded the Ernst von Siemens Prize 2019. Helen Bledsoe will play Bite for bass flute solo.

Saunders, born in London in 1967, studied violin and composition at the University of Edinburgh. In 1991 she received the German DAAD stipend, with which she studied composition with Wolfgang Rihm at the Hochschule für Musik in Karlsruhe. After three years she returned to Edinburgh, where she obtained her doctorate with Nigel Osborne in 1998. A year earlied she had moved to Berlin.

Magical physicality

Saunders has won many prizes, was a visiting professor at the renowned Ferienkurse für neue Musik in Darmstadt and was awarded an Honorary Doctorate at Huddersfield University in 2018.

She is particularly interested in timbre and likes to explore the possibilities of instruments by means of playing techniques of her own designing. ‘For me what’s really important is enabling the listener to feel the magical physicality of sound: the timbre, the colour, the mass and the weight of sound,’ she once said. She compares herself to a sculptor working with different materials.

Her scores are teeming with detailed instructions, sometimes she also employs objects such as metronomes, radios, record players and mechanical music boxes. In her music she regularly refers to artists and writers, such as James Joyce and Derek Jarman. In her recent work, she often leans towards Samuel Beckett and his fascination with shadow and silence.

This also applies to Bite for bass flute solo, which she composed in 2015 for Helen Bledsoe, Musikfabrik’s solo flute player. It is part of a series of solo pieces she has written in recent years for performers with whom she has worked together closely; in her score she explicitly thanks Bledsoe for their pleasant ‘sound sessions’.

Daunting solo

The score is quite daunting. The flutist produces quarter tones and multiphonics, plays with Flatterzunge and has to constantly – and – quickly switch between (extremely) fast and (very) slow tempi. The dynamics vary from the softest pianissimo to the loudest fortissimo. Meanwhile, Bledsoe whispers, sings or shouts texts by Beckett in her instrument, giving the physical sound a different colour and intention.

On her website Helen Bledsoe describes Bite as ‘a massive, expressive, sighing and ranting piece for bass flute with low B’. She premiered it in 2016, one critic praising it for being was ‘quite athletic’. Yet two years later Saunders made a revision in which she deleted several parts. This version will be performed for the first time in the concert on 18 May, after which Bledsoe hopes to record it for CD.

NTRZaterdagMatinee 18 May, Concertgebouw Amsterdam 2pm
Musikfabrik/Emilio Pamárico
World premières by Rozalie Hirs and Sander Germanus; further works by Rebecca Saunders, Unsuk Chin and Carola Bauckholt

#CarolaBauckholt #HelenBledsoe #Musikfabrik #NTRZaterdagmatinee #RebeccaSaunders #RozalieHirs #UnsukChin

Carola Bauckholt concocts music from sludge flakes and animal sounds

On May 18 NTRZaterdagMatinee presents an adventurous programme. The German Ensemble Musikfabrik will perform two world premières and a Dutch première by five composers of the same generation, four of whom are women. I earlier wrote about the pieces of Unsuk Chin, Rebecca Saunders and Sander Germanus, today I’m zooming in on Carola Bauckholt, whose Schlammflocke (Sludge Flakes) will be performed in the Netherlands for the first time.

Born in Krefeld in 1959, Carola Bauckholt is one of the most original voices in German musical life. She studied with Mauricio Kagel at the Conservatory of Cologne and was  associated with the avant-garde Theatre am Marienplatz in her native city of Krefeld for many years. In this venue a lot of hers and Kagel’s pieces had their first run.

Bauckholt likes to draw on ‘unmusical’ sources. The rattling of a rusty sign, the terrifying howling of wolves, the squeaking of a door, or the stuttering of a faltering petrol engine, however farfetched a source may seem, Bauckholt hears music in it. She develops the most inventive playing techniques and combines a pleasant kind of alienation with a refreshing sense of humour.

Curiosity

In an interview she told me: ‘My motive is curiosity. When I know where something is going, I feel superfluous, even as a listener. I find it fascinating how elusive music is: people hear the same notes and textures, but have totally different thoughts and associations. I try to understand this over and over again, that’s why I experiment with sounds and connections that I’ve never heard before.’

During the concert on 18 May Bauckholt will make her debut in NTRZaterdagMatinee with Schlammflocke, which she composed in 2010 for the Cologne based Ensemble Musikfabrik. The piece for 16 musicians is inspired by the operation of water purification installations, in which so-called sludge flakes play an important role. These are microorganisms of dead and living material that are used for the biological degradation process of sewage.

Just as the sludge flakes purify our wastewater, Bauckholt wants to ‘clean’ our aural perception. For this purpose she uses a wide range of resources. The musicians not only play their own instruments but also produce all kinds of animal sounds. Bauckholt uses nose whistles, puts a saxophone mouthpiece on the tuba, and has the upper octave of the piano strings taped with adhesive paste.

Virtual zoo

The sounds she conjures up in this way are derived from CD recordings of birds, frogs, foxes, sea lions and chimpanzees, which she has translated to the instruments as faithfully as possible. Pitch, rhythm, timbre and dynamics are accurately noted, but the performer is expected to interpret them as he/she sees fit. The result is a soundworld that is as exciting as it is mysterious, and that stimulates both our ears and minds in a playful way.

In Schlammflocke Bauckholt masterfully blends technique and nature. Against a tranquil background we hear the squeaking of what sounds like a metal blade yearning for a drop of oil moving slowly through the water. The ubiquitous animal callings and bird twittering create the feeling that one finds oneself in a virtual kind of zoo.

At the same time, Bauckholt creates a striking image of the surroundings of a water purification plant. After all, such constructions are often found in solitary places in nature. After its première one critic wrote: ‘Sometimes these places even seem to concretize geographically, when the music evokes the biting cold and rigid ice formations of the polar regions.’

18 May 2.15 pm Concertgebouw Amsterdam: Musikfabrik. The concert forms part of the radio series NTRZaterdagMatinee and is broadcast live on Radio4.

#CarolaBauckholt #ConcertgebouwAmsterdam #Musikfabrik #NTRZaterdagmatinee #Schlammflocke

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#BrigittaMuntendorf b. 1982

'Shivers on speed' ; premiere. 2013

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#ManuelNawri

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CtbVOBhyIiQ

NEW: 📣 Sounddramaturgien: Everything new with 3D audio? ✍️ by Julian Kämper

We present SOUNDDRAMATURGIEN: As a collective, we design performance formats for head-listening audiences - always with the vision of shaping audible space as a narrative parameter.

👀 READ here: https://www.soundingfuture.com/en/article/sounddramaturgien-everything-new-3d-audio

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