Elective Affinities | March 2009
The Salzburg Biennale: the new festival for contemporary music in the city of Mozart.
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The Swiss-born composer and conductor, Beat Furrer, has lived and worked in Austria for many years. "What always preoccupies me is understanding what keeps humans moving so aimlessly that they, as if in a blind fury, separate themselves from nature," says Furrer whilst discussing his attempt to "understand this great transformation that is on the verge of being executed without our understanding". [...] |
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When Steve Reich began his studies in 1958, any deviation from the serial norms, any shift towards tonality, was viewed in avant-garde circles and by the majority of composition professors as a sin against the soul of contemporary music. As this doctrine was never advocated as strongly in the US as it was in Europe, and due also in part to Reich’s teachers who included the controversial composer Darius Milhaud, the young man stayed true to what he construed to be a musical heartbeat – tonality, the rhythm of jazz, and the sounds of early Stravinsky. [...] |
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Toshio Hosokawa, born 1955 in Hiroshima, went to Germany to study when he was just 21. There he met his most influential teachers, Isang Yun in Berlin and Klaus Huber in Freiburg, with whom he studied composition. Ironically it was at this point, far from his homeland, that he was encouraged by Klaus Huber to focus on the traditional music of Japan. [...] |
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Brian Ferneyhough, one of the many prominent students of the Swiss composer Klaus Huber, writes about his venerated teacher: "Each of his works (is) a highly individual answer to a clear, focused, technically exact and sophisticated array of circumstances. At the same time, each work is also a precise and ever-recurring deliberation of the relationship between contemporary musical languages and the real, imperfect world in which they are embedded." [...] |
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