In his introduction to an interview with Swiss composer Jürg Frey (“The Otherworldly Harmony of Jürg Frey”, Oct. 29th 2019) ) in The New Yorker, music critic and author Alex Ross mentions that the music by the Wandelweiser Collective was released from the margins of contemporary music during the past decade: “Something about the music’s separateness appeals to modern listeners who are overwhelmed with information and saturated in noise.” About Frey’s music, he furthermore writes it is “sparse to the point of vanishing.”
Taken out of its context, this quote might lead you to expect music that focuses on omission, on what isn’t there, but that would be a regrettable misunderstanding. If anything, the music of Frey actually addresses the autonomy and value of each single note, not just the overall composition they became a part of, as well as the prominence of silence. The music of the Wandelweiser composers is usually quiet and restrained, the approaches of Cage and Feldman taken to a logical extreme. Frey’s biography on the Wandelweiser website refers to “an elementary non-extravagance of sound” as one of the main characteristics of his music.
The four-part Echo.Trio.Fragile.Eyot. is remarkable in that it not only contains material that was composed or produced in different periods, but also that two distinct approaches are being merged. “Paysage d’échos” and “Equilibre fragile” were sound installations. The latter one Frey created for an installation in a large garden with apple trees, with seven mini lo-fi speakers placed in a long line of about one hundred meters in a garden. Later on, Frey put this sound line also in indoor halls, and even in the hall of a four-story old department store. “Paysage d’échos” is a three-part counterpoint, with three loudspeakers placed wide apart. Both installations were created where they were recorded, Frey working with sounds on a computer. There was no written score.
By contrast, “Streichtrio” and “Eyot” reflect a period of time for the Wandelsweiser collective when the discussion about sound and silence was at the foreground. This discussion was not only conducted verbally, in conversations, but also took place in the compositions, the central question being: how does sound influence the silence, and vice versa? Frey explains: “For me it was important to find out how close to silence a sound can get. Can silence even be inside the sound? During this time, I also pursued the idea that a composition can be silent if it does not require a complicated effort. Or the other way round: a piece of music can have as few notes as possible; if the compositional effort is large and complicated, the piece does not seem quiet.”
On this album, the alternation of installations and compositions helps blur the distinction between the approaches. Frey felt his composed works had the tendency to reflect a sound installation approach anyway. The composed pieces were static and didn’t have a direction or journey from beginning to end. This is the case with “Eyot” and “Streichtrio”, compositions with a written score. Frey: “For the CD I was looking for two installations to relate to the static compositions and to bring an opening to it blur the distinction between composition and installation. And now, maybe the installations “Paysage d’échos” and “ Equilibre fragile” might be experienced even more as a composition than the two other pieces.”
Taken together, these works not only trigger concentrated, deep(er) listening, making a great case for the importance of silence as a decisive and structural element, but they also stress that the line between a composition and an installation is an imaginary one, or at least much more fluid than one might think.
Guy Peters 2019
