Bozzini Quartet: Lang, Simms, Tenney

Program Notes

Klaus Lang
Drei Allmenden (2020)

Over the course of music history, scores have become increasingly prescriptive. The greater the composer’s ego, the more they/he saw themself/himself in the role of the artistic genius. And the more counterpoint was replaced by emotional expression, the more detailed the scores became. All aspects of the music and its execution were to be precisely determined by the brilliant composer and specified with the utmost completeness in the score. At the same time, the natural collaborative unity of musician and composer that had existed until then was slowly dissolved. With the Nazi prohibition of ‘degenerate’ music in the twentieth century, the connection between composer and interpreter on the one hand was completely cut and, on the other, a canon was created that has been going in circles, remaining unchanged for seventy years. By banishing living composers from mainstream musical life into small niches, the relics of dead composers, namely their scores, have become objects of quasi cultlike veneration within the operation of major concert halls, opera houses, and conservatories. The introduction, transfer, and application of the Protestant principle sola scriptura from religion to music has led to phenomena such as historical performance practice and the Urtext edition. Scores have been canonized, so to speak, with musicians thereby resembling priests and theologians. But is a score really the music? Where is the music? Is it in the composer’s mind? Is it in the score, in the concert space, or in the mind of the listener? With all this in mind, the music resulting from the collaboration with Konus Quartett as well as other works of mine is more closely related to the scores of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Many of these scores are very simple and clear, but they demand musicians who, through their powers of diminution and figuration in performance, give the notated framework a certain sonic shine or are able to conjure up a susurrant soundscape using only a few instances of figured bass notation. However, it must be noted that the more clearly formed and organized the fundamental structure, the more freedom there is for the player at any given moment in performance.