Talea Ensemble: Enno Poppe

Program Notes

Enno Poppe
Speicher I-VI (2008–13)

Music, as an art form, is alive. Rules and laws of musical composition are there to be reflected, updated, substituted, or disposed of. It starts with the definition of its smallest element: a note. Up to how much pitch variation is a note with vibrato still a single note? There is a continuum of events between vibrato, portamento, glissando and microtonal deviations. Nothing of this is covered by our music theory. Moreover, there is a barely researched relationship between tone and intonation about which performing musicians intuitively know much more than composers do, with their tendency towards taxonomy. The Speicher Project is a complex structure of variations and repetitions. Across all dimensions the elements are always in the same coherent relation. The very first viola notes (‘evolving variation’) correlate exactly with the form on a small, middle, and large scale. In order to move on and remain interesting, a musical piece, besides variety, needs something one can actually recognize. In that sense everything can be recognizable—an individual sound as much as a whole movement (as in a recapitulation). There is, therefore, no need to throw in idea after idea, but rather to create a network of derivations within music.