Eva-Maria Houben - Breath For Organ - 2018

Eva-Maria Houben - Breath For Organ

Жанр: Contemporary
Страна-производитель диска: ger
Год издания диска: 2018
Издатель (лейбл): Second Editions
Номер по каталогу: 003
Дата записи: 2018
Аудиокодек: FLAC
Тип рипа: tracks
Битрейт аудио: (lossy + lossless)
Продолжительность: 1:14:55
Источник: скачано с
-источник/ник/другое: slsk
: нет
Треклист:

01 Breath For Organ 1:14:55
Исполнители:
Composed By, Organ - Eva-Maria Houben

review by Bradford Bailey
Eva-Maria Houben - Breath For Organ (2018)
Eva-Maria Houben is a composer, pianist, musicologist, and university professor based in Dortmund, Germany. She is also the director of the Tonstudio des Instituts für Musik und Musikwissenschaft der Universität Dortmund. Since the middle of the 2000’s she has released a daunting stream of releases - nearly 50 in total, largely housed on Edition Wandelweiser or her own imprint, Diafani. Breath For Organ is the personification of subtlety and constraint - an hour and 15 minute work, which the title more or less aptly describes - the central element being the passage of air through an organ. While I’ve encountered a number of works or performances over the years which incorporate an organ’s “breath”, and the passage of air through brass and reed instruments is a structural and textural element regularly deployed by a vast range of improvisers, Houben, through duration, commitment and constraint, pushes and transforms this sonorous territory into its own total world. Like much of Wandelweiser’s output, it belongs to a spectrum of composition which sets out to recalibrate the listener’s expectation and a relationship to dynamics and tonal, structural, and rhythmic relation within a work - through an extreme form of constraint, draw the ear toward subtle, and often lost, occurrences and interactions of sound. In Houben’s hands, and across the length of Breath For Organ, the result is stunningly beautiful, immersive, engaging, and rewarding - the grating texture of air punctuated by shifts and leaked tones generated by its relationship to the organ’s pipes.
What must be asked when engaging with something critically, is what that thing sets out to do, what it achieves, and what its broader context and potential is. Breath For Organ, in many ways, is the product of the kind of endgame thinking which gave us 4′33″ . It searches for a form of progress, embarking on a process which is intended the shift the listener’s expectations, understanding, and relationship to a certain territory of sound, but, once achieved, doesn’t particularly allow for further exploration. It is so constrained and discrete, that it seems unlikely that Houben will embark on a process of building a large body of work within this territory of the organ’s potential, nor, were she to do so, would many listeners find the results particularly rewarding, or be able to distinguish one work from the next. Once reaped, like 4′33″, the work’s rewards are best deployed beyond it’s own boundaries. While this is a perfectly reasonable creative practice and pursuit, it very often risks painting itself into into a corner - becoming a “one-liner”.
This is where we must ask what a thing sets out to do, what its broader context and potential is - what it contributes to and creates. Admittedly, perhaps to my own discredit, had Houben not belonged to the Wandelweiser group, it is highly unlikely that I would have placed her under the critical microscope I am, but that thing, something I feel to be a negative force within the contexts of experimental and avant-garde musics, has inevitably colored where I understand her to reside - a maker of good work which contributes to something bad.
In many ways, the questions surrounding the Wandelweiser group belong to a sprawling conundrum which threads its way through the last century - what do you do with a creative object which is linked to something ethically questionable? This is something intellectual circles have faced when contending with the work of Heidegger and Celine, both abhorrent anti-Semites with connections to the Nazi party, with the criminality of Genet, currently with the #metoo movement, and many others. In those cases the questions largely addressed the negotiation of great things made by bad people. The Wandelweiser conundrum is more complex because, at least to my knowledge, most of the group’s member are good, well- intentioned individuals who make reasonably good work, but who contribute, perhaps without considering it, to the perpetuation of unethical realities, many of which descend from the actions of John Cage, and directly undermine the potential and spirit of our context.
Cage, progressively toward the end, despite the radical ideas that he helped popularize, was fundamentally conservative. His ideas and actions attempted to define (and thus constrain the potential of) experimental and avant-garde music, and limit its applications to elitist contexts - to the highly educated beneficiaries of social, cultural, racial, and economic privilege. For decades there have been a largely suppressed series of critiques which highlight many of his actions as racist, sexist, and, despite being queer himself, homophobic. The use of Cage’s ideas does not fundamentally mean that one participates with or perpetuates these evils. Sartre drew extensively on Heidegger, attempting to strip their evils and deploy what was noble in them for the greater good, but never attempted to obscure the truth of their root. What is undeniable, is that the elitism, segregation, and undermining, growing directly from Cage’s idea of orthodoxy, continue around us today, and seem to be gathering steam.
In recent years, I have encountered increasing concern among members of the experimental music community about the participatory role of avant-garde Classical music, with associative extensions, largely growing from, or associated with, academia, in defining experimental music - that this collective voice is obscuring a vast range of practices and contexts, coming to be a signifier in and of itself. This is something I have also observed. Experimental music is more diverse in race, gender, and practice, as well as more geographically and culturally expansive, than it has ever been, yet the authoring of its histories and defining characteristics seem to grow ever more narrow - owned by highly educated white men from Europe and the United States, with a token nod given to handful of women and artists from Asia.
What becomes incredibly hard about evaluating this process is knowing how active or conscious it is. The authoring of history is often a consequence of access to its artifacts and preexisting knowledge from which a historian departs, thus it is very easy for historic sins to be perpetuated in the present.
The community surrounding avant-garde and experimental music has always been small, but its access to resources has certainly changed over the years. Looking back, during the era which stretched from the 1950’s to the 90’s, it was large and diverse enough to sustain a surprising number of independent record labels, publishing houses and periodicals, which, in their totality, represented a broad and international diversity of intent, proximity, and practice. Tragically, with perhaps the exception of the number of record labels, this is no longer the case. The sources of information are increasingly narrowed and contained. This is a simple consequence of economics, rather than active intervention. What becomes very notable, is that culture which was largely sculpted through its active independence from institutions, now increasingly is defined and voiced from within institutions, particularly via academics and university presses - the narrow context which willingly loose money on subject with such a small range of interest. Crucially, this is not a practice of philanthropy. It is a sustaining investment - when a music can be defined, it can be taught. When something is taught, it becomes an economy. For something to have an economy, it needs a validating history. And thus, without counterpoint, this context has become a singular and powe