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The Silent Book
Saturday, 25 Sept


Austrian composer Peter Ablinger (who currently resides in Berlin) came to Bushwick's Cafe Orwell for a night featuring a selection of his works, followed by a short interview, presented by new music organization Music =.

The performance began with 6-18 (excerpted from 1-127): 13 short pieces for electric guitar and amplified sound, played in quick succession.  Each piece was characterized by: quiet simplicity, interrupted by highly complex loudness, with a return to simplicity at the end.  The loudness comprised amplified, pre-recorded samples of city noise and lightning fast guitar gestures; the loud sections, as well as the simpler solo guitar sections, differed slightly in length piece to piece.  Thus it was impossible to predict when or how long one's ears were to be barraged with the loud sections; only that they would occur somewhere in the middle.  The guitarist's performance was compelling, as he executed the abrupt virtuosic gestures with apparent ease.
Weiss/Weisslich ("White/White-ish") 17c: A clock radio tuned to white noise, shut off at the entrance of an extended snare drum roll.
Ohne Titel ("Without Title") 1-10: Performed by electric guitar and vibraphone (the instrumentation is up to the performers).  A sparse, quiet, rarely more than monophonic piece.  Here again there were many short pieces in quick succession, though this time creating a string of delicate gestures, performed with tender care by The Silent Book.  A particularly nice moment occurred when the guitar and vibes struck the same high note together, both instruments letting the note ring and fade.

[The following is paraphrased from my notes; I invite Mr. Ablinger to correct me in the comments section if I've misrepresented his answers in any way.]
Q and A session with the audience, hosted by Matthew Hough and Ian Antonio: 
Q: What is the significance of noise in your music? 
A: White noise is the acoustical version of everything, a totality of sounds like white light, like a blank page, to be tweaked perceptually, or not. Consider a monochrome painting---the closest equivalent in music is white noise.  The experience of white noise: we as listeners have no reference point within white noise, which is emptier than silence.
Q: Regarding 6-18 (1-127), were you thinking about the listener when you composed this piece? 
A: Yes.  The perceptual problem with noise is that it creates anxiety about one's inability to extract information; "our brains are damned" by this compulsion to extract information.  In [Ablinger's] pieces for large ensembles, once you get over the "materiality" of the noise, you start to hear figures that aren't in any one instrument, like "illusions" you see when staring for a prolonged time at a white wall.  Likewise, with 6-18 (1-127), behind each short piece and as they go by a new layer starts to emerge, which is the reason for the multiple repetitions of a similar gesture.
Q: Do you have an ideal listener in mind when you compose? 
A: No.  It is impossible to perceive [Ablinger's] pieces in only one way.  Your experience is part of the creation of the piece. "Like a dance between the composer and performer and listener."  Depending on the piece, one or the other does more leading, or it may be equally divided sometimes.
Q: Why allow the performer to choose which succession of numbers to play in 1-127? 
A: The performer should never play all 128 pieces in one performance; flexibility for the performer is part of the reason for letting each decide how many to play.  
 
 

Sunday, 8 March



“Either the string or my hand is going to break,” exhaled Josel as he simultaneously tightened and plucked the third string on his guitar.  Mercifully, an audience member came to Seth Josel’s aid, sitting down next to him and twisting the tuning peg as Josel continued to pluck the ever-tightening string on his acoustic guitar.  Having already plucked and tuned two strings until they snapped off the guitar’s neck, Josel was halfway through Peter Ablinger’s “Exercitium 1-6,” when the third string refused to break.  Far more exciting than listening to each of the guitar's six strings produce gradually higher and higher notes one after another, was the tension that gradually pulled Josel and his audience tighter and tighter, getting red in the face, waiting for the snap to happen.

Thus began the show at Brooklyn’s intimate Diapason on Sunday night, a CD release concert from Mode Records featuring Josel on solo guitar, the audience seated on couches and floor cushions.  Following this first harrowing piece was “The Possibility of a New Work for Electric Guitar” by the super-chill composer Morton Feldman, Josel playing an electric guitar from above as it lay on the floor, in a replication of a recording made by Christian Wolff back in 1966.  The piece, like so many Feldman pieces, drew the audience into its quasi-ambient, nicely proportioned world.

Another work by Ablinger, called “63-99,” came next, and the tension felt in the first piece of the set began to build again.  A series of 36 approximately one-minute pieces flowing from one to the next, each movement, from #63 to #99 (with the exception of one of them) began at the bridge-end of the guitar neck with a high, descending scale before being abruptly interrupted by frenetic picking at the middle of the neck while speakers blasted out samples of Berlin city-sounds; then, just as abruptly, the city went away and Josel continued downward to the low end of the neck.  Surprising was the one piece out of the 36 in which the city did not blast its way in, leaving Josel to play uninterrupted down the neck. 

The set ended with Seth Josel’s slightly altered version (based on some sketches of Feldman’s) of the Morton Feldman piece, in which he held the guitar in the normal position and used a pedal to create some effective swells.  No completed copy of the score for this piece exists, so the performance was a welcome and rare one. 


photo taken from Josel's myspace page