Starting with a systematic variation of polyphony in each of the three movements of "Bis 4-Stimmung", German composer and pianist Florian Wittenburg deviates from strict structures through a component of randomly generated core notes which he then makes coherent through harmony and melody, each part punctuated with layers of Wittenburg reciting Dutch poet Cees Noteboom.
Format: CD Condition: New Released: 2022 Country: Germany Packaging: Cardboard Gatefold 3 Panels Piano recorded at Studio Nijmegen, The Netherland, on January 15th, 2020; voice recorded in Kleve, Germany, on August 13th, 2020.
"the title already indicates the systematic aspect of this piano music: the applied systematic variation of the polyphony (actually "1- bis 4-klänge" would be more appropriate than the title, but that sounds a bit strange to my ears in German), whereby my system application is not absolute here, i.e. i sometimes deviated from it for the sake of the music.
but the music also has a random component: i started with half a page of randomly generated core notes, then tried to create coherence through melody and harmony.
seen in this way, this music is a combination of chance and system. Put simply, this chance + system method results in chords and phrases that react to one another. this seems to be in the spirit of morton feldman, e.g. comparable to the slow sections of his last pieces, although i doubt that he had a random method behind it.
the resulting music could also be described as a kind of "twelve-tone music", since all twelve tones usually appear in the pieces. but it is quite different from the twelve-tone music of the founding fathers, e.g. Schönberg's music, which consciously operated with a twelve-tone row.
as with many of feldman's pieces, this music does not raise the question of tonality or atonality, it embraces both.
the poems of nooteboom, in canonical form, serve here as interludes. Above all, because of their enigmatic nature, I think they go well with this piano music."-Florian Wittenburg (translated by Google)