Touching Universes

Album review

MACH (DO) is the title of a cycle of pieces for solo instruments which Eres Holz began in 2011 with a virtuoso trumpet solo and which now comprises nine pieces, with live electronics added since the clarinet piece of 2016. MACH! is both an exhortation and an homage to the physicist Ernst Mach. The unit of measurement that bears the latter’s name is still used to indicate the speed of supersonic aircraft – a suggestion of the difficulty of the pieces. MACH, as written in the score of the organ piece, is “a kind of invitation to do that which is not trivial”.

All the pieces in the cycle draw from a repertoire of virtuoso techniques and expressive figures specific to the respective instruments which have developed over the course of musical history. The harp, for example, features deep, bell-like bass tones and glittering arpeggios, the cello has double stops signifying the greatest intensity, and the accordion part is written in a full-bodied playing style comparable to the sound of an organ. The electronics initially amplify the sound – for example through reverberation effects and subtle changes of colour – but then increasingly transform the sound production. We still hear the typical features of each instrument’s language, but their intensity is now heightened to the ecstatic, the instruments speaking in foreign tongues, as it were. The individual, imprisoned in himself, seeks to go outside himself by all possible means, to communicate himself to the world. It is, as the composer puts it, “about communication, about the search for empathy”, about “overcoming loneliness”, somehow getting through to the outside world, even through “a scream” if necessary.

Certainly, these pieces are about the “loneliness of life” as part of the human condition, the knowledge, as Arthur Schnitzler said, “that two people must always, always remain foreign to each other, that one can never fully see into each other, that one actually never really understands one another.” But it is certainly no coincidence that five of these pieces were written during the 2020 / 21 coronavirus pandemic with its restrictions in interpersonal contact. Loneliness had suddenly become a daily experience and a subject of debate, and thus these pieces also have a topical quality. Man, even in isolation – whether imposed or self-chosen – remains an “animal sociale” existing in the context of his relation to others. It is in this sense, perhaps, that the words of the philosopher Byung-Chul Han, which Holz has included in the cycle’s harp piece, are to be understood: “Resonance is not an echo of the self. It is inherent in the dimension of the Other. It signifies harmony.”

A chord progression as the core idea of a piece is a model that has frequently interested Holz. The question was: can patterns of perception of tonal music – such as the sense of the tonic, tension, and resolution – be transferred to non-tonally-organized music? To this end, he turned his attention to the history of European polyphony from its beginnings (Pérotin) to the Baroque period, for instance the rules of voice leading, which not only govern the treatment of dissonances, but also strictly determine how one chord is to be resolved into another. For Holz, it became necessary to formulate such rules himself, rules which are no longer related to modal or tonal relationships, but which ensure the coherence of the music under newly defined parameters. In order to establish such rules, he also avails himself of the computer: “I try to predict certain mechanisms or certain types of musical processes”, as he stated in a 2016 interview. “How would it sound now if I thought so-and-so? How would that sound if I allowed it to continue in this way, according to certain rules of interval resolution?”

The in-depth exploration of the parameter of harmony – as harmony, and not as the result of independent linear movements – is unusual in New Music. Harmony is indispensable as a frame of reference for the melodic element: “I work harmonically so that the melodies also obtain a ‘sense’. Just as Bach does. And it is precisely for this reason that I allow myself melodic freedom, because it is harmonically grounded.”

This melodic freedom notably involves the inclusion of microtones, which play a very important role in Holz’s music. Human language, along with crying, laughter and all the other affective vocal utterances, do not occur in the regulated balance of the well-tempered system with its twelve equal half-tone steps. Microtones can naturally be used to better approximate human sounds. For Holz, microtones “are a sign that stands for the imperfectness of man – man as a biological being, and not a sterile or a ‘well-tempered’ machine. Microtones as an expression of pain, but also of passion and the erotic”. © Neos music