An intuitive musical experience at TIM

By Emilie Sueur

JAKARTA (JP): The Jakarta Performing Art Market 1997 (Pastojak '97) ended last Monday at Taman Ismail Marzuki with the uncanny chords of the Ensemble for Intuitive Music Weimar.

A little background on the ensemble. Piano and synthesizer player Michael Von Hintzenstern established the German group in 1980. This musician who studied organ, conducting and music history is also the founder of a yearly festival for contemporary music, Tage Neuer Musik Weimar, and has lead several concert series.

His frenetic involvement in the promotion of contemporary music was honored with the Weimar Prize last year.

Matthias Von Hintzenstern, cellist, joined the Ensemble in 1980. In 1982, the Ensemble welcomed Hans Tutschku.

A specialist in electroacoustic music, Tutschku is also a composer and professor in the Liszt Conservatory in Weimar and in the electronic music studios of Institute for Research and Acoustic Music in Paris.

The final member to join was Daniel Hoffmann in 1993. This horn and trumpet player has followed a jazzy orientated path as he played in many jazz groups and won first prize in the 1991 Weimar international jazz workshop.

The four pieces of the performance resembled nothing heard before and may have been a shock to many audience members.

Some of them, speaking after the performance, vouched that Annaherung (Approach) was the most accessible to musical novices.

The use of acoustic instruments helped them find musical bench marks. Moreover, as the music was quite smooth and melodious, listeners could close their eyes and let their minds wander.

But it may have been difficult for the average neophyte listener to keep concentrated on this music for a long time.

The second piece, Leuchtende Splitter (Shining Splinter), was centered on the piano performance. Von Hintzenstern played a first fragment that was recorded in real-time by Hans Tutschku thanks to specific software.

The idea then was to give back the music after transformation, allowing the pianist to enter into what he called "a dialog with himself".

The visual effect of the performance was astonishing as piano sounds could be heard even though the pianist was not playing.

These kinds of software are interesting as they allow the composer to create, during the concert, various musical treatments according to his specific mood and feelings of the moment. Each concert is therefore unique.

The third piece, Sieben Stufen (Seven Steps), was perhaps the strangest of all as it only involved electroacoustic music.

It was based on the poem Verfall (Decline) by Austrian Georg Trakl. Some speech in French and German was used as a sound source mixed with different sound effects.

The description included in the program gives the general idea of the piece: "... the text finally appears in a counterpoint between the French and the German version, followed by a 'retro- coda' which contains the whole piece reversed and compressed into 49 seconds."

Some people from the audience had trouble getting into this compressed, distorted and computerized music as it lacked what "a human spirit".

One woman found the computer music "too cold and inhuman".

For the last piece, the acoustic player came back on stage for Begegnungen(Encounters), which is a good illustration of the very essence of this group.

Each musician is provided a space of freedom to play according to his mood, to his feeling and to his relation to his environment. We are here at the center of intuition.

The piece is completely related to the precise moment of the playing. For those reasons, the intuitive music of Weimar is a field of freedom for the musicians.

Slamet Abdul Syukur, the famous Indonesian composer of contemporary music, was also in the audience.

He said there was no need to have any previous musical knowledge for this kind of concert. The only quality required is curiosity. "The more you will listen to this music the more you will be able to get into it."

Slamet believed that the musicians had totally mastered their instruments and were able to exploit all of their possibilities.

The new instruments are available here, but local musicians have not exploited them to the fullest, he added.

Though the audience might be disconcerted by the music, Slamet thought it was better to let the public discover it without prior explanation.

Slamet's only criticism was the seeming lack of joviality and glee in their music, in contrast to contemporary Latin composers.

The evening was a unique experience. For some, it was like a mysterious journey in a spaceship. For others, it was a real musical delight. As Slamet said, you should try it at least once.