MATTHIAS OCKERT

Liner Notes

Fluid Solidity
The Music of Matthias Ockert
by Hans-Jürgen Linke

Music moves in time, through time, and never independently of time. Sound waves are its medium, but time is the ineluctable stage on which music appears in the world. This idea has been a permanent fixture of the philosophy of music ever since Hegel delivered his lectures on aesthetics. Music demands time from its listeners, and itself determines how much time must exact from them. Those unwilling to follow its imperatives deny themselves and never receive anything whole to perceive in return.
Every performance is similarly dependent on time. It would be interesting to know whether, and if so how, music can exist outside the framework of a performance, when the human auditory faculty is allotted to it, enabling it to enter our imagination and our synaptic networks. Isn’t the human power of hearing constitutive for music’s very existence?
Unheard music does not have the same amount of reality. It exists merely as a possibility in graphic markings, musical texts, files, or sound media. Still, it has at least escaped its evanescent time-bound essence, rooted in the moment. Music has existed this way for centuries as the upshot of a complex historical process involving the participation of musicians and music engravers. One might say that music had a safety net stretched between the unique performance and the ideal performance, ever capable of being reproduced. But neither the unique nor the ideal are the truth we are concerned about. Truth has many sides and many locations, between which, depending on our temperament, we can stand in coexistence or in contradiction.
One truth is surely that every compositional act is concerned with pinning down fugitive moments. Music should not just drift in time and come to a stop; it should achieve solidity, structure, and form. And this lands us squarely in the midst of mathematics.
For ever since music has existed – that is, sounds with rhythms and definite pitches generated by musical instruments or deliberately by the human voice – it has clearly been based entirely on proportions, on quantifiable ratios. Forms, patterns, and rules have arisen, kindling expectations. These proportions and structures make music amenable to repetition. They are its ideal side. But they are not necessarily its sole reality.

Matthias Ockert is a composer who tackles things fundamentally and profoundly. But he also loves the specific, the expressive, the unique, perhaps even things that violate or abandon the rules. But never so that the violations and abandonments lack all semblance of regularity, never so that the specific becomes separate from the ideal, or vice versa: the one is always retained within the horizon of the other. Rather than either-or situations, he is concerned with concurrent and parallel existences. Never simply with music in the flux of time.
Those who think beyond time immediately land in space. After all, for wellnigh a century time has rarely ventured by itself into the philosophical arena. It seems categorically inseparable from space, forming space-time. Space and time thus escape our normal everyday consciousness and imagination.
Everyday consciousness used to be well-served by Immanuel Kant’s synthetic a priori categories. Who could have imagined that everything would become far more synthetic, and not a bit less a priori. Basically, our familiar modes of cognition, where time and space occupy different realms of awareness and the world, are unwilling and unable to leave everyday consciousness behind. This mode of cognition fits too neatly with our habitual ways of perceiving the world, even if we might have left them long ago. Space-time is beset with obstacles when we try to take it seriously as an aesthetic category: how, pray, are we to imagine this a priori categorical synthesis of space and time, which is evidently unable to distinguish sharply between the When and the Where?
In music, we have an art form that has vividly incorporated the modern view of space-time in its inner essence. But it does not always realize this.

The things that music sometimes fails to realize about itself may have a bearing on Matthias Ockert. When Ockert reviews the early years of his (still ongoing) musical and compositional training, he feels as if he has been in the wrong movie. What he wanted was something completely obvious and illuminating, but it became impossible at every turn.
Being a jazz guitarist, Ockert is artistically beholden to the given sonic moment, to the flow of music in time. On the other hand, he has studied architecture, and thus deals with the shaping and structuring of material, with drawings and construction, stasis and solidity – in short, with space and its principles of order. He intuitively grasped that flux and solidity are tightly related, even if his courses of study seemed to have nothing in common.
His horizons expanded when he encountered the works of Iannis Xenakis. Xenakis was an architect, a pupil and partner of Le Corbusier, and he took architecture as the point of department for his understanding of music like no one before him. The few works on which he demonstrated the close ties pertaining between these two fields of artistic endeavor are not directly and truly perceivable; but neither do they immediately strike the eye with their duality.
One prototype was the Philips Pavilion that Xenakis designed and built as Le Corbusier’s associate to adorn the 1958 World Fair in Brussels. It was a building whose ground plan was patterned on the human stomach, and whose shape and furnishings served the electronic music performed inside it. The music was Edgard Varèse’s Poème électronique and Xenakis’s Concret PH. One piece not performed in Brussels was Xenakis’s Metastasis, where the glissando motions of the multiply divided strings were based on the same forms as the steep hyperbolic-paraboloid exterior surfaces of the pavilion itself. All that remains of the World Fair is the witty Atomium; the beautiful, complex Philips Pavilion was demolished. Today the building exists only in the form of its surviving construction plans, just as a piece of music never performed again survives only in its score. It also survives in Xenakis’s Metastasis, thus preserving its duality.
Matthias Ockert is not what one might call a Xenakis pupil. He is an architect and a musician who makes no distinction in principle between these two modes of creation and sees no reason to choose between them. Methods of music-making, such as improvisation and composition, may exist concurrently, emerge from each other, overlap, complement, and cast doubt on each other. It is not surprising that Ockert’s far-ranging work as a musician deals in a special way with the ineffable; that the titles of his pieces toy with philosophical puzzles; that his musical language makes no effort to shun methods or materials; that there are no „Keep Off“ signs in his musical landscape; or that he avoids anything imprecise, vacuous, and amorphous.
Space is made accessible through sectional divisions, through rhythms, through a system of events and shapes that form or mirror its perspectives, its horizon-blurring density, its tense emptiness, or (why not?) its curvatures.

Time, meaning the course of these events, is full of drama, dynamism, and unpredictability. Temporality generates the energy that musicians must constantly tap in order to bring chains of events to their culmination. To do this, one needs more than just manuscript paper and digital storage devices, more than musicians capable of reliably playing the written notes placed on their music stands. The musicians must also be capable of partly relieving the composer of responsibility for the acoustical results; they must enable composers to let go of their music and to empathetically follow its emergence in the world of the senses.
Just such musicians can be found in the jazz scene. Jazz is a musical genre practically defined by the high proportion of creative independence it bestows on its performers. It is also defined by idiomatic peculiarities, typical formal processes, a repertoire – in short, by a multi-dimensional mode of existence poised between the ideal and the momentary, between formality and spontaneity.
But the emergence of a tradition of western European ensembles devoted with special commitment and maximum competence to the performance of contemporary music has, since the 1980s, opened up musical possibilities scarcely intuited before. Ensembles that offer and constantly adapt their empathy, their advanced performance techniques, and their highly flexible working methods to the demands of present-day music have encouraged composers who may have taken up different professions – architecture, say – or written music for the filing cabinet. These ensembles are capable of giving composers informed feedback on their work. For composers, like anyone else, need feedback.
In other words, it’s not reaching for the stars to want both the ideal and its realization in the present moment. To want something this difficult does not mean realizing it once and for all in the here and now. It generally means starting from scratch all over again, with new material, new ideas, new mistakes. None of this comes from the region where parallels intersect, remote from perceivable spaces and times. It comes from the musicians’ reality. Music is only temporarily a lonely business. The loneliness that surrounds composers when they compose is merely a focused interim phase, a space where they can withdraw, not a place of actuality. They can lose and/or find themselves there, but they don’t stay there.
It’s only logical that a composer with far-reaching conceptions of the sort practiced by Matthias Ockert will not limit himself to standard instruments. He works extensively with electronic sound generation in the infinite realm of synthetic sounds. When composing in solitude, he often has his electric guitar ready to hand. Ever since Charlie Christian and Jimi Hendrix reinvented its sensual sonic features, the guitar has become a hugely physical instrument. The electric guitar has always had to deal with an imaginary sonic space; and as the vibrations of its steel strings are readily amenable to electronic processing, this sonic space, if not infinite, has always been unforeseeably protean. Matthias Ockert prefers relatively simple electronic equipment and standard industrial effects when he plays the guitar. The effects are not nearly as important as the way he plays with them.

Stretto – Fluid Space is part of an eight-channel electronic composition whose material is made up of samples taken from an electric guitar. The title alludes to Stretto House (1989-91) by the architect Steven Holl, who modeled its form after Béla Bartók’s Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta (1936).
Holl’s architectural monograph Intertwining is a source of inspiration for Ockert’s Laminar Flow. The title contemplates and constructs possibilities for layered flux. Members of Ensemble Modern and Ensemble intercontemporain helped him to achieve it.
Nachglut is a rumination, with the aid of live samplings, on Gustav Mahler’s dictum „Tradition is the passing on of the fire, not the worship of the ashes.“ Two pianos join the ruminations. The samplings accelerate and decelerate the material, varying the parameters of pitch and time accordingly. The ensemble must adapt itself to these fluctuations.
Continuous Open Flux likewise alludes to Steven Holl’s Intertwining. This piece, for double bass, four percussionists, and electronics, consists of changing reactions between bass and percussion and employs a procedure from electronic music as its compositional principle. The electronic sounds are purely synthetic.
Dans la Nuit, for guitar and piano, is a post-romantic nocturne with artificial sound-spaces. It is dedicated to the poet Henri Michaux.
Strombahnen II follows a musical score that is also a computer program in which certain tones trigger certain processes. The electronics thus seem to lead a life of their own – a life incomprehensible by itself. Accordingly, Strombahnen is a technical term taken not from the applied sciences, but from medicine.
The seven numbered pieces entitled Primum Mobile are scenes from a feature-length composition related equally to Dante and to the Prinzhorn Collection – a collection of art works by the so-called mentally ill. These works share with Dante the conviction that an earthly paradise can exist only in an activity conducted for its own sake. Or would that be Hell on earth?