Nikolaus Brass ~
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a "csendes" komponista...
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Orvos ~ szerkesztő ~ zeneszerző..
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Találkozás Morton Feldmannal...
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On Nikolaus Brass
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Nikolaus Brass, born in Lindau on Lake Constance in 1949, is a quiet composer. It was only relatively late that he revealed his inward-looking works to the public. For all that, however, his sublime musical language has been received with increasing intensity and urgency. Composing, perhaps now more than ever, means finding one's own path. Faced with the rich variety of stylistic experiments, faced with lackadaisical postmodern "anything goes," finding that path can be difficult, and many young com­posers succumb to the temptations of a rapid attractiveness that is used up just as rapidly. Often there is hardly any time for growth and the maturation process under these circumstances. Nikolaus Brass's situation was quite difference: he studied medicine in Munich and while concurrently taking composi­tion lessons from Peter Kiesewetter. He supplemented the latter with studies under Frank Michael Beyer and Helmut Lachenmann. For several years Brass was active as a doctor; since 1982 he has been an editor for a medical newspaper. During this period he attended the Darmstadt Summer Courses several times; an encounter with Morton Feldman was a memory that influenced him for a long time. Composition, although it was unquestionably the most important thing to him, took place on the side, free from any obligation. The organism of his works - the expression "organism" is justi­fied in Brass's case - grew slowly.


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Nikolaus Brass has written his own brief comments on the works on the present CD:
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VOID
for piano (1999)
Premiere on November 30, 1999, in Munich, by Monika Stöhr
Written in 1999, following a visit to the Jewish Museum in Berlin, at a time the building was still
empty. VOID was the architect Daniel Libeskind's description of the vacated, empty spaces in the
interior of the construction that make it possible to experience the lack of something that once
existed.
Similarly, in my composition VOID refers to the structural voids that support the edifice of sound
and simultaneously call it into question.
In 2001 I wrote VOID II, a version of the solo piece expanded into a concerto for saxophone, piano, percussion, and orchestra.
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a due
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Music for accordion and violin (2003)
in memoriam J. H. - written for Susanne Schiitz and Hugo Noth
Premiered on October 19, 2003, in Digne-les-Bains by Susanne Schütz and Hugo Noth
Three movements - with the poetic titles "under blossoms," "under the moon's glow," and "the
snow cover" - taken from chapter titles in Yasushi Inoue's novel My Mother.
Preludes and postludes, called succinctly "before" - "after," although from the start the "before"
can be an "after" and the "after" a "before," lead into a musical space titled "memoria" in which
both the setting (the individual "movements") and the juxtaposition (the leading toward and away of the preludes and postludes) are sublated in the "thinking" and "reflecting" of the expressive ineffability of the music.
a due was written in early 2003 and is dedicated to the musicians who premiered it, Susanne
Schutz and Hugo Noth.
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TRIO
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for piano, violin, and violoncello (1987-91)
Premiere of the second version on March 8, 1997, in Munich, by members of Ensemble Köln:
Kristi Becker, Geoffry Wharton, Roman Guggenberger
The march of time is broken into states of "now still, then no more." What are formed are isolated musical aspects whose audible formal relation does not conceal the irreconcilability of experiential time that has been fragmented. Interrelatedness and thus the illusion of the organic is increasing­ly abandoned over the course of the piece. Patient listening has to focus on the tension between interval and sound, sound and silence, stasis, plane and movement, without this tension being resolved in the traditional dramatic sense. It is a matter of the actuality of states. A matter of expe­riencing a static temporal shape that is deliberately distinct from our habitual, dynamic experience of time.
The piece is divided into two parts. The second continues the tendencies of the first to transgress orders. Again and again this results in an experience of "static time" in hermetic musical spaces, which flowed from the energy of the musical figures and motive impulses of the opening.