POPPE: SPEICHER

SPEICHER I-VI separately. The total duration of the piece is 80 minutes with the word Speicher directly translating to ‘memory’.

Everything is related in exactly the same way, in all dimensions: the first viola notes are juxtaposed (as ‘developing variation’) in exactly the same way as the smaller, medium-sized and large formal sections. Besides variety, in order for a piece to keep moving and remain interesting, it is important above all that something can be recognised. Anything can be recognisable – a single sound or an entire formal part. Therefore, constantly throwing new ideas into a piece is less important than inventing an unforeseeable network of derivations. This enables you to predict what will happen next, producing an active listening experience. Incidentally, the proportions for everything, in the micro, as well as the macro-range, are 8–3–4–6–2–12. Two interlocked processes, of which one is shorter (8, 4, 2), the other longer (3, 6, 12). But those are real durations: whether something is long or short depends on the content and the effect.

Music is something living. Rules and laws are there to be reviewed, revised, replaced or abolished. That begins as early as the definition of our smallest building brick: the note. How much pitch fluctuation can a note have, with vibrato, and still be a single note? There is a continuum of occurrences between vibrato, portamento, glissando and microtonal deviations, none of which is covered by our music theory. In addition, an under-researched connection between timbre and intonation exists, about which musicians intuitively know more than composers, with their desire for classification.

The Speicher project is a complex structure made up of variations and repetitions. It consists of six parts which follow one another without a break, although each part can also be performed

This sounds abstract, as so often when music is being discussed. The musical phenomena are never abstract, however. In this piece, I am trying to discover something about dimensions. What do ideas achieve if they are stretched over an hour?

The listener should not be stretched; instead, in a large-format score I can and must reflect quite differently on my ideas. In this way, the plan for Speicher is in no way to prolong everything, but rather to maintain the intensity, to seek the extremes: the extreme density, thinning out, acceleration, broadening. It cannot be the aim for an 80 minute piece to produce a summary of contents or a list of ideas. Instead, I must always remain awake so that I can observe durations and how the forces in the music move and shift. In a memory, everything becomes disordered anyway. © Enno Poppe, translated by Glyn Thomas

IN CONVERSATION WITH ENNO POPPE differently – and yet something like a connection emerges. The reason for this lies in the easy recognisability of my objects.

AK: How does that occur in Speicher I and how can the objects from Speicher I be identified in Speicher VI?

© Harald Hoffmann

musicologist and radio editor Armin Köhler discusses speicher with the composer AK: One always gets the impression with your music that you are working motivically and thematically in the classical sense, something that is simply not the case on closer inspection.

What ‘tricks’ do you use?

EP: There are no tricks; everything is quite open. I approach the material very closely. If I use a cell as a motif, then even a simple glissando can be a motif. Thus, if I write 25 such glissandi in a row, it will still sound like a thematic work. I regard this as an incredibly interesting process, because I have different small objects which I can assemble

EP: Speicher I uses the simplest motif imaginable that I have ever used: just a single note on the viola, played on the open string. I chose this element as the starting point for this huge cycle. It changes colour right at the start. Later on, small glissandi are added; then the instrumentation begins to change. However we come back to the violas again and again and that is what’s important, especially at the beginning. Thereafter, these single notes form what are essentially longer and longer lines; that is, they build themselves together into something superior. In Speicher VI these separate notes are connected into very long lines, yet their separateness has a role to play also. The conclusion is supposed to lead back to this separation, but then at quite a different tempo and with quite a different significance. After all, we cannot pretend after 80 minutes that everything is as it was at the beginning. On the contrary, everything will have changed a lot.

AK: And how about Speicher II and the following?

EP: Speicher II is more thinly scored. After Speicher I, which showed us the tutti and was already very animated, Speicher II is very much a virtuoso piece for those musicians who are not in Speicher III. At three minutes, Speicher II is the shortest piece in the cycle and was therefore the hardest to write. In a context in which everything is orientated towards expansion, it was difficult for me to be brief. The piece contains references to all the other Speicher pieces, but not as quotations or motifs, but in more abstract variants. The saxophone solo from Speicher VI is

anticipated here just as much as the crazy virtuosity in Speicher V. Speicher III is a piece with very many lines. In the instrumentation there are two bass flutes, a microtonally tuned harp and strings that work with many melisma. The material grew straight out of the ending of Speicher I. In this respect, Speicher II is actually a disruption, because the music of Speicher I continues in Speicher III. Speicher IV is a huge comparative form which is carried very strongly by the woodwind. The form is given as a basis in Speicher II and differs greatly from the self-similar proportions in Speicher I, V and VI. The piece enters an explosive, very short conclusion, which is followed immediately by Speicher V. This is very much a virtuoso piece for the whole ensemble. The relationships here correspond with those in Speicher I, only at a far greater speed. The two violas begin once again – just like at the beginning of the cycle. Essentially, Speicher V is a sort of reprise. But as the piece is twice the speed of Speicher I, it will be transformed into something completely different.

Speicher VI has the really big lines, the great chord towers, and requires a considerable amount of time. Since the Speicher cycle has a quick tempo over long stretches throughout, it is important that in Speicher VI we get very close to the details in slow motion.

AK: You once said that you would “drive into the wall” in your Speicher cycle. What did you mean by that?

EP: When I wrote Speicher I three years ago for the occasion of the 25th anniversary of the Klangforum Wien, it was not at all obvious that the piece would be extended into a cycle. I found working on this opus so easy, and everything was so clear, that I had the feeling that I still needed some resistance. I needed to continue writing – indeed, to keep going until I really saw the wall in front of me where I sensed some resistance.

Where I see limits, I develop an even stronger interest in something. For me, that is always an important aspect of my work. It concerns not only the form and the material, but all types of ideas. I would rather learn something and make more headway with my ideas than seemed possible to

me from the outset. At the end of each writing process, I still have very many thoughts in my head which could not be accommodated in the piece and that gives me a good feeling. For even when I am looking for the resistance in the wall into which I would like to drive, I can nevertheless advance further and further.

AK: “Form is lust”, according to Ernst Stadler.

Which implies intensive expansion. You are a composer who works in an extraordinarily concentrated way. However, this concentration seems to me to be of special significance, even with such a large piece.

EP: Yes, that is correct. I get the feeling that you don’t need any more ideas for a long piece than for a shorter one. It was no different when I was writing my operas: For the long parts, I needed fewer ideas than for the shorter ones. I really can’t tell you why that is so. Morton Feldman said something similar once. It is becoming more obvious to me that it is not a case of the quantity of ideas, but of the awareness – the awareness when observing. Composition is always a type of observation, of course. I look at the material precisely and listen in to the sounds. And the bigger the projects, the more patiently I can deal with things. Speicher VI lasts twenty minutes, but I do not need six times as much material as in Speicher II, which only last three minutes, because I can use a lot more differentiation.

AK: How do you select your material? Why do you begin the way you began in Speicher I, for example – even though, when writing this piece, you had originally still not planned to allow the whole thing to develop into a grand form? And why did you stop exactly where you have now stopped in Speicher VI? EP: Form represents an idea, just like a melody or a sound. Forms are just as much ideas as anything else. I have a book in which I draft pieces whose sound I haven’t established yet. And there are other pieces where I have a clear concept of the sound, but don’t know anything about the form. That is quite an interesting process: letting loose form and sound on one another, because the two of them are not always truly congruent. It can even be the case that the form does not suit the sound at all. This is true for Speicher I. At some point in time, I had the idea of a fractal form which

had the same relationships on all levels. A matrix would eventually develop from this which would give me the length of the form and also indicate the repetitions. It is at this moment that the decisions take place. Of course, I could constantly be changing the form, but it is important to me that I follow a decision once it is made. That means that my formal scheme is fixed at some point. I cannot lengthen it towards the end of the piece any more, as it is prescribed by the form.

AK: Explain to us the title Speicher.

EP: A Speicher (Memory) is a storage system. The composition was preceded by the compositions Schrank (Cupboard) and Koffer (Suitcase). All these pieces deal with bringing order to something that was in disorder to begin with.

Speicher is a classification system that allows me to interlock the most varied ideas during a long drafting process and pour them into a great form.

AK: But Speicher comprises of many small constituent parts‌ EP: Constituent memories, to a certain extent. The composition consists of six parts, and each of these six parts is divided further into six parts which have the same relationship to one another, in terms of their lengths and proportions, as the six main parts. Speicher I, as well as Speicher V and Speicher VI, all have the same formal relationships, down to the lowest cell level, as the individual parts of this 80 minute Speicher cycle have to one another. I have been able to experience these different repetitions and changes, these various relationships in the several formal constellations, evoking quite different perceptual aspects.

Translated by Glyn Thomas