Journeys into the interior

The composer Christian Jost

Christian Jost (born 1963) is a citizen of the world. He is at home within Western traditions, but his music is also open to non-European forms. The fact that he studied in one of the strongholds of contemporary music in Cologne and then immediately continued his studies at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music in the USA is a key to understanding his music. Jost began to develop an interest in American music, minimalism, film music, and, first and foremost, jazz at an early age. In his ‘music dance theatre’ work Lover (WP 2014 Berlin, Kraftwerk), the composer combined Western vocal polyphony with the traditional sounds of Asian drums and gongs.

Chinese culture plays a prominent role in Jost’s works. The opera Rote Laterne (WP 2015, Opernhaus Zürich) is based on the novel ‘Wives and Concubines’ written by Su Tong, and the composer’s chamber opera Heart Sutra (WP 2013 Taipei, National Concert Hall) is an operatic adaptation of the eponymous short story by the Chinese author Eileen Chang. Christian Jost has become an established figure in the Chinese classical music scene on account of his flourishing relationships within cultural circles and the rapid proliferation of his works through media channels.

Jost grew up in a period in which so-called ‘serious music’ was ideologised to a greater degree than is the case today. The generation identifying with Pierre Boulez, the ‘holy spirit’ of the avant-garde, found themselves at the pinnacle of its influence. Christian Jost’s commitment to narrative qualities in music, sonority and tonal clarity has been shaped by his desire to liberate himself from any form of ideological constraint. His compositional method is however not so much dominated by musical models or counter-positions, but primarily through the development of his own individual language. The composer describes this method as the ‘third way’, a post-modern technique which is known as ‘modern creative’ in jazz: ‘Right from the start, my objective was to follow the third way. Not Donaueschingen, not the tonal Americans, not Boulez or Stockhausen and also not Reimann or Henze. The third way entailed the establishment of a new independent form of composition uniting elements of Ligeti’s Atmosphères with those of Bitches Brew by Miles Davis. This was not merely a bit of jazz here and a bit of classical music there, alternating with a bit of musical avant-garde, but music which communicates the feeling of structuralised improvisation to listeners, focused on the freedom of jazz paired with classical structure.’

Counterworlds

Jost’s masterly amalgamation of contemporary music techniques with seemingly divergent musical elements, brings both components into a clear, transparent structure. Although the music is notated, listeners have the feeling that it is being created spontaneously on the spur of the moment. This technique of calculated immediacy is what generates the unique allure of his compositions.

The composer will jot down a few musical ideas in manuscript and then move immediately to full score, notating all the individual parts. He describes this technique as working ‘directly on the sound’. His music is rich in instrumental color and his preferred method of composition is to work organically. Some of his musical phrases develop in the manner of a fern leaf unfurling and his music frequently germinates from small cells, running rampant, flowing and pulsating.

Jost’s operatic compositions are irrevocably linked to his wife, the mezzo-soprano Stella Doufexis, who died at the age of 47 in December 2015. He created the title role of his opera Hamlet (WP 2009, Komische Oper Berlin) especially for her. His knowledge of the voice and the requirements of classical opera singers have been continuously honed through daily contact with vocal practice.

Jost’s sources of inspiration for his music theatre works include novels, films, stage dramas and modern art. His operas are highly atmospheric and maintain the tension between a real and modern story and its mythical and frequently surrealist exaltation. At the same time, there is always an element which undermines the realism of the plots.

The creation of new types of plot interaction is closely linked to his method of composition. This becomes clear in his choral oratorio Angst (WP 2006, Ultraschall Berlin – Festival für neue Musik). The composer’s use of verses by Friedrich Hölderlin and the subtitle ‘Five gateways of a journey into the interior of angst’ make it clear that this work is not merely a retelling of the anguished mental calculation a mountain climber must make when forced to cut through the rope linking him to his climbing partner in order to save his own life. Once exposed to the snow-covered mountains, it appears that one’s own physical being pales into insignificance and interior thoughts and emotions push themselves to the fore. The fifth section of Angst consists of a 64-voice a cappella movement literally submerging itself in the extensive ramifications of the protagonist’s neural pathways in which multiple voices express his anxiety, feelings of guilt and also his will to survive.

In an interview on Jost’s opera Hamlet which also utilises internal (choral) voices, the composer stated: ‘I don’t believe that our consciousness functions chronologically. We do not perceive events we are involved in as an orderly sequence of incidents and are only able to construct an overall view from the individual elements of our experience in retrospect. I attempt to use this notion of multi-level perception as a foundation for my composition. My aim is to provide a representation of the multiple levels of our consciousness in order to hint at the inexplicable.’

A number of Christian Jost’s works can be performed equally well in the concert hall or on the opera stage. These compositions include fragile eggshell mind. an epic story in 3 parts (WP 1989, San Francisco), Phoenix resurrexit. Odyssee in vier Teilen (WP 2001, Kamp-Bornhofen, Pilgerhalle), the music-dance theatre work Lover (WP 2014, Kraftwerk Berlin) and the previously mentioned oratorio Angst. The composition Dichterliebe recomposed (WP 2017, Konzerthaus Berlin) based on Robert Schumann‘s well-known song cycle was transformed into music theatre at several opera houses.