On Tuesday, January 28, 2020 at 7:00 pm, the Austrian Cultural Forum New York presents pianist Eric Wubbels performing selections from Peter Ablinger's ground-breaking "Voices and Piano" series. In this Insider Interview, we spoke with Mr. Wubbels about his past experiences working with Ablinger, his approach to learning this music, and so much more. More info online at acfny.org.
What drew you to the music of Peter Ablinger?
His music really stands out for me in the world of composition – in the visual arts there are all kinds of major artists whose work is first and foremost concept-driven, but among composers until very recently it's hard to name more than Cage, Lucier, and one or two others. I'd put Ablinger in with them.
The breadth of his practice is pretty extraordinary (everything from concert music to installation to opera, text scores, electronic music, and “trees planted according to acoustic criteria”...), and yet once you're familiar with his basic artistic personality everything is so clearly related back to a very small set of core concerns and principles. The simplest way I could say it is that his music is about listening.
And yet for me it's the furthest thing from dryly conceptual in its treatment of those concerns. It's incredibly sincere, humanistic, spiritual, and politically engaged, unpretentious and alive to beauty. And, I love the sounds...
And can you share any anecdotes from your experiences working with him?
In 2009 he agreed to come to New York to work with my ensemble on a concert of his music. We had basically no reputation in Europe, so we were amazed that he was willing to come over at all. And then, he refused to be put up in a hotel (he slept on my couch in Brooklyn for the week), and refused to be paid a commissioning fee that was any more than what any of the musicians who would play the piece would be paid for playing it. I really admire him.
In this work “Voices and Piano”, the pianist is performing along with recordings of voices or speech – as the performer, how does the electronic/recorded part of the work influence/affect how you approach your part?
As the piano part is derived completely from the sound of each recording and voice, part of the initial work is trying to hear what Peter heard in the quality of the voice (or sometimes the noise artifacts of the recording itself) so that you can create the overall sound and affect of each piece. I think arriving at an interpretation involves making decisions primarily about sonority and the overall dynamic structure – I'm trying to achieve something relative to the voice which is not quite “accompanying,” not quite “blending,” but finding a kind of balance-point where the combination of the parts allows them to be experienced simultaneously so that something new is revealed through their comparison.
My initial impulse when I first worked on the pieces was to try to match the piano part to the voice as closely as possible (rhythmically, dynamically, etc.). After working with Peter I appreciate the ways in which the alignment between the two elements is less “realistic” and more “pixellated” – the piano is basically an equal-tempered grid of an instrument, while a voice is totally fluid. So the relationship between the two has something in common with Chuck Close's portraits, or earlier pointillist/divisionist approaches to representation in the visual arts, where we see the “reality” of what's seen simultaneously with the “grid” of our own perception.
You will be performing this program in Chicago as well as in New York – in a work like this with a static electronic part, how much variety do you try to bring to your own part from performance to performance?
Another thing that I really value in Voices and Piano is the form, which is one that very rare in the music world – it's an archive. There are currently over 50 pieces, and as a result the cumulative duration is far too long to be played in a single concert. As a performer, then, your first responsibility is actually curatorial: you choose which voices to present, and thereby which individuals, communities, and points of view to represent in a given performance.
For that reason, I feel like there are all these voices already present in the piece, and I'm not really trying to draw focus away from them onto myself. I think I'd feel compelled to generate variety for myself only if I were bored with the music, and on the contrary, given the difficulty of the task, I'm completely immersed in it and it takes the entirety of my focus. Every performance is naturally different without my having to intend the details of that in any way; it's great like that!
How does your experience as both a composer and performer influence how you interpret the music of Ablinger?
It helps me put my performer ego aside and so that I can try just to serve the idea. As a composer, I see what he's going for, and I see and value the beauty of it, and I recognize that it's likely best served by a performance that's neutral, by and large. If my presence in the room dominates over the recorded voice, the balance between the elements that's necessary for them to blend into a third, composite structure would be lost. And so I have to resist the impulse to be “expressive” or dynamic in traditional ways, as that will actually make the piece as a whole less expressive.