"It is music to be heard, to be listened to. It is a sound experience by repetition"

 

"There still is a large audience waiting to be found, irritated by dogmatisms but always there to be touched by an artificial “human” sound"

1. Ruth Prieto: World Edition has just published your work Im Klang Sein. What can you tell us about the CD?

Ernstalbrecht Stiebler: This is no avant-garde music. It is beyond “old” avant-garde. It is music to be heard, to be listened to. It is a sound experience by repetition.

2. R.P.: What are we going to discover in this work?

Ernstalbrecht Stiebler: Slowness, a perspective of depth of sound, more “undertones” than overtones, no glamorous surface, but the shadows of the “background of the sound”.

3. R.P.: “To be within the sound - not to expect anything - no beautiful moments - no big emotions - no artfulness- but to follow, from note to note, a sound that carries the music” … how do you ‘translate this into music?

Ernstalbrecht Stiebler: By concentration on each musical progress - like controlling, listening to the sound – like this, the movement of the pitches within the sound can be experienced – how the sound of the pitches carries the whole sound.

4. R.P.: As a composer, which characteristic defines you best?

Ernstalbrecht Stiebler: Slowly, cautious, but thorough and always with some “con moto”.

5. R.P.: What is composition for you in this day and age?

Ernstalbrecht Stiebler: It is about developing music into deepness of sound – the new land that is not the land of sounds never heard but experienced by composition. Composition leads to a sound space with an inner dimension from where music comes and to where it returns. The inner dimension is an imagined dimension inside of your mind.

6. R.P.: What is your main obsession when working?

Ernstalbrecht Stiebler: To be free of theory, always following the inner tendency of moving into the sound.

7. R.P.: What is missing in the dissemination of music of present-day creation? Does it reach a sufficiently wide audience?

Ernstalbrecht Stiebler: There still is a large audience waiting to be found, irritated by dogmatisms but always there to be touched by an artificial “human” sound.

8. R.P.: Could you describe your creative process that led to the works on the CD?

Ernstalbrecht Stiebler: To hear and to write it down, again and again, repetitio est mater of opening the sound space, to find the way.
 
9. R.P.: Where are you right now as a composer?

Ernstalbrecht Stiebler: I am beyond avant-garde and neo-classicism – it seems to be a distant country which, however, is everywhere at the same time … if you can feel it.

10. R.P.: How do you see the contemporary music scene today?

Ernstalbrecht Stiebler: Highly interesting music, but the audience as well as the media are not sufficiently informed and often do not have enough space to introduce the new music in an understandable way. So all of us are, as Cage said, “Overnewsed and underinformed”.


 

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Ernstalbrecht Stiebler:  Im Klang sein, published by World Edition.

CD #0030
ERNSTALBRECHT STIEBLER
IM KLANG SEIN
 
1. Three in One II
Ensemble L'ART POUR L'ART

2. De-crescendo
hr-Sinfonie I Franck Ollu

3. im klang sein
Ensemble WERKTAG
 
"To be within the sound - not to expect anything - no beautiful moments - no big emotions - no artfulness- but to follow, from note to note, a sound that carries the music, a sound within the sound: it changes slowly at a tempo that suggests a movement at a great distance, one that might leave our gravitational field, in which gravity is reduced and which is not even always recognized because of its slowness. This "sound-space", which touches the cosmos but is at the same time perceptible right down to the fingertips, carries a reality that here and now is a buzz in the ear, yet at the same time comprehends an entire ambience: time rendered into a space by sound.

Beyond all taboos of an old avant-garde, a new territory might be found here where old prohibitions mark the milestones of gradual progress into the terrain of a country in which many things are not only permissible, but must be found again - probably, however, somewhere along the line (a very long line) of tradition. (Ernstalbrecht Stiebler)"

More information at World Edition