New Phonic Art - Version 2

Begegnung In Baden-Baden (1971)

Carlos Roqué Alsina, piano, electric organ, percussion, flute, zurle (Macedonian oboe)
Vinko Globokar, trombone, alphorn, zurle (Macedonian oboe)
Michel Portal, E-flat clarinet, B-flat clarinet, bass clarinet, saxophone
Jean-Pierre Drouet, percussion

There is no visual direction and no preliminary "briefing" of the performers. No attempt is made by any member of the group to influence the others by word or attitude. The choice of sources of sound is absolutely free. This free kind of ensemble music is made in the spirit of mutual tolerance, whereby the musical intuition of each individual is entirely responsible for the form the work takes.

New Phonic Art is the logical conclusion of a musical development that started as far back as the beginning of the nineteen-fifties, at first in America with John Cage and Earle Brown, and the "aleatory technique" - the novel form of notation which, within a framework laid down by the composer, gives the interpreter more or less freedom either to choose one of various interpretative possibilities or largely to determine the development of a piece himself (as, for example, in one of the most uncompromising "scores" - a quartet by Franco Donatoni, written in 1963 - in which it says: "The performance will be determined by the reading of the syllables from the headlines of four daily newspapers. The players can simultaneously begin to read on one particular page. Each player reads without paying any attention to the other performers"). The New Phonic Art group carries this increasing freedom from the "dictatorship" of the score and the consequential greater involvement of the interpreter in the musical shaping of the piece to its logical extreme: for the first time since the beginning of new music, no score at all is used.

The "composition", just as unpremeditated as an unrehearsed discussion between four people, develops out of the immanent laws of question and answer, of the action and reaction of the instruments to one another, and at times out of the sublime concurrence and recreative mood of the playing. Since none of the pieces played by the four musicians can be foreseen in any way, as the sound, the combination of sound and the contrasts develop out of intuitive tensions and reactions which grow organically, than it follows that each piece is unique and unrepeatable.

The recording took place at Baden-Baden on the 23rd and 24th of January 1971. Until then the group gave only concerts but never played in a recording studio. We recorded two "team-plays" in the evening of the 23rd, two in the afternoon and three in the evening of the 24th of January. After having heard the recording tapes, we choose the first, the third and the seventh. No use whatsover was made of only electronical manipulation.

Each of these three pieces is complete in itself, without any cutting or rearranging of the tape, which would have changed, or, worse, "improved" the sequence of the instrumental combinations or the question and answer structure. The unusual richness of the sound colours is a result of the wide variety of instruments used, ranging from piano, organ, xylophone and percussion to alphorn, from rustling paper, and the beating of wood to the sounds produced by Globokar by running a stick up and down the ribbed profile of the alphorn. --Werner Goldschmidt

Art by Monica Bonvicini

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