Alfred Huber: Chamber Music

Haffner, Eszter; De Groot, Niek; Klipfel, Catherine; Muller, Othmar; Kerschbaum, Martin; Morgenstern Trio

For more than a hundred years, composers have been exercising sovereign control over their musical material and compositional decisions. Thus, for a century, the question of how musical works might be understood by an audience keeps being raised. “Understanding” in this case does not mean a mere rudimentary comprehension of musical events, but a penetration into the musical structure that also enables anticipation, the emergence of expectations, the aspect of surprise and thus an experience of “meaning”. According to Theodor W. Adorno, who repeatedly provided pointed propositions in the field of music theory and who also epitomized a point of reference for Alfred Huber, the performer was the only entity even capable of understanding contemporary music. This question of “comprehensibility” of contemporary music is also eminently important to the composer Alfred Huber. His response, however, is more optimistic than that of Adorno. For years, Huber has been addressing communicative processes in music on both a theoretical and a practical basis, approaching them via information theories, music philosophy and also with the means of neurocognitive science – but above all musically. His composing is based on the understanding of music as a language that can, and wants to, reach an addressee. Certainly, the composer is often tempted – as in his works PHI and PI – to calculate and construct with com-plex extra-musical categories. But this never occurs at the expense of musical expression. As we shall see, the composer prefers to give up constructive calculation rather than curb the momentum of the music.

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