This Thurs­day, 7:30pm at the Aus­trian Cul­tural Forum, I’ll have the con­sid­er­able plea­sure and honor of step­ping out from behind the glow­ing screen and appear­ing in a minor role at a major event: the world pre­miere of Bern­hard Lang’s “Mon­odolo­gies XVIII,” per­formed by the Argento Ensem­ble and dancer Silke Gra­binger. I will be inter­view­ing Lang briefly on the stage, and the plea­sure and honor is in how deeply fas­ci­nat­ing and excit­ing his music has been to me since I first heard it in 2009.

There is a group of middle-aged Euro­pean com­poser who are mak­ing music that has a con­nected aes­thetic in how it goes beyond both Post-Minimalism and Post-Modernism in a way that com­bines exper­i­men­tal con­cepts with the prac­tice of craft and a Roman­tic feel­ing for expres­sion and the sub­lime beauty that can be found in some­thing unset­tling, even absurd. Some of the promi­nent names in my mind are Olga Neuwirth, Sal­va­tore Scia­r­rino and George Friedrich Haas. My infor­mal sur­vey of musi­cians, crit­ics and audi­ences tells me that Lang is far less well known, although I think they would find Lang imme­di­ately appeal­ing; more abstract and with a darker aes­thetic than Haas, but more phys­i­cally expres­sive than Neuwirth, rooted in the prac­tice of play­ing pop music and jazz, and with an excel­lent intu­itive ear and a glee­fully sub­ver­sive sense of humor.

The ten or fif­teen min­utes we will be speak­ing can’t do much more than open up a door­way into his work, and so Lang gra­ciously took time amidst a demand­ing rehearsal sched­ule to talk about his meth­ods, his ideas and his per­sonal val­ues. We found a quiet spot, acci­den­tally but absolutely appro­pri­ately, in front of a frag­ment of the Berlin Wall, where we talked about Coltrane, Miles Davis, Bob Dylan, Bruck­ner and history.

In sub­tle ways, Lang is closer to the legacy of Amer­i­can music than Euro­pean music, with one immensely impor­tant dif­fer­ence. To fol­low Robert Ashley’s use­ful gen­er­al­iza­tion, “Amer­i­can com­posers want to tell their sto­ries, the (Euro­pean) struc­tural ideas have never been a pri­or­ity.” Lang wants to tell his own story as well, although it may seem to be dis­guised by struc­tural pri­or­i­ties. But Lang is also deeply sen­si­tive to his­tory, musi­cal and oth­er­wise, and his per­sonal story is intrin­si­cally con­nected to the scarred phys­i­cal and psy­cho­log­i­cal land­scape of Europe: fas­cism, war, geno­cide, totalitarianism.

The struc­tural idea at the core of his work is sim­ple and pow­er­ful: the loop. It’s con­nected to the tape exper­i­ments of Steve Reich, and also to film run­ning through sprock­ets and hands spin­ning turnta­bles for­ward and back. It’s a repet­i­tive ele­ment that works as a ground bass, a tonal cen­ter and a unit of time above and beyond the beat. It’s the fun­da­men­tal repet­i­tive ele­ment in his repet­i­tive style, but rep­e­ti­tion for Lang is like atonal­ity to Berg, core mate­r­ial to be adapted to the imper­a­tive of expres­sion. Lang drops in ghostly frag­ments of phrases, finely crafted vocal melodies, spo­ken text, invig­o­rat­ing and com­pletely idiomatic bits of rock and jazz.

Lang’s loops are imper­fect, uneven, and that makes his music sound earthy and hand-made. They go against the grain of process music and per­va­sive tech­nol­ogy that turns mak­ing music into con­struct­ing some­thing out of the pre-recorded equiv­a­lent of Lego. You can hear the phys­i­cal craft of com­po­si­tion and his intu­itive ear in Lang’s results, and I can hear how it comes out of his back­ground as a key­board player and work­ing jazz musi­cian, tran­scrib­ing solos. Tak­ing a sound and turn­ing it into nota­tion and then play­ing it your­self is a highly phys­i­cal activ­ity, mak­ing the imma­te­r­ial solid so you can work with it, and you can hear him push­ing the loops around in his pieces.

If elec­tric Miles appeals to you, Lang will excite you. The loops have the effect of a deep groove, on top of which the music is free to reach for lim­its. And like elec­tric Miles, the sound com­bines frag­ments of famil­iar ele­ments in a fas­ci­nat­ing abstract con­text that is full of dis­turb­ing beauty. The meth­ods may be unusual, but the goal is to com­mu­ni­cate human expe­ri­ence, just as it was for the Roman­tics, and Lang builds a fun­da­men­tal insta­bil­ity into his mate­r­ial, just as the Roman­tics did. Time may move on a line, but human and social his­tory moves in cycles. The cycle of birth to death offers both extra­or­di­nary oppor­tu­ni­ties and extra­or­di­nary lim­its, the loop marks the begin­ning and the end, the alpha and omega in which chaos and order bal­ance. As he likes to say, “the sleep of his­tor­i­cal rea­son cre­ates repetition.”

Rec­om­mended listening:

Differenz/Wiederholung 2

Bern­hard Lang: DW 8, 15, 3

 I Hate Mozart