HC ARTMANN+HK GRUBER FRANKENSTEIN LP GUNTHER SCHULLER

$

55

HEINZ KARL GRUBER

 FRANKENSTEIN!! / ROUGH MUSIC LP

Amadeo

w/6-page insert

Rare original austrian issue of 2 of HK Gruber's best known works "Frankenstein!!" (after the texts of HC Artmann) and "Rough Music".

Some info on the release:  Very rare original issue, released in Austria sometime in the 80's by the Amadeo label. Features HK Gruber in 2 of his most well known works: "Frankenstein!!" & "Rough Music". Gunther Schuller conducts Frankenstein, Lothar Zagrosek conducts "Rough Music" with percussion from solist Gerald Fromme. 

Here's what Mr. Gruber writes about Frankenstein: "The origins of this ‘pan-demonium’ go back to the Frankenstein Suite of 1971 – a sequence of songs and dances written for the Vienna ‘MOB art and tone ART Ensemble’, which was then active in the field of instrumental theatre. Although the Suite was a success, I was unhappy about its improvisatory structure, and also needed the resources of a full orchestra. So in 1976/77 I completely recomposed the work in its present form. It was first performed on 25 November 1978 by the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra under Simon Rattle, with myself as soloist. For the 1979 Berlin Festival I wrote an alternative version for soloist and 12 players (first performed that year by the Vienna ensemble ‘die reihe’ under Kurt Schwertsik, again with myself as soloist). Since then, the two versions have happily co-existed; and in 1983, at the Espace Cardin in Paris, Frankenstein!! entered the theatre for the first time – an unforeseen development, but one that proved suited to Artmann’s multi-layered fantasy.

The title of the volume from which I took the poems of Frankenstein!! – Allerleirausch, neue schöne kinderreime (Noises, noises, all around – lovely new children’s rhymes) – promises something innocuous; but Artmann himself has described the poems as being, among other things, ‘covert political statements’. Typically he refused to explain what he meant. But his reticence is eloquent: the monsters of political life have always tried to hide their true faces, and all too often succeed in doing so. One of the dubious figures in the pandemonium is the unfortunate scientist who makes so surprising an entry at mid-point. Frankenstein – or whoever we choose to identify with that name – is not the protagonist, but the figure behind the scenes whom we forget at our peril. Hence the exclamation marks.

Artmann’s demystification of heroic villains or villainous heroes finds a musical parallel in, for instance, the persistent alienation of conventional orchestral sound by resorting to a cupboard-full of toy instruments. However picturesque or amusing the visual effect of the toys, their primary role is musical rather than playful – even howling plastic horses have their motivic / harmonic function. In order to do justice to the true significance of the texts it would be enough to provide some extra exercises in structural complexity. By analogy with Artmann’s diction, my aim was a broad palette combining traditional musical idioms with newer and more popular ones, and thus remaining true to the deceptive simplicity of texts whose forms at first glance suggest a naive and innocently cheerful atmosphere."

And about Rough Music: "Early in the 1970's my colleague Gerald Fromme, who is principal solo timpanist in the Austrian Radio Symphony Orchestra (ORF) suggested I write a concerto for him. The request fascinated me, but raised fundamental questions to which I had no immediate answer. One of the aspects of the dissolution of the 'tonal' system was the emancipation of rhythm and the consequent liberation of the percussion from its largely subordinate or even menial tasks. While on the one hand I welcomed this liberation, on the other I have always found that tonality is for me an indispensable means of expression.

Since my soloist would, by definition, have to have a decisive role in the development of themes, I was drawn to Alban Berg's idea of 'Hauptrhyhmus' ('Leading rhythm'). The soloist would take command by a series of signals, based on rhythmic ideas and embracing metrical and formal structures, while the orchestra would form a kind of echo-chamber for developing the percussionist's material in intervallic and harmonic terms. But how was the interaction of soloist and orchestra to be defined, if not in terms of the concerto ideals of the past? The question continued to puzzle me for several years,

In 1981 the Austrian Radio, without knowing of our discussions, commissioned me to write a concerto for Fromme. Before I could start on it I had to write an orchestral piece, to which, on its completion, I gave the title Charivari. Curious about the origins of a word generally associated with the Parisian magazine in which Doré, Daumier and others satirised the Second Empire, I turned to the dictionaries and was astonished to discover that the medieval ritual to which it referred involved primitive forms of percussion. As a means of venting their disapproval on individuals who stepped out of line (generally out of the marital line) villagers would 'serenade' the hapless sinner at midnight by banging pan lids, crashing tin trays, rattling bottles and even pulling the tails of cats which protruded from specially constructed boxes. The French exported Charivari to Canada and Louisiana, where it became known as 'Shivaree'; the Basques knew it as 'Toberac' (like Charivari an onomatopoeic word) and the English as 'Rough Music' or 'Skimmity riding'; while the Germans - who shared the French taste for tormenting cats - called it ‘Katzenmusik'. In parts of France, notably the Périgord, the custom was so firmly rooted that it survived into the first half of our own century - a century which has, of course, evolved immeasurably more effective means of expressing society's disapproval of outsiders. Particularly relevant in this context is the Bavarian ritual which, in its still harmless form, was known as 'Haberfeldtreiben'.

What this deep-rooted custom seemed to offer was not an excuse for folkloric exploration, but a dramatic and formal basis for the concerto as concerto. The heterogeneous sound elements - tuned and untuned, aggressive and moderating - that are marshalled together by the demagogic 'drummer' represent in the first place a concentration of forces which gradually find their allies and fellow-travellers in the orchestra. This image becomes, by extension, an expression of a mass movement whose participants, from a variety of contradictory motives, have surrendered their individuality to a questionable leadership.

The first movement, 'Toberac' is the simplest of the three, structurally, expressively, and instrumentally. The solo part begins with the 'Hauptrhythmus' and is restricted to two melody instruments – xylophone and marimba.

In the second movement, 'Shivaree', the untuned percussion takes over, and is doubled by the orchestra, whose harmonic structures eventually give rise to the vibraphone's lyrical answer. Although there are no specifically American allusions in this movement just as there are no Basque ones in its predecessor the violence of its developments may serve as a reminder that the 'innocent' revelry of Shivaree was not without relevance to the latter-day processions of the Ku Klux Klan.

While the first two movements may be heard as abstract manoeuvres, the third is concrete and specific. The subtitle 'for Henri Sauguet, at the tomb of Mister the Poor Man' refers not only to the doyen of French composers - who was born in Bordeaux in 1901 - and to his mentor, Erik Satie, but to an aesthetic implicitly opposed to all forms of violence, whether physical or spiritual. From the 'white' harmonies of the opening music there gradually emerges a ghostly outline of Satie's waltz-song ‘Je te veux'. Its untroubled mood and its purely formal implications govern the ensuing music and eventually allow for a second allusion - this time, to the waltz from Sauguet's ballet Les Forains. Rejoinders from the orchestra and from the soloist's arsenal become ever louder and more brutal until finally the two melodies are silenced ... and yet the echoes from them linger on, in the whiteness of their peaceable harmony."

Heinz Karl Gruber (he professionally uses the form HK Gruber) is an Austrian composer, bass player and singer, born in Vienna on 3 January 1943 and a leading figure of the so-called Third Viennese School.

Gruber is said to be a descendant (though the descent remains obscure) of Franz Xaver Gruber, composer of the carol Stille Nacht (Silent Night). From 1953 to 1957 Gruber was a member of the Vienna Boys Choir. He studied at the Vienna Hochschule für Musik, his composition teachers being Alfred Uhl, Erwin Ratz and Hanns Jelinek, and later Gottfried von Einem, with whom he also studied privately. In 1961 Gruber joined the ensemble die reihe as a double bass player, and became principal bass of the Vienna Tonkünstler Orchestra in 1963. In 1968, with his composer friends Kurt Schwertsik and Otto M. Zykan and the violinist Ernst Kovacic, he co-founded the 'MOB-art & tone-ART' ensemble, partly to perform their own repertoire (which included a short piece by Gruber, Bossa Nova, which rapidly became a hit tune) and partly that of Mauricio Kagel. The ensemble may be regarded as the cradle of what has been called the 'Third Viennese School', of which Gruber is now the best-known representative.

Like Schwertsik, Gruber had been taught in the post-Schoenbergian style of the Second Viennese School, but – also like Schwertsik – rapidly came to his own personal accommodation to tonality and older Viennese traditions. The critic Paul Driver has written of Gruber: ‘Neo-romantic, neo-tonal, neo-expressionistic, neo-Viennese: he isn’t any of those things, so much as a sentient (and downright accomplished) composer who keeps responding to whatever musical stimulus, be it highbrow or lowbrow, 12-tone or 7-tone, bitter or sweet, that comes his way’. Gruber had been composing – and also playing jazz – from his student days, but achieved international fame in 1978 with Frankenstein!!, a 'pan-demonium' for chansonnier and orchestra (or large ensemble) on poems from allerleirausch, a collection of children's verse by his friend, the absurdist and Viennese-dialect poet H.C. Artmann, which he performed as singer around the world in the following few years. He and Schwertsik shared a 'Composers' Portrait' feature at the 1979 Berlin Festival, and Gruber has subsequently been ranked among Austria’s leading composers. As a performer (conductor, singer, bass player) he has been involved in music by Peter Maxwell Davies, Hanns Eisler, and Kurt Weill, and made notable CD recordings of the latter two composers. In September 2009 Gruber was appointed composer/conductor of the BBC Philharmonic Orchestra in succession to James MacMillan.

Hans Carl Artmann, also known as Ib Hansen, was (amongst other things) an Austria-born poet and writer, most popular for his early poems written in Viennese ( med ana schwoazzn dintn, 1958), which however never after were to be the focus of his oeuvre.  Artmann was born in Vienna as the son of shoe maker Johann Artmann and his wife Marie (née Schneider). After growing up in Vienna and attending Volks- & Hauptschule, he worked as an office intern for three years; in 1940, he was conscripted during World War II, and transferred to a punishment battalion after suffering a war wound in 1941. Having grown up trilingually, Artmann had an interest in language from an early age on; in 1947, his first publications appeared on radio and in the newspaper Neue Wege. He joined the Art-Club in 1951, and worked with Gerhard Rühm and Konrad Bayer from 1952 on. The same year, he also founded the so-called Wiener Gruppe of avantgarde poets, which he left in 1958.

Condition: Vinyl and cover lie in very good+(+) condition, vinyl looks very clean with the exception of 2 "stains" on side b: and plays with some light crackle and surface noise on places, while cover has some age wear, mainly at the corners (look picture).

Tracklist

Frankenstein!! (30:05)

Grete Müller's Abschied Fanfare, Epilog

Credits

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