FL: What role can new music play in the contemporary world?
GFH: It’s necessary that a number of human beings exist who dedicate their lives to creating new emotions, new art. I think people who are focussed in creating new emotions and new art are like yeast in society. Let us have a look to the younger history of Poland. New art – not only music, also literature, for instance Stanisław Lem – was a strong contributor to the death of ‘real socialism’. Well, it’s not that everybody in the streets hummed melodies written by Penderecki. But these artists demonstrated publicly that it’s possible to create a new world – just by trusting your own imagination.
If you looked into today’s politics in Austria, the FPÖ (die Nachfolger der Vorläufer der Nazis – the heirs to the forerunners of the Nazis) have lost their power. This is the result of many reasons. One these reasons is that artists stood up, and kept standing up, and never tired of exposing Nazism. Of course, that doesn’t mean Elfriede Jelinek writes one of her disturbing, shocking and incredibly beautiful texts and immediately some stupid guys change their minds. No, not at all. But it’s important that many people who are sensitive, who are conscious, that they try to dedicate their lives to the general idea of humanity – Elfriede Jelinek, Olga Neuwrith, Bernhard Lang, Johannes Maria Staud, me, and hundreds of others – saying: no, this is wrong, this is inhuman. The existence of a great number of these individuals can change things.
FL: Who are the performers of your pieces to you?
GFH: I’d like to start my answer with an anecdote. In 1979 I had my final exam in composing, I composed a cantata. The singer who was supposed to sing the cantata was quite famous and specialised in contemporary music. During the rehearsal, she sang it and nothing was right. I showed her her mistakes. I sung the melody. She was shocked, closed the score, and said: ‘What??? You are able to HEAR what you have written? In that case, I can’t sing it.’ This anecdote says a lot about the history of performances of new music. There were hundreds, thousands of performances like that. Artists who just pretended to do what is written in the composer’s score.
But this singer’s reaction was a problem for me, not her. I had to adapt this cantata to a concerto for viola and chamber orchestra and asked a good friend of mine to play the solo part. I loved discussing music with him, it was so important to me. He taught me many things about Schubert, Schumann and so on. He lived in Salzburg (I lived in Graz), but he visited me to perform my piece – and we didn’t have the chance to speak about our beloved music of the 19th century, because he had to practise the damn score that I had written! I never will forget myself listening to him, spending his precious time to study these ‘weird ideas’ I had in my mind. Ever since that experience, I’ve realised that everybody practising my music is giving me a great gift – their time and their abilities.
When I compose music that requires the expenditure of a lot of time on the behalf of the performers, the performers must get the chance to receive something in return. For example, in many of my pieces I ask for these very difficult intervals in ‘just intonation’, which are really hard to achieve. They are ‘out of tune’ – but within the other world of my intonation, they have to be perfectly in tune. When they get them right, it’s overwhelmingly beautiful. And in this moment, musicians have the chance to enjoy the results of their hard work (if they want to…)
