THE PERIPHERY AND THE CENTRE MANFRED EICHER

A few months ago a Japanese journalist and his photographer came to our office to do a story about us and our company for a Tokyo magazine. I don't know whether the two of them enjoyed their visit, and I don't know what the article- a several-page, full-colour spread- said, because I don't know Japanese. But I certainly liked the photographs they took back to Japan with them. They were shot from the window of the office, and you can see the Griifelfing motorway junction going towards the city centre. You can see that it's cold, only a few degrees above zero, and dusk is drawing in. Fog has settled over the landscape. Half-growri trees stretch their scrawny branches skyward, as if the northern tree line were very close. The pine tree in front of the window seems to have been borrowed from a

Munich: the view from the office window

Japanese woodcut, and the few cars dotting the six- it's when I get here that I know I've reached Munich, lane road look like messengers to or from anywhere the city I've called home for over thirty years. but here. They're poetic photos that the Japanese visitors to ECM took, strangely intimate pictures There is a freedom in this place, a musical quality from a no man's land of industrial culture, a no in its placelessness. 'My place,' as Edmond Jabes man's land you enter and leave only to enter and once said, 'is the absence of any such thing.'Music leave some other no man's land. is a purely temporal phenomenon. It creates

spaces by connecting inside and outside, and that

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I like this spot on the outskirts of Munich, and not just because, arriving from Zurich or the south west,

allows it to overcome any kind of place.

I also like the motorway junction for being peripheral.

The Periphery and the Centre

'The clearer the voice, the more dissonant its sound,' writes Joseph Brodsky in his introduction to the work of Ossip Mandelstam. 'It would appeal to no choir and its aesthetic isolation takes on physical proportions.'

Of course, no one would have imagined Ossip Mandelstam as a member of a choir, but we understand what Brodsky is trying to say: that singularity and clarity are closely linked, that there is no clarity without divergence, deviation, a movement away from the group. What results might be termed seclusion at close quarters, and I think that this proximate remoteness or remote proximity is a renewing, life-affirming part of every vital culture -as is curiosity.

The curiosity that leads us, time and again, to draw inspiration from the remotest sources, classical and modern. Seclusion at close quarters means travelling between cultures and languages, but also travelling into history. The result is a roaming tendency, an ever-changing contemporaneity with the Old and the New, with the composers of the Middle Ages and the modern era alike.

Genuinely knowing ourselves always involves knowing how others see us. Those who are serious about culture will try to position themselves at the periphery and see how they are mirrored from there. The meaning of a culture reveals itself in its plenitude only through encounter and contact with a culture different, even alien to it. The dialogue that develops between them by far transcends the realm of the self-contained and unambiguous. We ask an alien culture questions it would not ask itself. And in doing so, we look for answers to questions that are our own.

But we must never settle too comfortably at the periphery- the margin should only be a source, a spot from which to grasp the essence of the centre.

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The moment we realize that there are no frontiers, distance becomes light.

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My love of music has shaped my life since I was a child. Later on, I was increasingly captivated by the cinema as well. This twofold devotion to music and films determined the trajectory of my music studies in Berlin. The places that satisfied my two passions were located across the road from one another: the Musikhochschule on the north side of Hardenbergstrasse, the cinema at Steinplatz on

the south side, with four lanes of traffic in between. It was in that cinema that I first saw films by Roberto Rossellini, Ingmar Bergman, Jean-Luc Godard and Robert Bresson.

One film that exercised a particular attraction was Godard's Vivre sa vie, with Anna Karina- a quiet, rhythmically composed film with a demonstrative predilection for light, sound and music, and a penchant for the art of leaving things unsaid, at which Godard has been an uncompromising master since the very start.

I have been sending him records for twenty years now, musical messages that occasionally resurface in the erratic oeuvre that marks his later years. His Histoire(s) du Cinema is also a history of music.

The Sonimage studio is located in the rue du Nord in Rolle, on the shores of Lake Geneva. The few light sources in the room are all trained on the desk, with its typewriter, cutting table and mixing panel. When, with the subtle sensibilities of a composer, Godard sets to harmonizing musical sounds and natural noises, and creates friction between them, he produces shadows and sparks. Our perception is sharpened: now we can discern even the tiniest shards of sound - the beating of a

seagull's wing, fragments of song, a dog barking, a clock striking, a wave breaking.

And time and again it is a joy to watch Jean-Luc Godard, the master of sound and image,

Jean-Luc Godard

that can stand up to Beethoven's music. Godard the magician, ferryman from another reality.

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meticulously slipping on white gloves, like a Music is the focal point of my life, its essential surgeon, so as not to leave any fingerprints on the core. It is from there that everything else grows, rolls of film that he spools back and forth at the and to there that I always return: to the concert cutting table. His editing is bold- and painstaking. halls, churches and studios. Music is my vocation:

the atmosphere produced at a recording session One of the many things I owe him is the auditory should be inimitable and awaken the desire to insight that the music of Johann Sebastian Bach make changes or, where necessary, to improve and retains its pulse and rhythm even when played perfect. For instance, to question things, to be backwards. prepared to abandon concepts worked out during

Godard is scrupulous in hunting down exactly what he wants: for the film Allemagne Neuf Zero, we listened to at least thirty versions of the Allegretto of Beethoven's Seventh Symphony- Bernstein, Klemperer, Harnoncourt, Furtwangler, Gardiner, Abbado, Kubelik and Schuricht, to name only a few- before we finally decided on a Bruno Walter recording. There are very few images, very few films

rehearsals or even ones that were successful in concert - concepts that, in the privacy of the recording studio and with different people listening, change and require transformation.

We experience a sense of joy when we can express and give acoustic reali0 to music through a single gesture, a single intake of breath. These are tl;1e moments when something is set in motion. It is

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The Periphery and the Centre

like breathing on a mirror: within seconds the surface is veiled in an evanescent mist that, moving inwards from the edges, as quickly disappears again. What remains is the question: what was there - was it anything at all?

The crucial thing is for a tone or mood to be created- an atmosphere that sincerely expresses what one wishes to convey of oneself and one's emotions. Music is the art that speaks directly to the soul.

Sometimes the distant sound of a violin or a mere noise is enough set the process going. Sometimes the most insignificant events, the blank spaces between the words, so to speak, can spark off changes. Intuitive experiences, improvisations or simple sounds, words or images that can be juxtaposed or linked up to produce a hitherto unimagined, new context. It is the nature of this inner web of relationships that shapes the rhythm, momentum and architecture of a piece of music. Anchored in time, music opens up its own space, its own musical time, which seems to contain all that is inexplicable and mysterious. This is the distance one always wishes to have very close by.

'What you said about intuition in your letter,' wrote Albert Einstein in a letter to Hermann Broch, 'expresses exactly what I feel. For logical form can never exhaust the possibilities of cognition, just as the nature of poetry is more than metre and the nature of music is more than the theory of rhythm and harmonic progression. The essential nature remains mysterious and will ever remain so, can only be sensed but never grasped.'

v

When I turned six, my mother gave me a violin, and I quickly acquired a taste for it. I had actually

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wanted to learn to play the piano, but, with four elder sisters also living in the house in Hintere Metzergasse, there was no space for one.

Eight years later, when I discovered Miles Davis and bass player Paul Chambers, the violin was forgotten. Although our house had no room for a double bass either, the Quartier du Jazz in Lindau did, and it became a home away from home. Today the bass stands forlorn in a corner of my office, next to the 78s. I did, in fact, dedicate my studies to the instrument, and for a year in Berlin it even looked as if I would spend my life in the back row of a symphony orchestra. It was a good period in my life. I retain vivid memories of the conductor Carl Schuricht. The bass remained incidental to my life, like the violin before it- but when I think of the two episodes, they take on the quality of milestones along my route to the other side of the musical listening experience.

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Some of the earliest, most important and most enduring impulses for my work I owe to Ingmar Bergman, who was, at one point, my neighbour in Titurelstrasse in Munich. The characters in his films ar~ not commonplace to the cinema, for they are creatures of warm humanity. Bergman relies totally on their presence, setting them apart and showing them in existential dignity. He links up cinematic events and music so closely that the result can be like a balancing act, a floating latticework of the two expressive forms.

Of all the arts, I would say that music and film have most in common. Film is, after all, a way of shaping time. It uses duration, which is otherwise the measure of time, to allow the viewer to forget time. And the so-called phrasing, or narrative gesture, comes from music, too. As I see it, in both film and music the most important thing is clarity

Erland Josephson in the film Holozan (dir: Manfred Eicher! Heinz Butler)

and coherence - the creation of atmosphere: light, him, whose violin was hanging limply by his side, sound, noises, rhythm. and said: 'Now I've spelled it out for you slowly. In

concert I'd play it at the proper tempo.' 'In compassion we achieve a higher freedom.' Ingmar Bergman quotes Schopenhauer's dictum in his moving film about Schubert and his music, one of the most beautiful tributes ever made to the great composer.

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I had already heard him at Carnegie Hall. But he impressed me even more making his way from the Basel railway station to a master class. It was deepest winter; crusty snow crunched underfoot. He was swathed in a bearskin cap and was carrying a case. The face emerging from his beard, the delicacy of his build and the magnified acuteness of his bespectacled gaze gave him the look of a personified cause.

Arrived at the Conservatoire, he put down his

Gidon Kremer and I met again years later, when we were in a Basel studio with Keith Jarrett to record Arvo Part's Fratres for the record Tabula Rasa. A truly electrifying encounter between the most unconventional stylists and protagonists of contemporary classical music and jazz.

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I first heard the Officium defunctorum by Morales at Seville cathedral in the 1970s. When I listened to it again twenty years later, while driving through the jagged lava fields of Iceland, I was enormously moved. At the time I was on location with Erland Josephson and Jorgos Arvanitis for Holoziin, a film adaptation of Max Frisch's story Man in the Holocene.

case, took out his Strad and, barely grazing the The sky like ash or lead. The luminous sound -strings with the bow, played a passage at lightning night before one's eyes. speed. Then he turned to the student in front of

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The Periphery and the Centre

While working on the film in Iceland, I listened alternately to the Hilliard Ensemble's recording of Gesualdo's Tenebrae Responses and the chants of saxophonist Jan Garbarek. Suddenly Morales seemed like a southern continent with northern birds of passage skimming in broad circles overhead - on the shores of the basalt sea. As we could not match the intensity of the sounds to the trajectory of the film, we later decided for different music.

What remained was the idea.

And that is how the recording of Jan Garbarek and the Hilliard Ensemble in the Provostry of St Gerold came about - Officium, a recording that presents new and far-flung sound worlds.

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He did not just devise and write radio plays or publish essays on his ideas about light and life in the North, he also played the piano: A Consort of Musicke by William Byrd and Orlando Gibbons, for example.

I was fortunate enough to be present when Glenn Gould made this recording at the Columbia studio in New York and later to meet him personally while he was involved in the serious, mysterious process of editing the tapes.

Death as transfiguration? . .. Relics of the past, in their legions. So what transpires is precisely what he wanted least: the interpretation threatens to supplant the actual score and the performance is suddenly mistaken for the music itself- as if no other reading were possible. Everything seems to have been said. And that ends in an easy way out. Which is a burden to the person who has decided always to pursue the stoniest path.

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Growing up on the shores of Lake Constance, I spent a lot of time at the waterside. The landscape there is mild but the lake can get very rough. And when the fog comes up, you can be overcome by the feeling you're looking out to the sea. The droning wind and the roar of the surf hav~ imprinted themselves on my mind. The sounds of nature are the models for art, the oldest form of song. And even the calm, when the wind has died down, can still be sensed.

I rediscovered these impressions in the North, above all in Scandinavia, where they occur with even greater purity and existential force. The wind is a poet from the North.

'Go with the Wind, I say the shadows.'Thus Peter Huchel.'Be faithful, says the stone."The dawn breaks I where light and leaf I live intertwined I and the face is consumed in a flame.'

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Art can touch and penetrate, I am convinced, only when it is created in authenticity and passion. And I recognize ever more clearly: everything that genuinely goes deep is bound to succeed.

It is good to know that there are kindred spirits with whom I can share my passion.

I am lucky to be a musician. At home in a wordless language.

Translated by Eileen Walliser-Schwarzbart