My eighties and nineties.
Danger lurked. I knew I didn´t know enough European art-history. How invent the ( musical ) wheel ? The sonata as a bicycle? Innocence can breed disaster, lonely, lovely. Hubble´s universe, in a garden-hut near Stuttgart I composed SONATA FOR STRING ORCHESTRA ; I ” wrote ” its stringiness. I had to. I learned to invent sound forms. I had to. My American
MUSIC FOR THE BOOK OF KELLS ( calls for vast percussion ).It is an Early Irish Iron Age window. I had to do it. – Nobody showed me how.
I had cut pre-digital BALTHAZAR´S DREAM with bleeding fingers at the Berlin Technical University in heady 1980. Then, years later, I composed QUASI UN LAMENTO for an odd orchestra of three saxophones, wind, percussion, piano and strings; – I often asked myself had this been my prescient scream before the violent death of Rory in Hamburg 1987 ?
Beware all Holy Fools. I’d also beware musical composition as the biography´s breakfast, the unmediated and the raw. Cook, ye composers! And yet Horace´s polished art is surely right: I must construct highest sheen, my musical art, holier than bronze , my transmuted amputations and child-cauterization and orphaned child-emotions and-ghosts and – dreams and – terrors. Too simple? Certainly. And yet….
2012 HAIKUS
1.
Around Greenland booms
A white spume of cold breakers,
White noise, cool music.
2.
For the womb the seed
Sighs.For light the eternal
Dark polar day.
3.
Once here were strong pines.
Came the Great Wind that morning.
Now they are no more.
4.
This bright New Year´s Day
I replay our autumn film,
Its lovely evening….
5.
Old tides rush in where
No hovering white angel
Dares open its mouth