What art after Auschwitz? The question haunted composers who had seen Nazism sweep the homeland of Beethoven. Acutely aware of the evils of our times – racism, colonialism, sexism, and exploitation – they faced harrowing questions: how can music stand up to power? How should it be written, performed, and heard? Thus began an extraordinary experimental whirlwind, at the center of which was a humble and discreet genius: Klaus Huber.
Huber was a mystic, a revolutionary, and an immensely influential teacher. To celebrate the 100th anniversary of his birth, Jean-Luc Menet and Ensemble Alternance will perform the music of Huber and his friends and pupils Brian Ferneyhough, Toshio Hosokawa, Luigi Nono, and Heinz Holliger. Newly commissioned works by Aurélien Dumont and Brice Pauset will show the ongoing fertility of Huber’s musical conception. The Klaus Huber Centennial Project is an invitation to experience music whose uncompromising opposition to power is more relevant than ever.
PROGRAM
Saturday 2 November, 3pm: Jean-Luc Menet, flute and electronics
Klaus Huber - Plainte, lieber spaltet mein Herz , Intarsimile, Ein hauch von Unzeit
Heinz Holliger - (é)cri(t)
Brian Ferneyhough - Cassandra’s dream song
Toshio Hosokawa Kuroda-Bushi
Daniel Hugo Sprintz - Hommage à Klaus Huber (poème électronique)
Sunday 3 November, 3pm: Ensemble Alternance
Klaus Huber Vers la raison du cœur
Brice Pauset Creation
Aurélien Dumont Music of sighs
Klaus Huber L’ombre de notre âge
Both concerts will be followed by roundtables with the musicians.
- Tickets for each concert: £20 (full) / £5 (HCMS)
- Combined ticket for both concerts: £30 (full) / £10 (HCMS)
- Free for students with student ID
- Book your tickets via this link
- Tickets also available on the door
SAT 2 - SUN 3 NOVEMBER
@ 3pm HOMERTON COLLEGE, GREAT HALL
Dr Olivier Tonneau introduces Music Vs Power:
Listening as rebellion and mysticism
Alienation – that is, perhaps, the word that best describes our condition. As wars, exploitation, xenophobia, and environmental destruction threaten the very core of life, we are stuck on the surface, swept away by an endless flow of soundbites and epidermic indignations.
Our very emotions are hollowed out by the continuous solicitations of social media, empathy is but a word, demonstrations mere carnival that temporarily alleviates the experience of powerlessness.
The pervasive force of alienation has been diagnosed long ago. Guy Debord wrote The Society of the Spectacle in 1967 and Theodor Adorno had already chronicled the mutilation of the human condition during World War II.
Modern art was fundamentally born out of artists’ desire not to participate in the social spectacle. They knew that the gallery, the theatre and the concert hall were privileged spaces dedicated to the representation and legitimation of privilege; as such, they must be revolutionized. Composers began questioning the very act of listening.
Listening is a fundamental aspect of our lived experience – yet we rarely listen to music. It has largely become a soundtrack to life events: music to relax, music to make love, and even music to accompany protests.
Musical experiences are made of recognition rather than discoveries: we hear the same songs and the same symphonies all the time, whose ending we anticipate as soon as we heard their beginning.
To allow us to truly exercise our listening capacities, music must force us out of this comfort zone; entering a work of music should be like discovering a new language or setting foot on another world. Klaus Huber believed that only then could a musical experience be transformative.
“…the soul to dismount and walk on its silken feet”.
Klaus Huber (30 November 1924 – 2 October 2017) was born in a conservative milieu where Nazi sympathies were pervasive – including within musical institutions.
He initially found refuge in the teachings of medieval mystics and composers, who were to leave a permanent imprint upon his work.
The events of 1968 triggered his political awakening, and he became deeply interested in Liberation theology, which aims to articulate social struggles and Christian teaching.
Huber was deeply oecumenical: he studied Asian religions but also Arabic thought as well as Arabic music for many years, and it became another distinctive component of his own work. He set to music texts from a vast array of authors, from Hildegard of Bingen to Ernst Bloch, as well as French philosopher Jacques Derrida and Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish.
In 2002, in besieged Ramallah, the poet Mahmoud Darwish wrote a poem in which he called on “the soul to dismount and walk on its silken feet”. Klaus Huber often quoted this verse, which seems to express the purpose of his work.
Proudly perched on the body, does the soul fear injury if it sets foot on the ground? Silk, so fine and soft, is not fragile: it's one of the strongest fabrics there is. Cool in summer, warm in winter, it's tear-proof and almost indestructible. Perhaps Klaus Huber's music is intended to allow us to experience the solidity of the soul, to give us the courage to enter fully into the world.
Humiliated - enslaved - abandoned – despised
Huber was a rebellious mystic. Mysticism was to give humans the strength to fight against barbarism in all its forms: capitalism, totalitarianism, and war. Nuclear weapons are a recent invention, but they are only the most extreme manifestation of a self-destructive impulse that Huber already recognized in Albrecht Durer’s Dream vision in 1525.
Man can only fight barbarism by reaching to its source, which lies within himself, in what Freud identified as the death drive. Against this drive, the religious imperative to love one's fellow human was, according to Freud, no more than an illusion that could only lead to flight or guilt.
Huber was just as clear-sighted as Freud about pseudo-spiritualities stirred by the fear of humanity's self-destruction. Beyond wishful thinking, he sought to achieve what Derrida, after Pascal, called the “reason of the heart”. In a letter to the Palestinians written the same year as Darwish's poem, Derrida called for a “we” that “speaks without diplomacy to the heart”. That “we” can be a subject, that this collective subject can voice “the reason of the heart, its political reason”, is the mystic's conviction: beyond the ego, there is not only death, but an even deeper life.
Huber knew that it was impossible to conceptually differentiate pseudo-mysticism from authentic mysticism, asceticism from escapism. Words can clear up ambiguities: the true mystic never forgets the violence that befalls those who are, to quote the title of Huber’s great oratorio, “humiliated - enslaved - abandoned - despised”.
He believed that liberation requires spiritual awakening but never ignored the fact that it also demands concrete, physical struggle. Spirituality is no substitute for revolution. It must, however, preserve its meaning and value, and prevent it from turning into new oppressions: Huber was with Ernesto Cardenal against capitalist barbarism, and with Ossip Mandelstam against totalitarian barbarism.
While words remove ambiguities and cut short any complacent passivity, they are not enough to give substance to mysticism, which is grounded in experience, not belief.
The law of the descending movement
Of music, Huber says we know only one thing: “it is a form of human expression inherent in our need to live, which has directly to do with our existential time insofar as it is presence and passage.” He found in the theory of relativity confirmation of Christian mysticism, Zen and Sufism: if matter is energy, if the universe is movement, then the musical experience can restore the listener's profound awareness of his being-in-the-world. Indeed, this was the original purpose of music as a ritual practice. Drawing from medieval and Arabic music, Huber’s own works rejects both traditionalism and gratuitous experimentation: formal rigidity, of whichever kind, would be a symptom of the petrification of the soul.
Huber was convinced that neither music nor humanity could exist without transcendence. Like all spiritual visions, Klaus Huber's work cannot be circumscribed by programmatic formulas, and its truth can only be experienced through listening - all that language can do is prepare the listener by pointing out the direction in which they will be invited to travel.
Simone Weil wrote that “grace is the law of the descending movement”: music may initiate this movement by leading the soul to tread the rough paths of the world on its silken feet.
