In the very beginning, the creation, the Word may have been, of which the Logos song in the Gospel of John still sings.
But at the individual beginning of each person's life, the opening up of the world through language is preceded by a grammar of hormones that creates an order of effort and reward, fear and pleasure, need and solution, pain and comfort, before we even have a concept of it to have.
Of all the arts, it is probably music that seems to have the least direct access to these codes of our physical and mental well-being.
The composer Mark Andre, who is committed to the revelation of God in the Bible, in Jesus Christ and in the Holy Spirit, knows these codes of a preverbal touchability of the human being.
His music tells about
Jan Brachmann
Editor in the Feuilleton.
Follow I follow
It is no coincidence that Andre has both in his work “.
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above .
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.” for clarinet, orchestra and live electronics, performed by the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra conducted by Shiyeon Sung, and in “.
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are happy .
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.” for clarinet and live electronics both times developed from the sound of the clarinet.
Mozart's contemporary Christian Friedrich Daniel Schubart described her nature more than two hundred years ago as a "feeling melted in love".
There is something balsamic in the clarinet tone, something attractive, a ringing invitation to get close.
And Jörg Widmann, as a gifted clarinetist and at the same time as an intellectually empathetic composer, makes it possible to experience in a captivating way what these works are about: attention and encouragement that want to strengthen, comfort and heal.
".
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above .
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.” is developed from the Aaronic blessing formula of the Old Testament: “The Lord bless you and keep you;
may the Lord make his face shine upon you and be gracious to you;
the Lord lift up his countenance upon you and give you peace.” The work “.
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are blessed .
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.” follows the Beatitudes of the Sermon on the Mount in Matthew's Gospel.
Blessed are all those who renounce all attributes of common power, strength, violence, property and bossiness.
Widmann wanders through the Herkulessaal of the Munich Residence and surrounds the listener from all sides with sound and breath, which stands for the breath of life as well as for the Holy Spirit, accompanied in a highly sensitive way by Michael Acker, Joachim Haas and Maurice Oeser from the SWR Experimentalstudio, who create the closest connections to the live events in timbre and volume, so that the tension of closeness and longing never breaks.
But a wellness spirituality is not delivered here.
The music requires effort, constant reorientation of the sense of hearing and gives the Beatitudes a painful theological perspective: there are fourteen stations in the room from which Widmann blows, fourteen as in the Way of the Cross.
The happiness that is promised here cannot be had without a cross and suffering.
And so a relatively new work by Mark Andre for double bass solo is also called "For They Were Afraid" after the original closing sentence of the Gospel of Mark, which describes the first reaction of the three women on Easter morning when they learned that Christ had risen.
The double bass player Frank Reinecke and Mark Andre spent four years developing the piece together, letting the instrument itself show them the way, which rare sounds – glassy harmonics like almost faded traces of earlier sounds – need which speed and which contrasting environment to appear to get.
As in many of Andre's works, withdrawal and disappearance, waiting in between the past and the expected present, play a central role.
With Andre, however, the artistic design of traditional religious experiences goes hand in hand with an advanced aesthetic that includes noises, finger tapping on the fretboard, stroking on and behind the bridge, as well as on the frame of the double bass.
Frank Reinecke, who holds together the music of disappearance through his captivating stage presence, sees the tuning down of the lowest string of his instrument by a whole octave as the high point of the piece.
The sound has a frequency of 20.5 Hertz and is therefore just above the infrasound limit.
Reinecke combines this frequency with a tremolo of seven impulses per second, which approximates a frequency of 21 hertz.
The borderline experience of hearing takes the form of tremors, turning fear into a musically induced, physically palpable experience.