In the 5th subscription concert, we will perform Nik Bärtsch's new work "Aphantasia" together with his band Nik Bärtsch's MOBILE in cooperation with the Offbeat Jazzfestival Basel and the Kaserne Basel as a world premiere.
We are very pleased about the collaboration and look forward to the new work.
To help you get to know "Aphantasia" a little better, we are publishing Nik Bärtsch's commentary on the work here:
1 The inner eye hears nothing
While writing the piece, the question arose, as always, of how we actually hear music and how music communicates.
Do we hear information, energy, emotion? Do we follow rules, drifts, and dramatic structures?
These questions constantly preoccupied the musical philosopher of language, Ludwig Wittgenstein. How do musical meaning and coherence arise? How do we "understand" or "feel" a musical structure, form, and dramaturgy? Does it create a rollercoaster of emotions, an inner film, a Wittgensteinian system of rules?
Do we hear in a structurally, metaphorically, programmatically, universally predetermined way, or in a culturally and individually shaped emotional and aesthetic way? Or perhaps with a wild mixture of all these aspects?
While preoccupied with these fundamental considerations, I came across an article during the composing process about a phenomenon called "aphany": it describes the lack of visual imagination in the brain.
This reminded me of the 19th-century music-philosophical yearning that asserts absolute music, in contrast to program music, is the purest form of music—sounding form. This debate continues today when
comparing film and concert music. A person with aphantasia cannot actually hear a program or connect it to music in a visual way. They apparently hear pure structure, whatever that may be. They would be the ideal listener for absolute music. Perhaps in a similar sense to what Stravinsky meant when he said that music expresses nothing, neither a feeling, nor a state of mind, a psychological condition, nor a natural phenomenon, etc.
Music simply is music.
Imagine you couldn't see the music - how would you hear it?
Inspired by this phenomenon, I began to imagine the 5 parts of the piece as a dramaturgy of inner perception:
The Mind's Eye:
The inner eye sees nothing yet, only hears the emerging structure. It blindly scans the music and creates connections.
II Metaphoric Mind
The mind begins to evoke images, to extract them from the music, to embody the structure.
III. Mind's Ear:
The mentally perceived structures from the first sentence begin to solidify through remembering, repeating, varying, and changing, forming dramaturgies and perspectives. We hear the present in relation to the past. Time becomes space.
IV Dancing Mind
In a groove cycle of 5/4 against 1 1/4, the mind dances. It wanders away from structural listening. Groove is collective property, the composer Heiner Goebbels once said. Groove belongs to us all and connects us all, as it speaks universally.
V Mind's Body
All four previous movements culminate in a musical body. Understanding structure ultimately happens sensually, as in martial arts. Body and mind are one; the separation was an illusion from the beginning.
2 Serious entertainment
A similar debate about distinctions, like that between absolute and program music, arose in the 20th century regarding so-called serious music (E) and popular music (U). The difference was also economically relevant, as copyrights and support payments for "serious music" were long valued more highly—and still are—than those for "popular music." The reason for this weighting and separation has always been unclear to me, as I have always perceived appealing music as both serious and entertaining. Béla Bartók's "Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta" is entertaining, while Chico Barque's "Construçao" is deadly serious.
Thus, our music at MOBILE is free of ideology and inspired by various genres and musical techniques. "Ritual Groove Music" therefore describes more of a musical attitude than an aesthetic or a distinction.
3 From one source
Another distinction, which began in the 19th century and continued into the 20th, concerns the fundamental musical skills of composing, improvising, and interpreting. While this separation may seem useful for a focused specialization of each skill, we shouldn't forget that they all draw from the same source. Improvisation and an artful cadenza were commonplace for both composers and interpreters even in Beethoven's time. Drawing on this, our piece combines composed elements with freely interpretable roles and solos, primarily performed by my MOBILE colleagues Nicolas Stocker on drums, Sha on bass clarinet and alto saxophone, and myself. The piece thrives on all three skills and the musicians involved. It is never the same.
4 Aphantasia - The mind is empty
These reflections are signs of life from the piece, an entity that constantly communicates with us all during its creation, rehearsals, and performance. It yearns for a miraculous emergence from the
nothingness of the empty, blind mind and seeks to make itself heard, just like any piece of music.
A person with aphantasia said in an article I came across: "I don't need to do Zen meditation—my mind is already empty."
What a musical statement.
