»Being Inside of the Sound That Is Created«

What sparked the idea for »im klang sein«?

Joseph Houston (JH): It was sparked by a combination of wanting to play together again and wanting to play the pieces by Ernstalbrecht Stiebler, Klaus Lang and Sarah Hennies. For us working together is a comfortable and productive experience. Bec played more than I have of Stiebler's music and worked with him a lot. I also worked with him brielfy at the end of his life. Wehave played quite a lot of Klaus Lang together as well. These two composers in my head fit together very well and fit within the line-up of the group. With Stiebler and Lang, there's a deep focus in the music and a deep simplicity so that you're really listening carefully and you’re inside the sound. Then Sarah Hennies’s »Spectral Malsconcities« comes along and it's that same idea but it's a bit more explosive and propulsive. Everything opens up in the second half of the concert.

Rebecca Lane (RL): Joe and I had always wanted to work on some flute, piano, and percussion trios. There are a few pieces of that tradition that include Stiebler and Lang.

JH: We've talked about doing these pieces for a long time, but we could never quite find the right percussionist. And then Bec worked with Vanessa Porter on a few projects in the last few years. With her we can finally do these trios that we've wanted to do.

At KM28 you will be playing »Three in One II« by Ernstalbrecht Stiebler. The title of your concert is »im klang sein« – also a title of a Stiebler piece, one that is not part of this project, though. What sound is it that you're inviting the listener into?

RL: It is the title of a piece by Stiebler but it's also the way in which he thought about sound in general. Being inside of the sound that is created through the reduction of materials, through the unfolding of a strict form and the unfolding of particular sound events. The pitch materials have particular relations so that they are creating a sense of space, which allows you to enter into the sounds and their resonance. We're also invited to listen in this way because things are moving slowly, causing a heightened sense of perception.

Do you think that happens automatically while listening or would one have to be in a special mood or have a certain mindset to »enter«?

JH: For me it is partly mindset and partly perception when you have music like Stiebler's that is very focused. It often has just individual pitches or sometimes two together. After a certain time, my sense of perception changes and the way that I hear things changes. Obviously, it's about listening to the sound and focusing on the sound but at some point, you enter a certain state, where you're hearing things in a new way. Familiar things like a single pitch you experience differentlybecause of that state that you're in.

RL: And we're not talking about expressivity or trying to tell something. The sounds are just themselves and this helps to invoke this state.

JH: When I think about playing these trios, there's something like a deliberate, careful focus in the Stiebler and the Lang. I'm not a religious person, but it feels like this almost holy ritualistic thing. Everything happens in a set way. I hope that people listening might be taken to this other space. As a musician, particularly in this concert but also in a lot of the work that I do, I want the music I play to have this transcendental, almost sacred quality, so you can get into a kind of trance space where your mind is looser and you're able to hear things in a different way and make connections that you might otherwise not make.

You mentioned that the composers your programme features are not very frequently played in Berlin. Why do you think that is?

JH: They are of course played sometimes. They’re just not as familiar as some other names and some other trends in musichere. They feel slightly on the outside.

RL: Stiebler’s music being played in Berlin in the recent years has been, I think, mainly only by people who are connected to him and who had working relationships with him. Music was the thing that kept him alive. He was trying to create musical situations where he could perform and improvise with others, where he could continue his work as long as he could.

Each of you have worked with Klaus Lang in the past. He's a composer who doesn't to talk about his music or contextualize it in public so much. What is it like to work with him? How do you approach his music together with him?

JH: The first thing of Klaus Lang that we played was a duo piece for piano and flute called »Zwillingsgipfel«. He was happy to talk and make comments about the music and give us ideas of how the sounds should be and images that might help us achieve that.

RL: I feel like he didn't impose, he wasn't relating to us in an overtly hierarchical composer versus performer way. He was more excited to talk about tv series »Twin Peaks«, which the title came from. The piece ended up being extremely quiet and that was somehow a surprise to us at the time, how far he wanted us to go in that direction.  

JH: I think it's also nice to let the music speak for itself and not direct people's experience too much.

Ernstalbrecht Stiebler died about a year ago and it seems like his passing brought out his impact on the Berlinmusic scene. Rebecca, you've worked with him not only as a composer but also as a musician. How did you experience working together with him in these both capacities?

RL: When I first met him, which was maybe 11 or 12 years ago for an ensemble piece, I found that the composer / performer hierarchy was very strong. Then I started working with him more closely in the last five years and I noticed that this gradually began to disappear. During the pandemic, he started to improvise with a cellist called TilmanKanitz and he started to enter more into collaborative relationships with performers. He was just so happy to play music and to have people to play his music with. I saw this transformation in him, and I found it was very beautiful that someone who's in their mid-80s decides to start improvising for the first time. He had these very strong relationships with a handful of people who he was working with and that kept him going.

Did it also leave a trace in your work?

RL: Mostly what I'm doing is listening to the relationships between pitch material and Ernstalbrecht Stiebler had a particular way of organizing pitch material that needs time and space in order for the players and listeners to be inside of it and to allow a sense of space to arise. The unfolding of a particular idea or form I really like. He was influenced by composers like Giacinto Scelsi and Morton Feldman. Some of his works orientate themselves towards Scelsi's idea of one tone and one sound, which then is hinting towards the harmonic series and harmonic space, which is what I’m primarily working in. Stiebler’s work later in life is very much about octaves and fourths and fifths and creating this resonant space, which is also in some ways about opening up harmonic space. He was going towards this, but never actually fully went there. I really like this pointing towards something.

Sarah Hennies’s piece is a bit different than Lang’s and Stiebler’s. It's a series of miniatures. Why did you put this counterpoint into the concert?

JH: Around the time Bec and I were thinking about programming the two Lang and Stiebler trios, Jon out of the blue messaged me and asked if I wanted to play this Sarah Hennies trio. When I think about putting a concert together, obviously it's nice when there's a thread through the pieces, but I also quite like it if each piece shows different sides to this thread. The Hennies piece alters your perception by repetition. Lang’s and Stiebler’s pieces are also about repetition, but Hennies’s is a bit more straightforward in that way, it's louder, more gestural, and more active. It says: Here is a thing and you're just going to hear it eight times. When you hear the same material over and over again you have this familiar thing you start to experience differently the more you hear it. There's a lot of commonality with what Stiebler and Lang are doing, but it's taking us somewhere else.

RL: Ernstalbrecht Stiebler was in a sense a musical outsider in the German music scene, who connected more to the tradition of American experimentalism. Later in his life he moved to Berlin because that was, I think, where he felt more of a musical affinity with the people. The musicians were more open to playing his work, working with him and seeing value in his music. He was moving towards reductionism and ideas of resonance at a time when in his generation there was a movement towards greater and greater complexity. He was reacting against that. For most of his musical life he was on the European and German New Music periphery, and I feel like it’s important to show the work of these historical outsiders.

12 September 2025 – 8.30 p. m. – KM28: im klang sein