Tilman Kanitz is a Berlin-based musician, director, music producer and curator whose artistic practice moves between contemporary music, performance, music theatre and sound installation. Trained as a cellist, he worked at different opera houses before becoming Artistic Director of the Solistenensemble Kaleidoskop, a position he held until 2019. Since then, he has focused on his own musical practice.
The starting point of “Tiere” (Animals) is a 0.1-second whistle of a capricorn recorded up close in the high Alps, beneath a melting glacier. The recording was stretched to twenty minutes using different algorithms. The resulting versions were layered, edited and processed. At this scale of transformation, the initial sound almost disappears. What remains are mainly artifacts: glitches, spectral shifts, and granular textures. Frequencies beyond the range of normal hearing or reproduction were moved into the audible spectrum, revealing details that were otherwise imperceptible. Each algorithmically generated track was kept in its original temporal progression. Sections were removed, but no material was rearranged or looped, except at the very beginning of Side B. The capricorn’s whistle is no longer a representation of the animal, but a transformed trace in which technology, human perception, artistic decisions based on that perception, and non-human sound become inseparable.
Text about Stiebler’s and Kanitz’ collaboration by Matthias R. Entreß:
Improvisation is not a common practice in New Music, where compositions, down to the last detail, are set out in writing and are entrusted to highly virtuoso and best-rehearsed instrumentalists for their performance. Indeed, it is even rare for the composer and player to be the same person. So it was all the more surprising when in 2019 Ernstalbrecht Stiebler, composer of music categorized as reductionism, began to meet with cellist and composer Tilman Kanitz in the latter’s studio for improvisations, eventually recording them for this disc.
In this encounter, different experiences meet like magnetic poles. Tilman Kanitz, formerly artistic director of Solistenensemble Kaleidoskop, has gathered musical experiences from across the world, particularly in India, which benefited his sensibility for complex sounds and for the liveliness of calm, while Stiebler was among the first in Germany and Europe who in the 1960s broke away from the expressionist avantgarde to shape a new kind of listening, a more quiet and concentrated one.
The respective roles seem obvious: the cello will create a basis with sustained sounds for the piano’s sweeping movements on top. But it isn’t quite so simple, as Kanitz, long trained in microtonality and Just Intonation, directs the sound of the cello into a sphere inaccessible to the piano and its fixed pitches, keeps altering the sound, and the way the two instrumental languages or even worlds engage in a cautious interaction results in a mutual exploration of a temporal topography.
Tilman Kanitz explains: “For me, making music is a meditative research process. Playing with Ernstalbrecht Stiebler, I feel that I’m moving in spaces inbetween, that the tonal space that I contribute comes in contact with the tonal space played by the pianist. They intersect and overlap, move apart, for me this is a deeply spatial experience . . .”
And Ernstalbrecht Stiebler adds: “Music has a much more farreaching impact, it is the medium by which we experience space, feel it in fact, also within ourselves, subconsciously, or we hear how the cello moves across a variety of interconnected spaces. Here and now: this immediacy is the chance and the quality of improvisation. Find the courage to hear the depth and the stillness, the power of space, and to realize it.”
What distinguishes improvisation from composition for those who listen, for the audience, is their completely different activation of listening behaviour. Improvisation is not predetermined, and as this music is created newly in every moment, it subliminally signals its being at peril. Because of this, the listeners become participants in a social situation. The Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences in Leipzig already verified in 2010 by experiments that when people listen to an improvisation, even if they cannot distinguish it from a composition, their amygdala, the centre for compassion in the brain, is surprisingly stimulated much more strongly than during a prepared performance (A. Engel, P. E. Keller: The perception of musical spontaneity in improvised and imitated jazz performances. Frontiers in Psychology 2:83.). Improvisation, then, inevitably causes you to be more mentally alert, more ready to run to help, as it were.
Stiebler’s works since the 1960s have been documents of a progressive condensation of sounds and structures – so the current new freedom is at least unexpected: “I do perceive it as a natural continuation. There have always been possibilities to evolve, within the sounds, and I’ve found that out only now, through the collaboration with Tilman. So many pieces are written out so rigorously and there’s no way to break out, which is really a pity, but with a certain openness for what comes out of your fingers spontaneously, it’s sometimes much better than having intended it.”
The playing styles of the two musicians in the recordings of this LP are certainly dissimilar, Kanitz and his sustained sounds creating a different sense of duration than Stiebler as he meanders in this sonic spacetime continuum, but the subtle transformations in his play keep putting the pianist in new situations – and vice versa.
This freedom of movement among the intuitively created sounds doesn’t run counter to the two musicians’ common pursuit of reduction, as they both remain listeners. Each sound here is created with respect for silence.
For all the caution in their exploration of their music together, the compositional experience of either musician is not rendered obsolete. Kanitz: “I would even explicitly call it artistic creation. Then again Instant Composing would fit as a term here, it is indeed artistic creation in the moment, with the aspiration of putting it down” – namely in the form of these recordings, documents of both a most refined aesthetic interaction as well as a musical narrative in its own right.
Text: Matthias R. Entreß
Recorded and mixed 2020–2022 at Studio Tilman Kanitz
The cover art shows many streams entering a lake, and rising to mist in the warmth of the setting sun. Improvisation is like the water, transmutable, reflective. It carries in it, what it has touched, what it has lived. When we think of improvisation, we might also think of Jazz, and patterns of city life, a specific kind of human togetherness, that it spoke throughout the 20th century. If the improvisations of Tilman Kanitz and Ernstalbrecht Stiebler are of that lineage, you could say, that their Jazz, their improvisation, takes place in the undoing of those patterns. Their improvisation is reflective of an evolution in human togetherness, one which integrates vastness, emptiness, darkness, radiance, like the language of landscapes, rain, sunlight, cosmos, consciousness. It is the water which has touched aloneness and uncertainty, yet is fluid, curious, playful, even blissful. It is the water which does not name, does not judge, but flows, sparkles, dances.
Interview of the label manager Simon Reynell with Tilman Kanitz:
Simon Reynell: Could you tell us how and when your duo with Ernstalbrecht came about?
Tilman Kanitz: At a festival for North Indian Classical music in Calcutta I was impressed by the extensive “tuning up” process of the musicians. I thought of Ernstalbrecht and wrote to him, suggesting that he should write a cello piece for me. A couple of months later, at the concert in Berlin where I premiered this solo, he asked me if I would like to improvise with him. That was in early 2019. Since then we have been meeting, almost weekly, to improvise and record ourselves in my studio in Berlin Pankow.
How long has each of you been playing improvised music?
Ernstalbrecht says he started improvising music with me, shortly before his 85th birthday. I started improvising when I was 5 years old, together with my sister. And since then, improvising music on the cello, the piano, and other instruments has played an important role in my life. But it’s only with Ernstalbrecht that it has become a regular practice, and this is the first release of our improvised music for both of us.
I find it incredibly impressive that anyone can start improvising at the age of 85, and immediately do it so well. But are you improvising completely freely? To my (unmusical) ears, there seems to be some kind of modal system underlying the music. How much discussion, planning and preparation do you have before each session?
When we started improvising together it was a musical dialogue right away, with no discussion, planning and preparation. The only remark I remember is that at one point I made a request to play less notes. And on another occasion Ernstalbrecht asked me to play longer notes. These were the only two moments in our work when it seemed necessary to formulate one’s wish to the other. Despite that, each improvisation is simply accepted by us, and starts without any previous arrangement of any kind. The only intention is to meet at a certain time, and play, alternating who begins. We develop the pieces in real time with no revisions, trusting in the full breath. The music is predetermined by what we did before, trusting in the now, the expansion in the now, the play in the now. We listen to the recording two or three times, then play again. When we write to each other, we comment only on positive things, never mentioning what doesn’t or didn’t work, but communicating and building only on what did.
I think of Ernstalbrecht’s composed music as being wonderful, but quite austere. Yet the music you improvise together seems quite different – much more emotionally-driven, almost romantic….?
Ernstalbrecht’s composed music is meant to be played in public. The idea is to unburden music from emotions, and to enable the listener to create inner spaces, in order to encounter oneself. It is a highly individualized musical experience, unique for each listener. Our common music, on the other hand, is not meant to be played in public initially. It is our private dialogue about each of our musical histories. Ernstalbrecht says that, for him, our improvisations are a way of making it possible to deal with music history. Maybe improvising is for both of us simply the echo, the memory of a Mozart Sonata, or Liszt’s Petrarca Sonnet 104, or classical Persian music we listened to.
Yes, Ernstalbrecht described your music as “a new freedom to handle tradition” and says he is primarily using fifths and octaves. Your duo does seem to engage with melody more than other improvisations I listen to. Were you surprised that the music took that particular direction?
To be honest, I am surprised each time I listen to our music. I am surprised by these hints of melodic fragments, woven into the progressions. Sometimes they sound like extremely stretched particles of musical sediments, the remnants of traditions. At moments I sometimes think “this reminds me of…” and then the music already moves on and leaves that memory again. Most of our tracks are a journey. A journey with an unexpected destination, or rather no destination, merely a stream that often just fades away, leaving the listener unable to understand: how did I get here? And along the way, those melodies are blown through the structure, moving things forward.
I didn’t know your music until Ernstalbrecht sent me recordings of your duo. Can you describe your background, and what kinds of music you play in other contexts?
I have studied western classical music, especially the cello, since I was very little. At the same time, I listened over and over again to all kinds of old jazz records. And eventually, as a teenager, to Webern, Cage and Feldman, North Indian classical music, Lachenmann, and so on. At one point I became a soloist in an opera orchestra, playing Wagner, Verdi, Puccini – and finally I became the Artistic Director of the Berlin Solistenensemble Kaleidoskop. With this unique group of musicians, I had the wonderful opportunity to experiment with combining curating music and composing it. I was creating new works based on western classical music from 1400 until today. In the past three years I have been mainly working on my own music, and am invested in researching the relation of specific frequencies and different states of consciousness. At the moment I am listening to, if anything, sine waves, Pygmy music, Z. M. Dagar playing the Rudra veena, and, for research, any traditional music.
I hadn’t thought of Indian music, but I can see that there’s some connection between the contemplative, interiorised explorations of your duo with Ernstalbrecht, and a lot of the ragas I’ve heard. I think it’s good to have this relationship without attempting any kind of fusion or crossover music. Do you use other traditional musics in similar ways in your current work as a composer?
My work is based on dialoguing. That can be with someone, like with Ernstalbecht. Or it can be with an artwork, like it is in a series of piano pieces, based on my reflections on an ancient Egyptian artwork. Or it can be a remix of a traditional piece of music for Daegum, the Korean bamboo flute, bringing out the areas offside the audible, bleaching the music, leaving us with modulations of white noise and a crackle here and there, unrecognizably carrying the horizontal energy of the original.
Or it can be the encounter with an animal in the wilderness, the whistling sound this animal produces, while looking into my eyes. I recorded that sound, because I was fascinated by it. And then, using different algorithms, prolonged this 1/10th of a second long sound of the animal, communicating with his fellow animals. I zoomed into this extremely fast sound progression until it was 20 minutes long. That, with all its digital artifacts, was then my material. Still carrying the intense energy that made me record the sound in the first place. The work was then, to bring out all the interesting rhythms, curves, even melodies, that are contained in this material, to make space for all the unknown forms, shapes and entities, to keep the initial dramaturgy and maybe the meaning and function of that sound. This is an example of how I like to work, entering into and interacting with the unknown, dialoguing with it and together finding a path through the endless possibilities. It is all the reflection of the music I have listened to, the music I have learned from, and am inspired by.
Interview and CD[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][vc_column][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column][weston_gallery][/vc_column][/vc_row]
[vc_row][vc_column][vc_column_text]In April 2020 I started setting up my home studio in a former factory building in the north of Berlin. Since then I recorded and produced:
Our second release (01/2023) is on vinyl: Edition Telemark – Artwork: Aurélie Nemours
Stephan Szulzewsky
In 2020 and ’21 Stephan Szulzewsky aka Schulzky and I worked on two 20′ tracks of epic instrumental music and spoken word. The Album Treuhand77 will be released on December 9 2022: Treuhand77 – Artwork: Andreas Mühe
Tiere
Based on field recordings (2021) I produced an album of obscure cinematic music. The vinyl release is in December 2025 on Edition Telemark – Artwork: Chloe Firouzian
Mari Mana
Together with the singer songwriter and the producer Mo Stern I worked on and co-produced an album of minimalistic music for voice, guitar and cello. The release is in late 2023.
Niklas Draeger
Together with the actor/theatre director Niklas Draeger and based on texts by Ludwig Wittgenstein and Pierre Guyotat I produced an album with electronic music and spoken word (2020/21): Auflösung
[vc_row][vc_column width=”1/3″ animation=”wpb_bottom-to-top”][vc_wp_text]Ernstalbrecht Stiebler marks his 85th birthday with the premiere of his new piece for cello solo and a record release on Edition Telemark.
Program
mehrklang (Premiere), performed by Tilman Kanitz[/vc_wp_text][/vc_column][vc_column width=”2/3″ animation=”wpb_bottom-to-top”][vc_single_image image=”621″ img_size=”medium” add_caption=”yes”][vc_column_text]Schwebstoff #4
ERNSTALBRECHT STIEBLER is a composer of minimalist and reductionist contemporary music. Having attended the Darmstadt International Summer Courses for New Music from 1958 onwards, Stiebler decided in 1963 to leave serial music behind and instead opt for his own reductionist style built on minimalist structures and repetitions, though not in any way related to the so-called Minimal Music but rather influenced by Minimalism in visual art. In terms of composers of his time, the closest stylistic relationship that could be drawn is to Morton Feldman. Stiebler’s approach is best summarized in his own words: “Music is too important to burden it with emotions.”
His honors include the Bach-Preis Hamburg (1966) and a prize from the Stille Musik composition seminar in the Künstlerhaus Boswil (1991). Moreover, two of his productions for Hessischer Rundfunk received the Prix Italia Special Prize: Piece for Peace by Alvin Curran and Die Blinden by Walter Zimmermann.
Mr. Stiebler is also active in other positions. He served as director of new music for Hessischer Rundfunk from 1969-95 and founded the concert series Forum Neue Musik there in 1989. He co-produced numerous CDs for Hessischer Rundfunk in collaboration with the Hat Hut label, including the series devoted to the New York School (John Cage, Morton Feldman and Christian Wolff). In addition, he has written numerous essays for Musik-Konzepte, MusikTexte, and other music journals, as well as booklet notes for the Montaigne Auvidis CD of Words and Music by Morton Feldman.
Schwebstoff/Leuchtstoff is a series alternating between acoustic and electro-acoustic forms of experimental music. (Curators: Burkhard Beins, Werner Dafeldecker, Simon James Phillips)[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row]
[vc_row][vc_column width=”1/3″ animation=”wpb_bottom-to-top”][vc_column_text]Record release on Eoneul Saturn A by Sebastian Claren
Cello: Tilman Kanitz
Recording: Saturn A on eoneul
Score: Score[/vc_column_text][vc_column_text][/vc_column_text][/vc_column][vc_column width=”2/3″ animation=”wpb_bottom-to-top” offset=”vc_hidden-xs”][vc_single_image image=”672″ img_size=”full” add_caption=”yes”][vc_column_text]Saturn A
Sebastian Claren’s composition Saturn A is about discarded, abandoned sounds. It is about unnoticed sounds that everyone knows, that we ignore. Sounds that behave like a kind of dirty, neglected reverse side to our consciously cultivated ideas of sound.
These are not quiet, difficult to perceive or vague phenomena, but on the contrary, fully defined, concise and in some cases dynamically explosive sound phenomena.
Saturn A was created between 2016 and 2018 in close collaboration between Sebastian Claren and Tilman Kanitz
