READER: ZERO GRAVITY

“It‘s not the first time I’ve re-worked ‘finished’ pieces. This is mainly due to my basic way of working, which knows no compositional system, and the procedure is also unsystematic. This means that everything takes a long time. It‘s a slow process of emergence, of omission, of developments. It feels like a slow but natural process which I can’t accelerate at will. And this process leads in the end to a clear, in itself calm architecture of the composition. A calmness that is not least connected with the fact that the compositional questions have now been clarified.”

“I am always very much concerned with questions of material when I compose. And I think one of the reasons for my preoccupation with material is that it allows me to develop a kind of resistance to slipping too easily into a melancholic streak. I don’t resist it in an uptight way, but I try to look at the material as a neutral thing, and then under the surface it acquires those colours that characterise my music.”

from Jürg Frey: Vastness of Landscape – Depth of Time (Notes, 2008)

Listening

The eardrum is the gateway to the infinite inner worlds of the listener; it is the connection between the outside world and the inner world. I imagine my sounds as sound waves that fill a room and touch the eardrum, even the skin of the listener. Although my music is precisely notated, it could be like a casual and unintentional touch. One can imagine a boundary, and on the other side of that boundary, sound is no longer a touch but a message. I wonder what a piece of music would sound like if it were only this touch.

Being silent / Architecture

My music is silent architecture. It is like the silence of a room, a wall, a landscape, like places or spaces that are silent. It is silent music, but it is not absent. It is not speechless, nor does it move virtuosically on the edge of silence. In its quiet presence, however, everything is there: colors, sensations, shadows, durations. For musicians, it is sometimes difficult to play this sound, which is silent but not dead. This sound does not derive its liveliness and charisma from gesture and figuration. The music is silent sound, silent architecture.

Utility

I imagine that my music has intellectual and emotional utility. It is a kind of spiritual (not religious) music: it deals with time and with what is present and absent in it. It is also a kind of folk music: clear, direct, unambiguous. Sometimes I imagine that my pieces are like architecture or clothing: you hear them, you can dwell in them, you can have them around you, you carry them with you, within you.