PSYC

Volker HEYN
Born 1938, Karlsruhe, Germany

PSYC Pocket Syze Creator (1995)

piccolo/flute, heckelphone, Eb clarinet, contrabass clarinet/baritone saxophone, soprano saxophone, percussion, Samuel Applebee's Xmas Tree, auxiliary percussion

    >> If there is music << ...in this --sez Thomas Pynchon*--
    >> it's reed sections standing in
       bright shirt fronts and black all
       along the beach << ...and percussionists banging
       away at scrap metal pieces.
       Maybe a... >> a robed organist << (with a car horn)
    >> by the breakwater--itself broken, crusted
       with tides--whose languets
       and flues gather and
       shape
       the resonant spooks <<...

       How much more can you say about music, about
       "poetry in noise"--as is intended.
       As far as I'm concerned I sat me down
       (and figured what necessarily fits into the silent
       crevices between one uttered sound and another.
       And don't forget what that is:
       The anarchic spiel of speed and gravity when
       the reeds pause... or the metal.
       Is there an echo then?) ...and wrote me some music.

                --Volker Heyn

      This work was written for ELISION.

      * out of "Gravity's Rainbow" by Thomas Pynchon

The German composer, Volker HEYN, has established a personal musical style blending the violence of industrial soundscapes and natural phenomena with a highly physical approach to performance. The sounding drama of his work draws upon his experience with what he terms the "hard and soft edges of reverberating metal", an acute observation of the unpredictable, non-lyrical as well as poetic aspects of sonorous events.

The composer spent ten years in Australia in the 1960s working intermittently in industries such as as the Snowy Mountains Hydro-electric Scheme and Whyalla Foundry and it was in these steel-working factory halls that he met with the above-mentioned acoustic phenomena. He describes these factories as "huge expansive `cages´ of sound, hitting one's sensors from all directions--and all this with a spatial quality that makes the everyday concert hall seem impoverished".

Heyn began composing at that time acquiring a then rather crude tape recording machine with which he set out to meticulously record these sounds. In the treatment of sound the composer considered two main strata (1) the raw unrefined product heard by the recording machine, and (2) the `composed´, that is, intellectually conceived replica of that which the machine had recorded, and the binding of the two elements into one final sound version. Volker has also previously written for ELISION Ensemble, a work entitled Nuuh or Max the Fiddler's Complaint, and attended the premiere performance at TheatreWorks, St. Kilda in 1994.

Programme note © 1994 Liza LIM