fremdkörper

Hochschule für Musik
FREMDKÖRPER#
Musik von Stefan Prins
zone expérimentale
Freitag, 9. Dezember 2016, 20.15 Uhr
Neuer Saal der Musik-Akademie Basel
Eintritt frei
Stefan Prins
(*1979)
Piano Hero #1 (2011/12)
für Midi-Keyboard, Live-Elektronik & Video
Carlos Emilio López Ruiz, Klavier
Andreas Frank, Live-Elektronik
Erosie (Memory Space #1) (2005)
für Viola & Akkordeon
Sophie Wahlmüller, Viola
Maria Zubimendi, Akkordeon
Tatiana Timonina, Flöte
Fremdkörper #1 (2008)
für verstärkte Flöte (Piccolo), E-Gitarre, Schlagzeug, Christopher Moy, E-Gitarre
Jeanne Larrouturou, Schlagzeug
Violoncello, 4-Kanal Tonband & Live-Elektronik
Mathilde Raemy, Violoncello
Andreas Frank, Live-Elektronik
Improvisation
Diana Muela Mora, Flöte
Jeanne Larrouturou, Schlagzeug
Christopher Moy, Gitarre
Antonio Jiménez-Marín, Posaune
Yosvany Quintero, Klarinette
Stefan Prins, Live-Elektronik
Fremdkörper #3 (2010)
für Ensemble
Yosvany Quintero, Klarinette
Alexis Rebeté, Saxophon
Esther Schwalm, Trompete
Antonio Jiménez-Marín, Posaune
Jeanne Larrouturou, Schlagzeug
Maria Zubimendi, Akkordeon
Michele Patricolo, Violine
Sophie Wahlmüller, Viola
Mathilde Raemy, Violoncello
Jacek Karwan, Kontrabass
Carlos Emilio López Ruiz, Klavier
Justin Robinson, Live-Elektronik
Jürg Henneberger, Dirigent
Der belgische Komponist Stefan Prins gehört zu jener jungen Generation der digital natives, die in den
letzten zehn Jahren für einige Bewegung in der kleinen Szene der zeitgenössischen Musik gesorgt haben.
Ihr künstlerisches Selbstverständnis gründet nicht mehr allein in der hegelianisch-geschichtsphilosophischen Vorstellung der Entwicklung (ja quasi Entfaltung) des Materials. Während die ältere
Avantgarde die Kunstwahrheit jeweils im neuesten Materialstand festmachte, sind die Komponisten
dieser jüngsten, durchaus kritischen Generation von Komponisten, getragen von multi- und transmedialen Gedanken. Begriffe wie Diesseitigkeit, neuer Konzeptualismus, Digitalisierung, aber auch
theatrale Elemente und visuals gehören zu den erklärenden und materialen Selbstverständlichkeiten ihres
„neuen Komponierens“. Hier ist nicht mehr ein konservativer Rückbezug im Umgang mit bereits
Bekanntem am Wirken, wie wir ihn seit den späten 70-er Jahren kennen, nein es kann eine durchaus
kritische Postmodernität in dieser sehr selbstbewusst auftretenden Bewegung gesehen werden. Die
Komponisten sind mehr einer künstlerischen Öffnung verpflichtet, als einer Weiter-Verfeinerung der
zeitgenössischen Instrumentalmusik. Ihre Bezüge sind unter anderem in der bildenden Kunst, im Film, in
der sound art, in der noise music, in Pop und Rock und im internet zu finden, ihre Motivationen in der
politischen und gesellschaftlichen Alltagswelt. Darin findet eine klassische Forderung der kritischen
Avantgarde erneut eine gewisse Genugtuung, nämlich die Verschränkung von Theorie und Praxis, von
Kunst und Leben. So ist diese sehr lebendige, freche und zum Teil auch ikonoklastische Bewegung
vielleicht mehr als ein kurzes Aufbäumen, kann als größere Wende im neueren Musikdenken gesehen
werden. Diese Komponisten suchen den Anschluss an einen breiteren kulturellen und ästhetischen
Diskurs, der in der engen Szene der neuen Musik ihrer Meinung nach längst verloren gegangen ist.
Postmoderne ist hier nicht reaktionär, sondern dialektische Figur der Moderne.
Marcus Weiss
„ ..... (ihre) Hauptreferenzen sind nicht mehr Beethoven, Stockhausen, Dante oder Kafka, sondern auch,
und dies ohne hierarchische Unterscheidung: Beyoncé Knowles, Squarepusher, noise music, metal hard
rock, avant-pop, Quentin Tarantino, Banksy, Gangnam Style, anonyme Youtube-Videos etc.“
Stefan Prins
Stefan Prins (Belgium, 1979)
In his compositional work Prins seeks to critique received convention, to break the framework of the
usual, and dispose of aesthetic axioms. He envisions a musical art form beyond the safe confines of the
»scene«, wherein the connection to the larger cultural discourse has gotten lost. A central precondition
for the making of a new music with a future is the role of the aware, critical observer, one who is
prepared to exploit the technologies and mechanisms of the prefabricated media with a view to their
possibilities for new music. – Stefan Prins lives up to this calling. (Michael Rebhahn, 2012)
After graduating as an engineer at the age of 23, Stefan Prins started to study fulltime piano and
composition at the Royal Flemish Conservatory in Antwerp, Belgium, where he obtained his Masters
degree in Composition with Luc Van Hove magna cum laude. Concurrently, he studied Technology in
Music at the Royal Conservatory of Brussels with Peter Swinnen and Sonology at the Royal Conservatory
of The Hague (2004-2005; The Netherlands). Additionally he studied “Philosophy of Culture” and
“Philosophy of Technology” at the University of Antwerp. In 2015 Stefan obtains his PhD in composition
at Harvard University USA (Cambridge, Massachusetts), under the guidance of Chaya Czernowin.
As a composer he received several important awards in Belgium and abroad, such as the Kranichsteiner
Musikpreis 2010 for composition (Darmstadt), a Staubach Honorarium (2009, Darmstadt), the
International Impuls Composition Award (Graz, 2009), “Week of the Contemporary Music” (Gent, 2006,
2nd Prize) and “KBC Aquarius Composition Award for Young Composers” (Brussels, 2001). In 2012 the
Union of Belgian Music Journalists elected him "Young Belgian Musician of the Year" and in 2014 he
received the "ISCM Young Composers Award". In the same year he became Laureate of the Royal Flemish
Academy of Belgium for the Sciences and Arts in the class of the Arts. In 2016 Stefan received the "Kunstpreis Berlin für Musik".
His compositions have been played world wide by a.o. Klangforum Wien, Nadar Ensemble, Champ
d’Action, Ictus Ensemble, Nikel Ensemble, Ensemble Mosaik, Ensemble Recherche, Ensemble Dal Niente,
Trio Accanto, Defunensemble, Athelas Sinfonietta, Zwerm Electric Guitar Quartet, Agartha, the Ensor
String Quartet, Vertixe Sonora, soundinitiative, collectief reFLEXible, the Belgian Chamber Orchestra,
Jean-Guihen Queyras, Frederik Croene, Matthias Koole, Tom Pauwels, Mark Knoop, Stéphane Ginsburgh,
Sebastian Berweck, Séverine Ballon a.o. on festivals such as the Donaueschinger Musiktage, Wittener
Tage für Neue Kammermusik, the Darmstadt Ferienkurse (2010, 2012, 2014), Forum Neuer Musik
Deutschlandfunk, Eclat Stuttgart, Ultima Festival Oslo, Festival Musica Strasbourg, Wien Modern, Ars
Musica, Novembermusic, Transit Festival, Time Canvas, Musica Electronica Nova, Luzerne Festival, Tzlil
Meudcan Festival, Impuls Festival, Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival, Musica Viva Festival
(München).
Stefan Prins is closely involved with the new Belgian ensemble for contemporary music, Nadar
Ensemble, both as a composer, live-electronics-specialist and, together with Pieter Matthynssens, as
artistic director. Together with Thomas Olbrechts & Joachim Devillé he was one of the founders of the
long-standing collectief reFLEXible ‚ an ensemble that focuses exclusively on free improvised or instant
composed music, often including dance, performance, video, film, installation. Since 2011, Stefan plays
laptop in the band Ministry of Bad Decisions, together with Yaron Deutsch (e-guitar) and Brian Archinal
(drums).
„As an artist, I want to be firmly involved in this world, preferably standing knee-deep in its mud,
reflecting and commenting on it, declaring it my love and revulsion, shaping my amazement and
confusion, turning it inside out, exposing its mechanisms, questioning its certainties or adding weight to
its uncertainties. In short: being involved in a personal, straightforward, critical and complex
confrontation, in the most communicative way possible.“
Stefan Prins
Piano Hero #1 (2011-2012)
First piece of an immersive cycle for midi-keyboard, grand piano, live-cameras, video and live-electronics
"Immersion is the state of consciousness where an immersant's awareness of physical self is diminished
or lost by being surrounded in an engrossing total environment, often artificial. This mental state is
frequently accompanied with spatial excess, intense focus, a distorted sense of time, and effortless
action."
Source: Wikipedia (accessed 29/6/2011)
The "modern" grand piano, perfected in the nineteenth century, consists of a keyboard, a set of metal
strings and an ingenious mechanism of hammers and dampers, which serves as the transmission
between the pianist's muscles and the strings. The wooden body of the piano amplifies the vibrations of
the strings when they're hit by a hammer.
In Piano Hero the configuration of the „modern“ the nineteenth century grand piano is "updated" and
placed in today's context, using some of the typical artefacts of the 21st century: the keyboard now is an
electronic one, the computer serves as the transmission and the strings are played by a virtual pianist the avatar of the pianist of flesh and blood sitting on stage- while the wooden resonating body is
substituted by a set of electro-mechanical speakers.
But not only the "piano" is recontextualized. The mechanisms of "observing", as done by the audience, is
also taken into the equation. The act of "observing" underwent a radical change of meaning in a society
which is ever more being "monitored", either by the millions of security cameras in public places, a
network of geo-stationary satellites which can zoom in to human dimensions or the world wide web on
which every day millions of homemade videos are posted and watched by millions of anonymous
visitors.
Piano Hero #1 is the point zero of the Piano Hero cycle: the pianist becomes a mere operator in a world of
bits and bytes. From Piano Hero #2 on, the grand piano (which has become a "fremdkörper" after the
context-shift of PH#1) enters the game to fully articulate the tension between the real and the virtual, the
human and the mechanical, the past and the present. More chapters in this cycle are envisioned and will
be composed in the years to come.
Erosie (Memory Space #1) (2005)
When we own a clock of which the strike is activated every half hour, nothing seems to happen with the
strike in the time that the big hand moves from the whole hour to the half hour. But in reality, for
instance, in that time a lever in the mechanism is slowly being lifted, which once it reached a specific
point, unlocks the strike.
Willem Frederik Hermans
(in his doctoral thesis on the geographic phenomenon "Erosion")
Fremdkörper #1 (2008)
In Not I, a composition for electric-guitar and live-electronics (2007), I elaborated upon the idea of
alienating the relation between instrumental/physical action and the resulting sound through the use of
live-electronics. After finishing this piece, I felt the urge to expand this idea to more than one instrument
and take it yet one step further. When asked to write a composition for Nadar, I had the perfect occasion
to do so. Fremdkörper 1 and Not I have in common that every instrument is amplified through a guitar
amplifier placed next to the musician, and that this amplifier is connected to a system of live-electronics
which “intrudes”/”infects” the amplified instrumental sounds. The general approach however was very
different for both pieces. In Fremdkörper I started from a situation where the electronically processed
sounds and the instrumental sounds are completely different and distinguishable entities, as being two
seperate bodies. In the course of the composition, this situation of course undergoes several evolutions,
and at a certain point they even form one single “body”. The friction between singularity and plurality, as
can be found in the german word Fremdkörper, which is singular and plural at the same time, was one of
my central points of interest in this composition.
"Fremdkörper" was originally written to be the fourth composition in a concert-program called
"Entartung", for which Joachim Devillé has made a 50-minute animation film based on these four
compositions. Nevertheless, "Fremdkörper" can be performed as an autonomous composition in other
concert-programs as well.
Fremdkörper #3 (mit Michael Jackson) (2010)
A year before starting to write Fremdkörper #3 (Michael Jackson) Michael Jackson, The King of Pop,
deceased. His music and video-clips have had a tremendous impact on popular culture, and his personal
life was at least as iconic as his music. I still remember the moment that I saw for the very first time, as a
teenager, the videoclip of “Thriller”. I never saw something comparable before! And I remember that the
image I got of him after seeing this videoclip got ever more distorted over the following years when
seeing images of the continuous metamorphosis of his physical appearance. When composing this piece,
I realized that Michael Jackson was just a perfect illustration of a “Fremdkörper”, in the original sense of
the word. Therefore Fremdkörper #3 became a kind of distorted “in memoriam” for Michael Jackson.
All of the electronic sounds in this composition were generated using home-made soundprocessing
techniques on several “intro’s” of Michael Jackson songs. That the raw material consists (only) of these
intro’s, becomes only apparent on some short moments in the piece. On these moments, the electronic
sounds become a clear “Fremdkörper” within the context of the piece – and for that sake in the context of
most “contemporary classical music”. Or vice versa: the instrumentally produced sounds become a clear
Fremdkörper in relation to the electronic sounds. As much as medical sciences have altered Jackson’s
original appearance, the soundprocesses in this composition change and deteriorate the “soundbody” of
the intro’s of his songs. Besides this, there is the constant play between the instrumental actions and the
electronical sounds, in order to create a continuum of changes in perception: is what you see (or hear)
really what you get? Furthermore, the concept of the “Fremdkörper” is on another level very present in
and central to most of my compositions, in the sense that I continuously insert strange objects/
Fremdkörper – mainly everyday objects, like aluminium pizza-dishes, clothing pegs, ...- in the instruments
to alter the way they are being played and hence the way that they are perceived.
About the Fremdkörper-cycle:
According to scientists we’ll reach the so called point of “singularity” somewhere between 2030 and
2040. Once that point is reached, the distinction between body and its technological extensions can be
upheaved. The “Fremdkörper-cycle”, which currently consists of three compositions for different
ensembles plus live-electronics, focuses on how technology influences the human existence on an
increasingly fundamental level. In these compositions neither the body nor its technological extensions
are seen as the “Fremdkörper” but they are seen as Fremdkörper in relation to each other. In a bodily
context, the technology is the Fremdkörper, while in a technological context it’s the body which is the
Fremdkörper. In all these compositions several of these contextshifts can be found. The concept of a
Fremdkörper is present on several other levels as well. Of course the musical instruments can be seen as
Fremdkörpers too, while I make use of everyday objects (Fremdkörper, as defined by medical sciences) to
be inserted/attached to these instruments. And even the electronic sounds exhibit different degrees of
being Fremdkörper, according to the context. In Fremdkörper #1 all electronic sounds are directly derived
from the instrumental sounds, while I make use of electronic sounds generated with analog no-inputmixing techniques and of corrupted audiofiles found on the internet in Fremdkörper #2. In Fremdkörper
#3 (mit Michael Jackson), all electronic sounds are generated using digital processing-techniques on
several intro’s of songs by Michael Jackson.

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