Maximilian Marcoll: Music beyond concepts
Maximilian Marcoll is a contemporary music composer, living in Berlin. He explores the political potential of music and sound. For performances of his works, he has collaborated with numerous soloists, ensembles and conductors, such as Eva Zöllner, Heather Roche, Sebastian Berweck, Mark Lorenz Kysela, LUX:NM, Suono Mobile, Ensemble Handwerk, Neue Vocalsolisten, AAA — -AAA, Ensemble Mosaik, Ensemble United Berlin, Ensemble Nadar, Mocrep, Oh-Ton, Vladimir Jurowski, Enno Poppe and many more. He has taught at the Institute for Music and Media of the Robert Schumann Hochschule and the University of the Arts Bremen. As of April 2021 he will be Professor for Electroacoustic Composition and Sound Art and director of the Studio for electroacoustic Music (SeaM) at the University of Music and the Bauhaus University in Weimar.
The interview is co-created by Laura Švītiņa who created a text version of video interview.
What is good music composition?
Of course there are many things to consider. I’m going to answer this question from the perspective of the listener who happens to be a composer. In recent years I’ve repeatedly found myself thinking that the number one priority (it sounds almost like I’m working in advertising) is actually: don’t be boring. Because if everybody in the audience falls asleep during the piece, then nothing else matters anymore. Of course that doesn’t mean that pieces can’t be repetitive, reduced, or even monotonous — quite the contrary! There are plenty of pieces out there with lots of things going on, very agitated and hectic, incorporating multimedia etc. but still quite boring. This brings me to the second point: focus. There’s this quote from, I think it was, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry who said that a piece of art is not finished when there’s nothing more to add, but when there’s nothing left to take away. Do what you want to do and do as little as possible of all the other things that you could also have done. The main point of the piece must be very clear, and that doesn’t mean that point needs to be translatable into language. Also, I’m a sound geek, meaning, I’m often transfixed by the phenomenon of sound itself — so if something keeps my attention just by its “sound matter” then that already is some quality for me right there. But there are also completely different aspects involved, for instance: Do composers really understand what they’re doing? How many aspects are they actually aware of? How do they deal with the standard concert situation setup? For me, the setup more and more transgresses into the parameter of musical form. Also, is there something in a piece that points to something outside of the music world? And of course the most important thing — does it do something with me as a listener? Does it touch or confuse me? Does it make me see something differently? At least that’s what I am aiming for, to do all these things. Maybe it all boils down to originality because if you just do the same thing, people have already done before and if you have nothing to add then maybe you shouldn’t do it at all.
This text is a redacted extract from the video interview I did with Maximilian Marcoll on 6.9.2020. The full interview can be found here:
And what is your musical signature?
My favorite word at the moment when I talk about music is ZUGRIFF. It’s very hard to translate, but the key idea is that the importance is not in what you do, but how you do it. Not the material itself is important, but to what end — why you are choosing this and not something else? What does this material offer you, in order to get somewhere? Yes, perception, perspective, and such things. But it’s more about: How I can do something, very reduced even, with something everybody knows, which turns this thing into something completely different? In my work, this idea is mainly best visible in a series of compositions called Amproprifications where I take existing musical pieces and add layers of amplification. Technically this is an extremely simple thing, but the results are — or so I hope — completely different from the respective originals. I like to think of it as carving new pieces out of old ones, to take something (musical piece, technology, some structure or relation, anything) and twist it a bit, to achieve something else. These kinds of processes are what I enjoy the most.
Can you give two more examples of how this idea manifests in your work?
I have a series of monodic canons (Canone Monodico) and the technical setup is, in a way, a perversion of what a MIDI controller does — this old electronic idea of separating components (separate sound generation from the interface that controls it). And my question was: What would happen if two or more people control the very same wave generator at the same time? Meaning that they are not actually triggering distinctive pitches, but transposing one pitch that has been switched on at the beginning. Another example is a series of installation pieces that I am working on right now, my Control Issues. Sort of an installation for motorised midi controllers in which they themselves become the protagonists, rather than stay passive as in their usual use as controllers.
What is your process of composing?
In all the things I do, I set very strict constraints. For instance, in the Amproprifications there is only one parameter that I can use, which is amplification over time. Within those constraints, I start to play, which is also why it’s so much fun, because the process is quite playful. Sometimes it feels a bit like the crosswords, where there’s so little room to maneuver. Overall I try to be as clear as possible, leave everything else out and build strong fundaments on which I can move. And of course, then there’s always this testing, going back and forth until I finally reach a point where it flows.
How has your music changed over the past 10 years?
Oh, a lot. The main goals might not have shifted so much, but I think I became more precise and more open to possibilities. I have a clearer vision of what I want to do. At the same time, I don’t follow one single direction anymore. I’m interested in the political potential of sound and music, also outside of the concert space and in how we can reach the audience in a different way. And I’m also moving to a more modest approach towards music as a primarily acoustic form — and simultaneously I’m doing things that have no sound at all.
Does your music become more or less multimedia?
Let’s be clear on the notions here, just because there’s no sound in some pieces, that doesn’t mean they’re not music. And that’s the point. I think that the question — do we dissolve or extend the notion of music — could be a matter of perspective. I think that from the outside, it might be looking more like dissolving, but from the inside, from the composer’s point of view, it might look more like extending. For instance I built a website (https://www.deadcomposers.net/) that announces the death anniversary of composers right before their works go over into the public domain. So it’s within my frame of artistic practice, but it doesn’t sound. It is art related to music and maybe that’s what I do. Anyway, I love this Cage quote “you don’t have to call it music”. I don’t really care whether it sounds or not or for instance whether it has to be performed by someone or not.
How does technology affect your music?
There are lots of electronics in my pieces, true. On the other hand I’m about to write a big piece without any electronics whatsoever and I’m super excited about that. I think that at the root of what I do lies a sort of electronic thinking — the idea of a combination of separate modules that can be reconnected in a multitude of ways. For me, it’s not so much about the technology itself, but about the possibilities of new perspectives it might give us.
Can you name the most important technological artifact that impacts your music?
The one thing that is the backbone of my toolbox is my software Quince for editing time-based data. One of the reasons why I built it was that I needed flexibility. In an editor, not in a programming environment. I wanted it to be extendable, to be able to do things I didn’t know I needed, at that point. And that proved possible. I’m still using it and for things completely different from the ones I had in mind thirteen years ago, when I wrote it. On the other hand, I am so far behind with updates (Quince doesn’t run on current operating systems, for instance) — when there’s no one else to blame if something doesn’t work, sometimes you have to go back to programming for a week or a month. It happens. Other than that: No. It’s not about one technology, it’s about ways of being flexible. There’s nothing worse than composers meeting after not having seen each other for years and asking each other: What software do you use? It’s like judges asking each other: What kind of ballpen do you use to sign your verdicts. That really doesn’t mean anything.
What’s your biggest fear as a composer?
I guess, becoming boring to myself. But at the moment I have more ideas than I can actually realize and I really hope that doesn’t change.
Why are you still composing?
If I go on a holiday and I promise myself that I won’t do any work, then after some time it will just happen, I will start thinking about music, automatically. Also it’s my means of contributing. So that’s what I do.
What changes have you noticed in the music scene recently?
I think there are at least two major changes, maybe three, that might even be contradictory. On one hand, the act of presenting new material — something that has never been music before — is not so interesting anymore. Many people, knowingly or not, shifted their focus in that regard. On the other hand, there’s a massive trend towards multimedia. Suddenly everyone is jumping on the multimedia train “yeah, I can do video now”. Actually, I think that this period is almost over, the time in which people are just super excited about using video just in itsself. But there are still so many misconceptions. For instance, writing a piece with a video showing Facebook pages flickering on the screen doesn’t automatically make it a piece about social media. I think that video and multimedia are just additions to the toolbox that have their own context, history, etc and those need to be taken seriously and worked with.
What kind of new trends do you see?
I think we’re going to see a further opening of the scene. You can already see it in young ensembles — the fear of not playing your instrument is vanishing. There are experiments with different formats and concepts, and I don’t mean things like distributing the orchestra within the concert space. My Amproprifications for instance also exist in the form of pictures, prints that can be put on the wall. Many of us go in very different directions. Also, I’m very curious about what comes out of the institutionalisation of sound art, in the academies, because that could push these tendencies to open up even more.
What changes in the audience have you observed over the last 25 years?
I remember that 20 years ago there were a lot of conversations about how we could get more people into the concerts etc. And I’m having these conversations less and less, which is nice. With the music scene opening up there’s also a diversification of the audience itself. There are more people without academic musical background, which is nice, there are many people who know a lot more about art than music, introducing new kinds of discussions.
What is the role of new music in society?
I think at the moment we can’t afford to be silent and just keep doing our thing, pretending things are not happening around us. Because they are. I’m a big fan of many things that have been developed in the sixties and seventies, but bringing the conflicts into the music and working on them within the pieces just doesn’t cut it anymore. We have to show that there are other ways.
Selection of works created by Maximilian Marcoll
CONTROL ISSUES (click link below)
https://www.marcoll.de/controlissues/
