Our sonic environment is characterized by sounds that serve a communicative or deictic purpose. An alarm clock ringing indicates it is time to get up; sounds often accompany the pushing of keys and buttons on a given device to make it easier to use; sirens draw attention to dangers and make us alert. All these sounds give directions in everyday life, but are not associated with music in their usual context. For Clemens Gadenstätter, these are the preconditions for composition, as he briefly explains: “I notice how my hearing is conditioned, how acoustics are used around me, which forms of expression society picks to acoustically communicate their necessities, repression mechanisms, liberation attempts, and so on.”
Subsequently, he transposes these functional sounds from our everyday environment into the musical arena. Police whistles become rhythmical instruments, while acoustic instruments, on the other hand, imitate sirens with glissandi or become reminiscent of emergency vehicle signals with their quintal and quartal sequences. And some other sequences may remind listeners of mobile ringtones. Gadenstätter plays with this and introduces a sonic pattern into his compositions, varies them, puts them into a new context, and thus creates music out of signals that are otherwise used without any aesthetic qualities. All this is motivated by the composer’s affinity for making audiences aware and changing their perception. By confronting them with familiar things in a new context, he also changes their view on what they would accept as self-evident.
He includes this process in pieces such as “Variationen und alte Themen,” “Semantical Investigations,” and “Comic Sense.” In the latter, which he composed in 2003, he creates multilayered musical sparks from relatively simple original material – small, linked elements of varying sonic quality combine to form a dynamic event. He places keyboards with samples and an accordion with electronic devices next to a piano, which only appears to be used soloistically, and thus explodes conventional sonic limits within this three-part composition, oscillating between the traditional, the artificial, and the modern.
The title suggests comical music. However, this was not the composer’s intention; he much rather wanted to bring attention to the concept of “common sense,” because there is a wide consensus about the meaning of the sounds used. However, this meaning, along with other associations and connotations, is undercut in Gadenstätters works. He draws a connection to older musical forms by naming the individual parts “Grande Scherzo Concertante” or “Dance Mimétique” and by creating constellations that upon first glance resemble an instrumental concert.
Like so much in Gadenstätter’s oeuvre, these titles are not to be read literally. Similarly, his dedications to his life partner, Lisa Spalt, or to his friend whom he calls by his nickname Simba Al’aqwani (as he once told Lothar Knessl) are not unequivocal explanations for those who seek hidden secrets in his works. On the one hand, Gadenstätter uses these devices to directly indicate important influences and connections, but they are not as easily decoded as we might expect. Much like the sonic elements, these questions remain to be answered by the listeners and their own associations.
Not only that. Titles like “Songbook” (2001/02) are almost misleading. They are neither songs with lyrics, nor do they have simple structures. In his own words: “Work-Song, Love-Song, Rock-Song, a ballad, a Punk-Song, and some others. Songs I look at in the process of their creation, rendering these observations into musical sequences. In doing so, I am disrespectful, snotty, extremely loud at times, a great virtuoso…” And thus, in the cast of saxophone, drums, piano and variable electronic amplification/distortion, Gadenstätter approaches the traditional and permits a new way of looking at known patterns.
While Gadenstätter uses a variety of materials in his more recent works, his early compositions were characterized by the development of a limited starting point, as “Versprachlichung” (1992-94) and “Polyskopie” (2000/01) make clear. But even these pieces already display Gadenstätter’s approach to acoustics and its connotations. And his propensity toward long pieces. This busy composer is certainly not running out of ideas any time soon. We can therefore readily expect many more polymorphic reinterpretations of our acoustic environment.