Peter Ablinger belongs to the group of composers who are always searching for the new and unusual in their work and do not understand music as an insular system. The Upper Austrian composer consistently tries to push musical boundaries, to break traditional methods, to make room for new approaches. He prefers to act between the different art disciplines, bringing things together that do not really seem compatible at first glance. “To me, crossing genre-bordersis never an end in itself or a deliberate expansion attempt of composing. You have to dare to take one step outside the house in order to recognize the outlines of the house in which you are living in,” Ablinger once said in the mica-Interview. It is the examination of the phenomenon of sound, and the question of its effectiveness in different environments and contexts that define his artistic work, which forces him again and again to be subjected to reviewing his own understanding of music, and ultimately that of the listener.
Born in 1959 in Schwanenstadt in Upper Austria, Peter Ablinger first attended a school for higher technical education in Linz before he decided to study jazz piano in Graz. He then also took private composition lessons with Gösta Neuwirth in Graz, and with Roman Haubenstock-Ramati at the Musikhochschule in Vienna. In 1982 Peter Ablinger moved to Berlin, where he taught at the Music School of Kreuzberg until 1990 and worked as a freelance composer. Even then, it was important for the Upper Austrian to leave the traditional and solidified patterns and habits of music production and performance behind. In 1988 he founded the Ensemble Zwischentöne – a formation composed of professionals and lay people – which he sees as a “questioning of false professionalism and routine “. The Upper Austrian follows similar matters with the publishing company “Zeitvertrieb Wien Berlin”, which he jointly established with the composers Bernhard Lang, Klaus Lang and Nader Mashayekhi.
In any case, the award-winning composer (e.g. Peter Ablinger received the 1998 Award of the Academy of Arts Berlin, a scholarship from the Villa Aurora Los Angeles in 2001, in 2008 the Andrzej Dobrowolski Composition Prize for Lifetime Achievement and in 2010 the German Sound Art Award) submits himself to no restrictions, neither in the approach nor in the methodology, in the very entrenched structures and ideas in the music of today, or even in those of the contemporary. “Sometimes I criticize contemporary music as an inherent kind of conservatism, that they didn’t invent anything, except for things dealing with music theory categories, with scores and notation, maybe even with instrument categories, while leaving the basic conditions of composition, performance and so on completely untouched and operating in the same way as in previous centuries.” (mica-interview).
A central component of the work of Peter Ablinger, who has been working since 1992 at various universities and institutes as a visiting professor and lecturer, is formed by “investigation of basic conditions of listening”. This must not necessarily take place in the concert hall or fixed performance formats. Peter Ablinger, who sees himself most as a traditional composer, because the music is in a sense the starting position of his work, and of which he pursues his way into the other disciplines, strives for one thing with his musical installations, namely to experiment with the perception of the listener, “to encourage the listener to sharpen the awareness and perception of reality”.
Until 1994, his work focused primarily on soloist and chamber music ensembles up to 25 instruments (including the composition “Der Regen, das Glas, das Lachen”). In the following years, Ablinger unfolded his creative work in multiple parallel cycles, which considerably vary in their form and in their approaches. Various projects deal with instruments and electro-acoustic. In his composition “Weiss/Weisslich”, the instrumental pieces, installations, objects, recordings, notes and prose, constitute the central components.
Since 2001, he has been creating multi-part series as “Voices and Piano” or “Landschaftsoper Ulrichsberg”, where different musical genres and instrumentations are combined with each other. Although Peter Ablinger says: “Ultimately, I have an idea of my work, that basically all the series I’ve ever started and will maybe start are together one single “piece”, which is consistently shown under a different perspective.” (mica-interview 2008)
It is especially his extraordinary openness, his refusal to subdue to conventions, and his pronounced urge to experiment, which distinguish Peter Ablinger so much. He is an artist whose work is challenging, even more so because it demands a new approach of listening. With his ability to constantly expand his work with new, unheard facets, we may assume that we will get to hear a lot more of Peter Ablinger in the future.
Michael Ternai
(translated from German)
Photocredit: Siegrid Ablinger
Link: http://ablinger.mur.at/