Compassion, Memory, Commitment: Ingrid Schmoliner’s “MNEEM”

Photo of Ingrid Schmoliner (c) Maria Frodl
Ingrid Schmoliner (c) Maria Frodl

At the Wien Modern festival in 2019, the Vienna Konzerthaus was treated to a one-hour tour de force from pianist Ingrid Schmoliner. Now, the performance is available as a meticulously designed physical release on Ventil Records. Christoph Benkeser recently spoke to Schmoliner via Zoom in her Vienna apartment: fresh tulips on the table, a pair of cats stalking past the camera from time to time. “A hell of a week,” she says. Perhaps that’s what made for such an unusually open, honest conversation – about aggression and depression, the memory of stones, and the right piano for a marathon. And music, always music – the thing that connects everything.

First of all: How are you?

Ingrid Schmoliner: I always get depressed in February. Maybe because it’s my mother’s birthday, or because people I was close to died in February. Fortunately, I’ve got my cats – Berta Berserker and Wali Exsport – to keep me company. I often find people difficult and animals more rewarding to be around; there’s something “normal” about them. People are incomprehensible to me.

Why?

Ingrid Schmoliner: I spend a lot of time thinking about relationships, the theory of relativity, quantum physics, transpersonality – things you can’t really grasp. And I look at the moon from my third-floor apartment; I observe how differently it rises from day to day. 35 years ago, you could still follow the moon’s cycle – there was no light pollution.

So things are changing?

Ingrid Schmoliner: Definitely – everything is in flux. Especially in recent years, established systems are being totally rearranged. Humans aren’t just made of skin, bones, organs, and so forth; we’re more than we can grasp. In our society, there’s a tendency toward either over-esotericization or clinging to the strictly material. If people can’t dominate and confine something, it gets categorized as abnormal or psychologically ill. I have a very sensitive body – almost hypersensitive – so I often automatically compare what’s “functional” to what I am. Sometimes I think I’m too sensitive for this world. Really, though, I should be glad to offer these abilities to the world, see myself as an important part of the whole. That’s what nourishes my music, in the end. Coming from a rural, very hard-working, conservative Catholic family structure, where you define yourself in terms of physical work and output, my socialization is self-explanatory.

Photo of Ingrid Schmoliner (c) Ola Queen
Ingrid Schmoliner (c) Ola Queen

“I know how important sympathy is”

Has your family heard “MNEEM”?

Ingrid Schmoliner: Not really. The woman who used to look after me as a child has listened to my pieces a lot – she didn’t understand them, but she was always proud of me; she approved of the kind of life I lead. My mother, on the other hand, never really got it. She called me a dreamer when I was a child; she was worried I wouldn’t make it in school. A familiar perspective, not being able to escape your self-projection. Today, I know how important sympathy is – I’ve always tried to surround myself with people who at least try to be compassionate.

Did that lack of sympathy have an effect on you?

Ingrid Schmoliner: Country people don’t have much of a concept of multicultural city life. Some of them get into an ultraconservative, shitty, fascist way of thinking. I always formed my own opinions, though it wasn’t – and isn’t – easy, and though that fundamental, aggressive, depressive attitude affects me. Maybe that’s why I can’t read newspapers anymore, can’t listen to the news, nothing! When you know everything can be sold with deep-fake news, can you really trust the media anymore? I learn better through direct discourse with the people around me anyway.

“MNEEM” is a moving piece – an hour-long live performance from Wien Modern in 2019, now available from Ventil Records.

Ingrid Schmoliner: [Festival director] Bernhard Günther had heard a first, shorter version of it at echoraum, and I mentioned to him that I wanted to extend it to an hour; he then commissioned me to do it for the festival and I started composing “MNEEM” and training. It required a lot of time, endurance, and determination.

Video: Ingrid Schmoliner – “MNEEM” (excerpt)

“this trancelike current”

You can only understand that fully if you’ve seen excerpts from the piece – what a physical feat!

Ingrid Schmoliner: Every time! After 20 minutes, I think, “it’s only been twenty minutes!” But at some point I just get completely absorbed. Totally in the sound, only reacting through the playing. The training allows the technique, the keyboard mechanics, and my ears to become completely synchronized. As a listener, you suddenly notice that the sound starts drifting; that has to do with the saturation of the sound fields in the space, with the compositional concept, and with the exact miking; it develops this trancelike current. I’m trying to break into another level of consciousness, and to take the audience with me.

The piece was also unique – it was composed specifically for a Bösendorfer grand piano at the Konzerthaus. It will never be the way that I performed it in 2019 again, partially because, as a pianist, you can’t take an instrument on tour with you. I wish more venues had playable grand pianos, instruments with something to offer. That would make touring with such a specific piece a lot easier. I’d also need a sound designer to travel with me, and to be able to pay them a decent wage. It’s a difficult subject – I could spend a lot of time talking about how the established structures should be bringing innovation to the big stages and financing them properly.

What do you mean when you say “innovation”?

Ingrid Schmoliner: To put it sarcastically: innovation doesn’t automatically mean trendy, easily marketable synthesizer music played by people who are under 35 and preferably as sexy as possible.

It’s good to hear you say it out loud.

Ingrid Schmoliner: Sometimes I ask myself what we’re actually arguing about – whether I’m using the right pronoun? I’ve never seen people as either one thing or another. If you’re a loving person, I welcome you. That means that acceptance, tolerance, diversity, equal rights, inclusion, and open sexuality are truly important to me. At the same time, I don’t want to make a political issue out of everything, or force my opinion on people. It doesn’t work in the long term anyway; all it does is lead to resistance.

Photo of Ingrid Schmoliner (c) Markus Sepperer
Ingrid Schmoliner (c) Markus Sepperer

“You can’t communicate it in snippets”

Can you explain that further?

Ingrid Schmoliner: Art, regrettably, is becoming increasingly politicized. Since “MNEEM” works without language, though, it can’t be exploited [politically]. The piece works much more with the idea of engagement, going deeper and deeper into hearing and feeling. Not an easy subject, in a world full of overstimulation. I see that, too, when I’m promoting the piece. I’ve had to break it up into bite-sized pieces to get it heard by a wider audience – but my work has a quality that you can’t communicate in snippets.

The piece is an hour long; the listener has to commit to that.

Ingrid Schmoliner: Yes, “MNEEM” requires an investment of time and energy, in addition to the necessary space, which doesn’t pay for itself. Just because you can see and hear my work in a larger house or at a festival doesn’t mean that the pay is comparable to other music genres. That’s why I say it openly: artists need a fixed income. Everyone needs that!

One last question: what does “MNEEM” mean to you?

Ingrid Schmoliner: It’s a cool word, and a good story: after a performance a few years ago, a female stonecutter came to me to tell that “mneem” was derived from the Latin for “memory”. That’s interesting because, to me, stones have the oldest memory. That’s why there are the prints that go along with the release – they’re of stones that I’ve collected, that I’ve lived with. One of them I found 25 years ago in the Drava; another one comes from near Athens.

Some of them complement one another, like on the cover. The pictures are pigment-printed on fine-art baryta paper – and there are only two of each picture. I’ve signed each of them and described where the stones came from. The production was cost-intensive, so the pictures aren’t exactly inexpensive. Still, I’d be really pleased if they find their way into good hands. That would be a nice expression of esteem, one that would benefit the artist directly.

So “MNEEM” is…

Ingrid Schmoliner: The call, and the desire, to be present. As long as we’re talking about innovation and new media and appropriation and drug use, we’re talking at cross purposes. But try immersing yourself in a trance state with music; think about the world, matter, quantum physics, and your ancestors! That’s a whole other situation. When we think about how much is controlled by our unconscious, that we’re only aware of about 20% of what our brains do – about the rest, we know nothing! Music connects all these levels of humanity. That’s why I love it so much.

German original by Christoph Benkeser, translated and edited for length and content by Philip Yaeger.