In 2018 I found myself again in Berlin (my favorite city outside of New York) and I met up with Markus Reuter for a drink. He is a prolific composer and extraordinary musician. http://www.markusreuter.com/ is the link to his webpage. I would recommend everyone to check it out. One of the things that immediately jumps out at you when you’re with Markus is how consumed he is by music. Music is his life. I don’t know how many albums he has but I think he’s threatening Frank Zappa’s output. He actually reminds me of Zappa with the immense diversification of output that he has. His bandcamp page is about a mile long. As I’m writing this I am listening to his String Quartet No. 1 Heartland but I could just as easily be listening to Falling For Ascension; an electric guitar ensemble workout, or the beautiful haunting ambient quietude of Gratitude, Vol.1. His output is really breathtaking.
https://iapetus-store.com/album/string-quartet-no-1-heartland
While we were at the bar he described a few of his methodologies to music making. It seems he is always scheming ways to excite the muse. One diagram he drew on a napkin really intrigued me. It was a series of adjacent triangles with circles drawn at each point. In each circle he would place a musical note. He called it an Oculus. The idea was that when you played a note the very next note you could play had to be connected in the diagram to the note you just played. If you were at the top of the diagram your only choice was either of two notes. The most possibilities you had were six notes if you found yourself in the middle of the diagram. His stated mission with this type of working method was to (as I paraphrase his words) use a compositional system that basically disallows the musicians to play intuitively. The musician has to follow rules which serve to create really strange melodies and harmonies. This brings to mind the idea of what it means to play intuitively or, vice versa, to play against your intuition. Having played Markus' score I can certainly attest to the results and the idea that these so-called "rules" were actually quite liberating. Perhaps our own "intuitive" playing is only a set of "rules" that we have unconsciously given ourselves.
I don’t know if I begged, pleaded, cajoled, swore allegiance to some nefarious cult, or promised to buy the next round of drinks but he agreed to make an Oculus for ZXE. Once again I have to say this is one of the reasons you do a double album. To embrace the experiment itself. The jpg below shows the Oculus composition that Markus made for us. It now hangs framed in my office.
One of the things I also admire about Markus is that he specifically told me not to get too bogged down with any conceptual ideas about the piece. That it was just a means to an end; to make music. I took that to heart and in the next update I will show how I interpreted what Markus said to me and the license I took to modify things. I also invited Zach Layton to join ZXE for the realization of Markus' piece which resulted in the recording of another song on Sound Of Music called Coda.
Tack så mycket,
Richard