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    Poppe e

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    Imri Talgam
    Enno Poppe often begins musical works with a single motivic cell that branches out through variation and proliferation in a process inspired by mathematical models of plant growth. Poppe subjects motivic material to complex manipulation of intervals, directions, durations and pitches. This results in works with a living, organic quality. Poppe is also interested in the basic qualities of different materials, which inspired his cycle "Wood - Bone - Oil" that explores the textural qualities of those substances in music. While drawing on rational systems, Poppe also allows for spontaneity and subversion to avoid being dominated by strict logic. He critically examines historical concepts and aims to give them contemporary relevance through innovative reinterpretation in his works.

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    Poppe e

    Uploaded by

    Imri Talgam
    86 views2 pages
    Enno Poppe often begins musical works with a single motivic cell that branches out through variation and proliferation in a process inspired by mathematical models of plant growth. Poppe subjects motivic material to complex manipulation of intervals, directions, durations and pitches. This results in works with a living, organic quality. Poppe is also interested in the basic qualities of different materials, which inspired his cycle "Wood - Bone - Oil" that explores the textural qualities of those substances in music. While drawing on rational systems, Poppe also allows for spontaneity and subversion to avoid being dominated by strict logic. He critically examines historical concepts and aims to give them contemporary relevance through innovative reinterpretation in his works.

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    Enno Poppe often begins musical works with a single motivic cell that branches out through variation and proliferation in a process inspired by mathematical models of plant growth. Poppe subjects motivic material to complex manipulation of intervals, directions, durations and pitches. This results in works with a living, organic quality. Poppe is also interested in the basic qualities of different materials, which inspired his cycle "Wood - Bone - Oil" that explores the textural qualities of those substances in music. While drawing on rational systems, Poppe also allows for spontaneity and subversion to avoid being dominated by strict logic. He critically examines historical concepts and aims to give them contemporary relevance through innovative reinterpretation in his works.

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    86 views2 pages

    Poppe e

    Uploaded by

    Imri Talgam
    Enno Poppe often begins musical works with a single motivic cell that branches out through variation and proliferation in a process inspired by mathematical models of plant growth. Poppe subjects motivic material to complex manipulation of intervals, directions, durations and pitches. This results in works with a living, organic quality. Poppe is also interested in the basic qualities of different materials, which inspired his cycle "Wood - Bone - Oil" that explores the textural qualities of those substances in music. While drawing on rational systems, Poppe also allows for spontaneity and subversion to avoid being dominated by strict logic. He critically examines historical concepts and aims to give them contemporary relevance through innovative reinterpretation in his works.

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    of 2

    Enno Poppe

    Dented Nature 
On Enno Poppe’s Sonic Language


    The start is simple, clear and transparent. Enno Poppe’s works often begin with a single
    building brick. Starting from one distinct motivic cell - ‘short/long’ or ‘high/low’, for example
    – the works grow and proliferate like a plant that gains shape and complexity bit by bit. "I
    have been looking at mathematical models that describe simulations of how plants grow",
    Poppe explains. "How do things branch out? How does a new shoot come about?" For
    example, the theme of his piano variations is just one bar long, and consists of two intervals:
    seconds. What follows are 840 variations in which Poppe twists this motive in every
    conceivable way – in terms of interval structure, direction, durations and pitches. The same
    applies to the four-note ‘up-and-down’ motive that begins Holz, and gradually fan out to form
    a veritable thicket of sounds. 



    Poppe, born in 1969 in Hemer (in Saarland), often works with the L-branching familiar from
    biology, in the sense that he spreads, splits, stretches and compresses motives. In that
    respect, he engages with sound with the critical detachment of a scientific observer. In his
    hands, the material breeds, grows and proliferates like a living, dynamic biological culture.
    There’s a particular kind of calculation underlying the working-out of motives: numerical
    relationships play a significant role in Poppe’s scores. He believes in mathematical or
    scientifically orientated logics that give music consistency. But he is wary of those
    presumptions about consistency that all too often lead to mere musical tautologies. Looking
    at the form of a tree, one sees that in nature there are forces at work which the symmetry and
    regularity of mathematical logics can only formulate in general terms. Accordingly, Poppe
    enriches the physiognomy of the musical shapes with irregularities. And it is the deviations,
    mistakes and contradictions within the system, that is, its alleged pathologies, that endow the
    otherwise rigid organism with its liveliness and particularity. Whatever his reservations
    about systems, Poppe also finds sheer spontaneity suspect. So as not to become, on the one
    hand, "one’s own slave", dominated by systematic logic, nor subject to arbitrary factors on the
    other, Poppe is concerned to "act subversively against my own prescriptions, without
    damaging the posited rules – an interplay of technique and freedom." For him, it’s "not a
    matter of control, but of magnifying one’s own world."

    Poppe’s works not only deal with the growth of organic materials, but also with their basic
    nature. This aspect is of central significance to the cycle Holz – Knochen – Öl (Wood – Bone
    – Oil) composed between 1999 and 2004. The titles address what is consistent in the works:
    the pliable stability of the fibrous voice-leading in in Holz, the hard ‘martellatissimo’ and dry
    ‘secco’ in Knochen, and the sticky but energetic stream of interflowing lines in Öl. "Titles",
    says Poppe, "open up associative spaces for the listener." He is certainly not the
    programmatic, illustrative kind of composer. But for all the rationality with which he drafts
    and develops music shapes, one shouldn’t forget that there are also poetic considerations at
    the base of these works. The wild, "almost extravagant" (Poppe’s phrase) ensemble piece
    Scherben (Shards) confronts the listener with a piling up of fragmentary materials. Rad
    (Wheel) for two synthesizers thrives on circling figures and motives, the rattling of sonic
    machinery. And in his music theatre work Interzone, based on texts by Marcel Beyer
    (inspired in turn by William S. Burroughs), he evokes the futuristic sound-world of science
    fiction scenarios, delineating the insectoid existence central to the narration through
    whirring groups of notes.

    Along with these kinds of poetic ideas, and models derived from natural sciences, one thing
    that marks Poppe’s work is a critical historical awareness. Time after time, he takes up
    concepts that were hastily discarded in a spirit of revolution, and ponders their contemporary
    relevance. In Öl he revises and rehabilitates the concept of melody. Can one write a work
    based on melodic, linear material without submitting to the rhetorical gravity of melodic
    logic? One can, if one subsumes the leading voice within a context of timbre, harmony and
    contrary motion. Can one imagine a work that imitates the cyclic circling of lieder, but
    doesn’t become rigidly schematic? In his quintet Gelöschte Lieder Poppe solves this problem
    by having two levels of material constantly interpenetrating, creating constant ambivalence
    in relation to the sections’ formal functions. Even an idea which is central to Poppe’s concept
    of sound, namely the technique of sum- and difference-tones, refers back to the electro-
    acoustic technique of ring-modulation, is now regarded as ‘historic’: by adding and
    subtracting two frequencies he gets new, non-tempered intervals that give his music its palely
    luminous coloration, intervals that shimmer, but don’t clash. "Perhaps one could describe my
    chords as distorted spectral chords", Poppe summarises, "or as dented nature".

    For all this, Poppe has never renounced dramatic, even magical moments. The blurred
    cantilena that sometimes comes to the surface in the Gelöschte Lieder, the sombre morendo
    with which Öl fades away, or the narrow tenth-tone piano clusters at the end of Rad, as if the
    music had suffered an electric shock – these are moments where both sensuality and
    emphatic expression assert their rights.

    Björn Gottstein (2006/07)


    Translation by Richard Toop

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