The GrauSchumacher Piano Duo worked intensively with Karlheinz Stockhausen early on in his career and interpreted his epochal piano work Mantra. In an interview for our magazine in spring 2024, Götz Schumacher spoke in detail about these encounters with the composer.
The duo's deep familiarity with Stockhausen's Mantra will now also prove beneficial for a world premiere at the Wittener Tage für Neue Kammermusik: Ming Tsao has composed a realisation of Stockhausen's seven-page score Plus Minus under the title Plus or Minus. Written in 1964, the composition is a kind of framework plan that contains strict specifications in the context of serial music, but allows for a wide variety of realisations. "As my structural planning for Plus Minus became more exact, the final composition began to drift away from Plus Minus into a sound world dominated by fragments from Stockhausen’s Mantra,’ explains Ming Tsao about his work, which is already his second realisation of Stockhausen's score.
A first realisation was premiered in Witten in 2013 with the Ensemble Ascolta. Ming Tsao accompanies his new realisation with the question: "How is human expression possible in a world where technological control has damaged the earth as soon to be unlivable for humans?" He goes on to write about the work: "In Plus or Minus many electronic transducers are placed inside the piano so that each piano engages in a kind of feedback loop with its sounding materials. Low tones through the transducers cause the pianos to move and vibrate with the effect that the materiality of the piano itself – the wood and metal – begins to “sing” along with the performers. This possibility for musical expression in our damaged world I would call the “lyric of the Anthropocene” and it is towards this lyric that I push Stockhausen’s structural thinking with sound."
Following the world premiere with the GrauSchumacher Piano Duo and the SWR Experimentalstudio at the Wittener Tage für Neue Kammermusik on 3 May, Plus or Minus will be performed again as part of a CD release concert at the Kontakte Festival of the Berlin Akademie der Künste in June.
