Florian Wittenburg – Aleatoric Inspiration

Florian Wittenburg – piano, electronics
Ned Mc Gowan – bowed piano

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Sondsamples under:
https://soundcloud.com/florian-91/

1 Aleatoric inspiration 2010
2 Pulses & drones 2009
3 Für Scarlett 2014
4 Dark piece 2009
5 Little permutation piece 2009
6 Motiv Sabine 2014
7 Piece for bowed piano & electronics 2012
8 Aleatoric inspiration II 2010

This is already the fourth release by German composer Florian Wittenburg (see also Vital Weekly 825, 863 and 920). His first one was all about using computers to transform sounds, but that changed on his second, which was all about real instruments. On his latest release he plays around with the notion of 'aleatoric' which is, roughly, put chance music; music made with chance operations, like tossing dice or using star charts to map out compositions. Think of especially John Cage and Morton Feldman. Wittenburg uses these chance operations as an inspiration for his own music , but unlike Cage, if a note is not in the right place, Wittenburg will change it and there is some human interaction. On this CD we find a couple of pieces that deal purely with the piano and little do I know about 'real composing': the sparsely played piano sounds great, wether or not it's composed with chance operations or not. This is quite

beautiful music, and little do I know indeed, along the lines of Cage and Feldman. I must say I am more pleased with the two longest pieces here, which is perhaps more of my expertise also. 'Pulses & Drones' is a very minimal piece of what sounds like sine waves colliding and slowly moving about. There are no pulses to be heard as such in this piece, but it has a beautiful, almost Alvin-Lucier-like austerity about it. In 'Piece for Bowed Piano & electronics' a bow plays the strings of the piano and perhaps that sound is amplified by the use of electronics, amplfying overtones and bring out ringing aspects of the sounds. This too is a 'slow mover' but it's less subdued than 'Pulses & drones; it's more present and alive and it forms a great counterpart to the other pieces. Both of these pieces are quite long and great. Together with the piano pieces they make a beautifully varied release.

Frans de Waard for Vital Weekly