Abstract

Starting from the situation of music in Austria, I shall try to define what I think and what inspires me to compose the way I compose. Among the practitioners of music or those involved in music industry, and of course among the composers, there is in Vienna itself a melting pot of cultures, with very many different personalities and viewpoints. Music consists not only of tones, rhythms and sounds, but first of all of the relationship of tones, the bond of sounds, the combination of rhythms, the interaction of individual musical parameters to one another. In my writing, instead of musical "gestures", I make new room for "speaking", cantabile melodics, using a colorful palette of different scales, I try to give the triad new facets and set texts to music, interpreting them like Schubert or Wolf. I quite often use the same technique as the old master painters: although I have the whole picture in my head, I first paint the background, i. e. the accompaniment, the less important parts or layers of sound, so that they also receive a development with a logic of its own. Because composers today have every conceivable freedom to fulfill themselves in an individual manner. They can depict the world as ideal as we would all like it, or as bad as it is actually not, they can offer, to their heart’s content, aesthetic constructs, "sound clouds" or emotional "ear worms".

Keywords: progress,  New Music, audience, need for music, pluralism, social communication

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