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JÖRG WIDMANN'S JAGDQUARTETT

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 April 2016

Asher Ian Armstrong
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Abstract

Jörg Widmann's work embraces everything music history – and beyond – has to offer: Lachenmann, Boulez, the poetry of Baudelaire, Rilke's Late Sonnets and the Screaming Pope paintings of Francis Bacon. His transformative re-imagining of traditional forms is seen nowhere better than in the Jagdquartett, the third in a cycle of five quartets that comprise the core of his œuvre. In the interview around which this article is based he discusses the Jagdquartett and its inspirations in detail, and the possibility of his music representing a kind of meta-modernism.

Type
RESEARCH ARTICLES
Information
Tempo , Volume 70 , Issue 276 , April 2016 , pp. 22 - 33
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2016 

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References

1 He is the dedicatee of Musik für Klarinette und Orchester, by his teacher Wolfgang Rihm, Cantus by Aribert Reimann and Rechant by Heinz Holliger, to name a few.

2 Jörg Widmann, interview with the author, Toronto, 3 March 2012. Subsequent quoted material is taken from these unpublished notes unless otherwise cited.

3 Jörg Widmann, Forward to Chor (Mainz: Schott Music GmbH & Co., 2004.)

4 ‘Vor Schuberts Musik stürzt die Träne aus dem Auge, ohne erst die Seele zu befragen: so unbildlich und real fällt sie in uns ein. Wir weinen, ohne zu wissen warum’. The powerful translation is by Max Paddison. See Tom Cochrane, Bernardino Fantini and Klaus R. Scherer, The Emotional Power of Music (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), p. 18.

5 Tom Service, ‘A Guide to Jörg Widmann's Music’, The Guardian (8 October 2012), http://www.theguardian.com/music/tomserviceblog/2012/oct/08/jorg-widmann-contemporary-music-guide (accessed 4 March 2013).

6 Service, ‘A Guide to Jörg Widmann's Music’.

7 Service, ‘A Guide to Jörg Widmann's Music’.

8 van den Akker, Robin and Vermeulen, Timotheus, ‘Notes on Metamodernism’, Journal of Aesthetics & Culture, 2 (2010) DOI: 10.3402/jac.v1i0.5677Google Scholar, abstract.

9 Robin van den Akker, et al, ‘What is Metamodernism?’ Notes on Metamodernism (15 July 2010), http:// www.metamodernism.com/2010/07/15/what-is-metamodernism (accessed 27 February 2012).

10 Akker, et al, ‘What is Metamodernism?’.

11 Pierre Boulez, Notes on Apprenticeship, trans. Herbert Weinstock (New York: Knopf, 1968), p. 64.

12 Lack, Graham, ‘At Fever Pitch: the Music of Jörg Widmann’, TEMPO, Vol. 59, No. 231 (2005), pp. 29–35CrossRefGoogle Scholar, here 32.

13 Tom Service, ‘The Musical Double-Agent’, The Guardian (13 March 2009), http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2009/mar/13/jorg-widmann-clarinettist-wigmore-hall (accessed 4 March 2012).

14 Quoted in Graham Lack, ‘At Fever Pitch: the Music of Jörg Widmann’, p. 32.

15 In his Foreword to the Fieberphantasie, Widmann notes: ‘I often feel Robert Schumann's melodic shape to be like the amplitude of a temperature curve: nervous, flickering, feverish, an infinite number of small and large wave crests and troughs within the principal line’.

16 Jerry Silverman, Songs of Germany/Deutsche Lieder (Pacific, MO: Mel Bay Publications, 2008), p. 81.

17 Jörg Widmann, Foreword to Jagdquartett (Mainz: Schott Music GmbH & Co., 2003).

18 A recent music video of the Jagdquartett performed by the Ragazze Quartet gives a literal, staged dramatic shift at this point in the score, reflecting that in the musical narrative. This adapted staging of Widmann's work is entitled The Hunt, and is directed by Robin Coops and produced by Olya van Poppel.

19 Service, ‘The Musical Double-Agent’.

20 Jörg Widmann: Profile, Schott Music GmbH & Co. KG http://www.schott-music.com/shop/persons/featured/joerg-widmann/ (accessed 8 August 2015).