The album Encyclopedia of Pitch and Deviation, released by Kairos earlier this year, presents a selection of pieces with electronics for solo violin, mixed ensemble and orchestra by Austrian composer Matthias Kranebitter performed by violinist Gunde Jäch-Micko, Klangforum Wien, the Warsaw Philharmonic and the Black Page Orchestra.
Matthias Kranebitter is a composer of instrumental, electroacoustic and electronic music based in Vienna. He is the co-creator of the Black Page Orchestra, a contemporary music ensemble focusing on the performance of mixed music and multimedia by emerging composers. His music is rich in variation and nuance. His soundworld is characterised by dense sonorities: from saturated, distorted synthetic sounds with influences of glitch and 8-bit aesthetics, through midi sounds of acoustic instruments, to massive over-the-top sound design combined with highly expressive instrumental writing, which ranges from rough gestural and mechanistic-like textures to refined musical moments of acute clarity. Kranebitter takes advantage of the referential charge of sounds as socio-cultural signifiers to create complex and compelling musical works that link different themes and topics through sound beyond the inherently musical.
The first composition on the album, Pitch Study no. 1, from 2016, for violin and electronics, performed by Gunde Jäch-Micko, begins with a short electronic bleep, which ‘presents’ the pitch of the ‘étude’. The title of the composition becomes explicit in this very opening: the tuning protocol before a performance of concert music. The violin ‘takes’ the pitch and plays it, changing the timbre somewhat, and is followed by samples of different kinds (sounds of instruments, musical sequences and electronic sounds), instances of the pitch presented in an episodic fashion. In subsequent sections, the violin and electronics interact in different situations, one mimicking the other, with the electronic part building up to overtake the acoustic instrument in several moments. The complex electronic textures and the solo instrument create a dense and compelling electroacoustic landscape full of unexpected turns and shifts, with some humorous passages.
The second piece, which gives the album its title, Encyclopedia of Pitch and Deviation, from 2020, is a composition for large ensemble with electronics performed by Klangforum Wien. Following the title, the piece is a collection of sonic entries (musical and extramusical), which are arranged first in descending and then in ascending order, starting from 443 hz. Every entry in this encyclopedia is accompanied by a short description provided by a synthesised female voice. Each presentation of a new frequency brings with it a new musical context that gradually deviates and unfolds in a unique fashion. The disparate-seeming frequencies are bound together by the framing of the encyclopedia: a taxonomic collection of concepts organised in a clear fashion. The encyclopedia's vast collection of pitches are taken from a wide range of contexts: tuning, astrology, electronic appliances and other machines, geology, zoology and surveillance technology. Matthias craftily takes the listener into uncharted territories: the diverse nature of the entries corresponds to rich and diverse musical moments, all cleverly orchestrated. The engagement with extramusical, yet sound-related subject matter in an explicit way adds a conceptual depth to the piece that enriches the listening experience.
60 Auditory Scenes for Investigating Cocktail Party Deafness, from 2021, performed by the Warsaw Philharmonic, is a piece for orchestra, electronics and machine listening system. The title humorously emulates the scientific tone of the field of music perception research. It suggests a collection of musical moments conceived for or inspired by scientific research involving sound and music perception. Kranebitter clashes the artistic with the scientific, the referential with the abstract, the serious with the trivial. The format of the piece, which brings to mind the short-format, informative and somewhat sensationalist videos one encounters on social media platforms, is taken to its absurd extreme. Throughout the three movements, the music unfolds with an accompanying synthesised female voice that both explains and exemplifies machine listening based on what the orchestra plays. The result is a humorous and absurd display of machine listening virtuosity. The imaginative orchestration and the diversity of compelling sonic landscapes (auditory scenes) presented as short episodes of increasing absurdity take the listener from one sonic space to the next in a somewhat erratic fashion.
Nihilistic Study no. 7, for mixed ensemble and electronics, from 2013, performed by the Black Page Orchestra, begins with a synthesised female voice announcing the beginning of a listening example followed by the musical realisation thereof. The title alludes to the pedagogical, formative and virtuosic character of the étude in the history of Western music. The piece combines extreme electronic sonorities with fast instrumental gestures. Each example points to a different sonic context, as if these were part of a collection of sorts. With sharp humour, Kranebitter presents a wide referential space of human activity involving sound production. Ranging through musical tropes from the Western music canon, abstract textural composition, free improvisation, radio advertisements and soundscape, the piece charts a wide selection of sonic activity through diverse music and sonic landscapes. Starting from this piece, one can follow the way in which the composer in later pieces, including on this album, developed classification and referentiality as creative devices of his music.
The album closes with Le Vertigo, from 2016, performed by the Black Page Orchestra. The composition is a free rearrangement of a Baroque piece of the same title by Joseph-Nicolas-Pancrace Royer, an eighteenth-century harpsichordist, organist and composer from Turin. The traces (or remains?) of the original composition are presented in contexts varying in ‘disfiguration’. The traces of the past, ever present in the existing musical instruments and the harmonic system, are distorted, filtered and aggressively manipulated, producing an imaginative recomposition while maintaining a recognisable imprint of the composer's imaginative style.
Kranebitter's music embodies the current anxiety vis-à-vis the growing incorporation of new technologies in our hyper-technologically mediated way of life while also nodding to the commodification of sound, and with it, the continuous and ever expanding fetishisation of classical-music culture. The compositions comprising this album give a clear sonic impression of his rich, witty, musical and conceptual soundworld. Depending on the topic, hinted at through the titles of his compositions, the pieces address, with a humorous didacticism, their subject matter and take it to its absurd extreme. The excess of information, often disparately organised, establishes a link to the sensuous saturation we are continually under.
In a way, Matthias Kranebitter brings into the context of contemporary written music an iconoclastic critique of the values and rites inherited from – and still present in – Western classical music, with its clear, delimited context. Relying on plunderphonics – that is, the use of sampled material as a means of accessing different referential spaces – Kranebitter includes the extramusical, the social, even the scientific, all fields in which sound is a discursive agent. The pieces on this album invite the listener to engage with the world through music and sound in its multiple spaces of signification, while also acknowledging the privileged role of music in the discursive sonic treatment of ideas.
