The Gaze Inward
Barbara Buchholz in Conversation with Wolf Kampmann
On your last CD, you presented your instrument; on the new one, your instrument presents you. Was that deliberate?
On my first album "Theremin: Russia with Love" I wanted to go back to the roots of the instrument in Russia and trace the historical connections of the theremin. The concept of placing the theremin in various fields followed, as a pioneering instrument that’s not at home in any particular musical style. That led to projects with contemporary music such as the platform “Touch! Don‘t Touch!“, the “FinnProject“ with Finnish tango and live electronics, and other stylistically divergent projects. On the new CD I return to my own roots. One important source of inspiration was my acquaintance with Norwegian musicians such as Arve Henriksen, Jan Bang and Susanna & the Magical Orchestra. It was a challenge for me to try the theremin out in this Norwegian cosmos of sound, whose breadth could enhance the instrument’s possibilities extremely well.
Until now, music for the theremin has primarily been "about" the theremin, an exotic sound around which everything else is built. You are setting off onto entirely new paths. Theremin music in which one sometimes forgets one is listening to a theremin.
The reason for that is primarily because I gave all the freedom possible to the musicians I requested pieces from. I myself find it good that the instrument is not always the focus but can sometimes be just one of the colors. In the piece with Susanna & the Magical Orchestra, for example, it is just a breath of air. The theremin can be anything on this CD.
The musical statements on the disk range from sacred-sounding music to ambient music onto electronic music. A boreal arc stretches over everything. How did the music come together as a whole?
The musicians who are involved come into play there. There are three pieces by Tilmann Dehnhard in which Arve Henriksen plays trumpet and Tilmann himself either contrabass flute, clarinet, or baritone saxophone. This results in a trio in which the low instruments are framed by trumpet and theremin. From the outset, From the beginning it was my deep wish that Arve would play on my CD and I knew that Tilmann, with his affinity for this kind of music, was the right person to write for it. These three pieces function like images that evoke a great inner calm.
With Arve Henriksen and Jan Bang I played some concerts last autumn. I love the atmospheres Jan Bang creates with live sampling and programming. He wrote the composition "Öd", a really beautiful and sad "underwater soundtrack".
I met Susanna & the Magical Orchestra in 2006 at the Moers Festival in Germany. I was very touched to perceive how the band made silence visible. They enjoy the silence so completely that sometimes you hold your breath and think the music is standing still.
The Kammerflimmer Kollektief comes from an entirely different direction. It plays with the contrast between improvised noise, beautiful melodies and electronic ambientinfluences. The music is very lyrical, and that is optimally suited to theremin. It reminds me of the figures of Niki de Saint Phalle and Jean Tinguely, those colorful, happy figures and the rusty, wobbly, squeaky apparatuses that break up that beauty. Together they both produce a perfect work of art. I hear this fissure in the Kammerflimmer Kollektief too. It inspires me to ignore questions of style and instead to concentrate on bringing together what doesn’t seem to belong together.
I like that about Ulrike Haage, for example, who’s recognized in jazz circles as well as in pop circles; she writes for the theater, creates radio plays and escapes all classifications.
Ulrike and I played together in the mid-1980s in Reichlich Weiblich. She played piano and composed for the bigband, and I was the bassist. Her piece "Evocation" is really about how the morning sun gradually sends its rays through the clouds and asserts itself. Her emphatic rhythm is accompanied by this totally delicate theremin, as fragile as the rays that come through. Jan Krause is not only a fantastic bassist, percussionist, programmer and sound engineer, but he also built my MIDI theremin with which I can conjure up samples and loops out of thin air. We’ve known each other for a long time, so each of us understands the other’s musical idiom without needing words.
The last piece "Little Liar" is a wonderful song by Alejandro Govea Zappino, which got to me from Uruguay via MySpace. The piece stuck with me, and I asked him if he could imagine a joint production. It is perhaps the poppiest song on the album, but it’s really too unusual for pop.
For all the differences throughout the individual pieces, the album nevertheless has a basic musical foundation, which is not only carried by the theremin alone.
For all of the musicians I’ve spoken with, there’s a connection between abstract and emotional sound. That suits the theremin very well because, on the one hand, it’s abstract because it’s an electronic instrument, and, on the other hand, it’s very emotional because it’s so similar to the human voice and has a lot of expressive power. Originally I wanted to make an entirely different kind of CD, which would have been much more electronic. That concept couldn’t be sustained, however. I saw that sometimes you just have to take things as they come, and so I just let the concept be a concept. Suddenly everything came together organically. I met the musicians at just the right time, and everything worked out so there wasn’t any need to ask questions. Only in hindsight did I become conscious of the diversity of the pieces. While working on the album it sounded like a unity. I just followed whatever inspired me at the time. Sometimes it felt like it was remote-controlled. When I heard Susanna & the Magical Orchestra, I immediately knew I would have to ask them.
Many pieces sound as if you were approaching silence from a variety of perspectives.
Reflection on silence was a core idea that carried me through the whole production.
Dealing with silence as well as dealing with sound. What impresses me about Arve Henriksen is this trumpet sound that doesn’t even sound like a trumpet but is instead reminiscent of a sakuhachi flute. He was occupied for a long time with the sound of the latter and transferred its subtleties to the trumpet as a way for him to find an outlet for his inner voice.
I also allow myself to be inspired by other instruments, like horn or flute, and come up with sounds that are rather unusual for the theremin. For example, the vibrato-less entry of the theremin. In the pieces with Arve I could try out how similar the trumpet and theremin could sound, and whether there are even pieces, in which they can actually fuse. Where do parallels exist and differences only occur in the fact that the theremin player doesn’t breathe? The equivalent of breath for the theremin player is a movement that crucially influences the intonation. Every tiniest tremor the player makes is audible. This fragility is also the instrument´s strength.
With the composure that you bring to your playing, you give the theremin a voice.
The recognition of an exotic instrument is defined by the clichés that become
established at some point. For the theremin, it’s the horror movies of the 1950s.
The aesthetic of its sound was connected to a kind of pathos, which was supported by vibrato. Now the goal is to explore all the other directions you can go into with the theremin. This tradition doesn’t even exist yet. Naturally your own roots are crucial to that process. This Norwegian attitude is very familiar to me. Although I grew up in a big city, I always cultivated a great love for nature. I grew up with European music, with classical and popular music. Only later did I work intensely with jazz, but that isn’t really my culture. Archaic structures, on the other hand, are totally familiar to me.
Did you have to alter your relationship to the theremin to make this CD into what it is?
Not at all. I’ve always had this outlook. My idea for sound always corresponded to a simple aesthetic. It’s naturally very difficult to play clear notes on the theremin, because they make the pure intonation audible, and you can cover up intonation mistakes with vibrato. You have to have your whole body so much in control when playing that these pure notes are possible anyway. I never wanted to end up in this nostalgic corner with lots of pathos and horror effects.The theremin is not considered a physical instrument, because you don’t touch it, and yet the tension of the body makes it all the more physical. In essence, yes, because you have to be well grounded. You need very good contact and have to play from your own center. The equilibrium of the body has to be at rest, like in Tai Chi. There has to be a tension in the center, but all the body parts that are needed for playing have to be relaxed. It’s a lot like in martial arts. If the equilibrium is right, a concentration arises that enables the player to delve into each note. You have to really sink into the instrument. That’s why theremin players always look so silly. They stare into an imaginary distance as if they were blind, but in fact they’re just looking inward. Every hesitation, every uncertainty in the equilibrium will topple the sound, just as you would topple yourself.
Interview translated by Steven Lindberg
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