Claus-Steffen Mahnkopf, Ensemble SurPlus

Claus-Steffen Mahnkopf’s Hommage à Thomas Pynchon, performed at Haus der Berliner Festspiele, marks the intersection of the two thematic strands of this year’s MaerzMusik: Music – Text – Voice and Music and Space. Thomas Pynchon’s text functions as a kind of text machine providing the compositional strategies, which will lead to the subversive transformation of the traditional concert setting that Mahnkopf calls musical installation. Hommage à Thomas Pynchon forms part of a more comprehensive work, whose various cycles are also designed as homages and together lead up to Mahnkopf’s second music theatre. Those parts that have already been conceived or realised refer to György Kurtág, Daniel Libeskind, void, Prospero – and to Thomas Pynchon.

“My Hommage à Thomas Pynchon is a piece of music theatre, literally it is music for a theatre, meaning a spectacle, an event, in this case a thoroughly subverted one. It starts off like a concert – albeit with an extremely hard playing ensemble – but is subsequently in various stages transformed by live electronics and écriture automatique électronique into a musical installation, loud, unnerving and far from contemplative, which – despite the constantly intervening cello part – eventually builds up to the point of becoming independent. I mean this literally. On the one hand with regard to time because this music theatre does not have a finish but in a way the ‘work’ goes on forever; on the other hand with respect to the spacial inclusion of the theatre building itself. ... I could imagine this musical installation encompassing the whole city and gaining urban relevance, but that is utterly unrealistic.”
(from: Claus-Steffen Mahnkopf: Architektur und neue Musik, in: Musik und Architektur, ed. by Christoph Metzger for Internationales Musikinstitut Darmstadt, Saarbrücken 2003, p. 89)