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DIALOG 9
Simon Kühn
New Piece (World Premiere)
Pierre Schaeffer
Symphonie pour un homme seul (1950)
28 Jun 2004
20.00 |
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The French composer and sound engineer Pierre Schaeffer was born in Nancy in 1910. In 1942 he founded an acoustic experimental studio in Paris, and in 1948 he conducted experiments with noises in French radio’s “Club d’Essai”, experiments that eventually led to the development of musique concrète. In 1960 he was appointed Chef du Service de la Recherche de l’ORTF in Paris and in 1968 Professor of Musique expérimentale et appliquée à l'audiovisuel at the Paris Conservatory. Until 1976 he was a professor of experimental music at the Paris Conservatory. Pierre Schaeffer died in 1995.
The Symphonie pour un homme seul refers to the problem of the isolated individual in three different ways. First, the individual human being is the source or producer of all the sounds heard in the work. Second, however, by adding the phrase “pour un homme seul” to the title, the composer refers to the individual recipient and thus conveys a significant feature of musique concrète in general. By contrast with the concert hall, a work of “genuine loudspeaker art” is primarily experienced within one’s own four walls. Thus, the combination “Symphonie pour un homme seul” is contradictory, because the public character implied in the genre of the symphony pales beside the private reception of the work. Finally, the Symphonie pour un homme seul also contains an autobiographical moment, since it deals with the isolation of an individual who has ventured out onto vast and uncharted musical waters: “And the designation ‘homme seul’ is justified both by the use of noises imitated by man as exclusive source and by the loneliness of the authors, which echoes the loneliness of contemporary man, who finds himself lost in the mass” (Pierre Schaeffer).
Simon Kühn was born in Karlsruhe in 1971. He studied composition with Nicolaus A. Huber at the Folkwang Musikhochschule in Essen. Between 1992 and 1995 Kühn worked on techno music intensively, and since 1993 he has been researching and experimenting with low frequencies. At this time he also wrote his first compositions based on low-frequency information. In 1997 he received a grant from the Internationale Ferienkurse für Neue Musik in Darmstadt, and in 1999 he received a two-year fellowship from the Kunststiftung Baden-Württemberg. Simon Kühn lives and works in Berlin as an independent composer.
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