BERND FRANKE: VEIL (I) three movements for ensemble (version for orchestra) (2013/14)

"Defined Indeterminacy" To be comprehensible but not pictorial, to create freedom within a tightly delineated framework, to allow chaos inside the context of a system - this is what interests the Leipzig based composer Bernd Franke. For many years he has been concerned in his music with the problem of constructing substantial forms as well as with questions of openness, integration and wholeness. Thus Franke's musical examples are Witold Lutoslawski, Edgar Varese, John Cage and Morton Feldman. He also draws inspiration from the artwork of such as Joseph Beuys, Marc Chagall and Richard Pousette-Dart; his work is cosmopolitan, influenced by his visits to America and Asia. All this results among other things to a preference for composing series: in 1988 he began his first cycle SOLO XFACH – half way house (for Joseph Beuys); this was followed by the orchestral cycle CUT (since 2001) in which Franke is concerned especially with questions of simultaneity and layering of sound, and also, as shown in the 2004 chamber music cycles LINES and IN BETWEEN, with questions of notation, improvisation and aleatoric. With VEIL a further cycle is added whose first piece is dedicated to the Ensemble Modern and Fabian Panisello and which was premiered on the 28th October 2013 in Madrid. VEIL will in future consist of the piecing together of individual movements which however are not combinable with one another. The cycle commences with the five-part piece VEIL (1) in which are to be found the fields of tension typical for Franke: metrical but not precisely determined excerpts are combined with exactly defined simultaneous or successive sections; the “indeterminacy” is at the same time a method of producing a direct experience. Together with many refinements and shadowing of sounds such as split sounds, improvised runs, falling tones and microintervals, accents, pizzicati, “dirty” sounds made by strong bow pressures and similar, levels of association are heightened - nevertheless the music should always be experienced as possessing its own quality, for, as Franke says: “music both requires and does not require an explanation”. Karen Allihn