ORTH
SOUNDING

I would like to start with a term I once used a few years ago to talk about the work of Josef Reiter: there was talk of a "grammar of the few" or even "of the least." At the time, that was also a reference to a theory that was once very much in vogue, the "generative transformation grammar" of the linguist and linguist Noam Chomsky. The idea, in a nutshell, is a grammar that doesn't write down rules, but rather puts the process, the observation of the process of speaking and understanding, at the center of thought. That is to say: there is a very manageable quantity of letters and a perhaps still manageable quantity of words, and from these we can, however - applying and observing certain, relatively few rules of the game - form a no longer manageable, an infinite quantity of meaning-bearing sentences. To transfer this model mentally to the work of Josef Reiter means to emphasize that his work is not about the little as such, about some form of minimalism or repetitism, but about models in which with a few rules and a manageable amount of tones nevertheless an incalculable number of different sound constellations can be created. There is a text with a very nice title by Heinrich von Kleist and this title is: "On the gradual production of thoughts while talking". The text is about the fact that while you are speaking and only because you have to think along and further while speaking yourself, you come up with thoughts that would never occur to you if you did not get involved in this process. Actually also a model of a mental kind of generative transformation grammar. And if we are talking about Josef Reiter's works here today, let's link them together now. There is a series of works by Josef Reiter with a very beautiful title, which refers to the very beautiful title of Kleist: Josef Reiter's series of works is called "On the Gradual Fabrication of Spaces in Listening." These works, which - just like the work to be opened today - , are perceptible as sound installations, are always about concrete spaces. The sounds played by Josef Reiter in these spaces do not want to impose themselves on the characteristics of the space, but quite the opposite, they want to enable the visitors to experience additional spatial dimensions, that is, to continue building the space by listening to it, to gradually manufacture it with their ears and brains. For this purpose Josef Reiter uses certain characteristics of a space, from which he extracts the sounds and their sequence. To name one of the possibilities: Rooms have very specific proportions, very specific rooms then often also very specific proportions, and these can then be reinterpreted, for example, into musical interval proportions, which then add acoustic-musical ones to the optical proportions of a room. And this, by the way, is usually done very quietly, in reduced timbres and in layers of sound of different lengths that are constantly superimposed on each other in a different way. Now I'm talking all the time about a series of works, to which the work to be opened today does not belong at all. Nevertheless, through this narrative I wanted to awaken a kind of sensitivity in you for the fundamental characteristics of Josef Reiter's sound installations. A few hints to facilitate the perception, to understand exactly this work to be opened today will follow now. The sound finding for the works described so far is quite conceptual. Here in Orth, however, we are dealing with a much more direct, with a semantic form of sound-finding, so to speak. Of course, it is also about a relationship of the concrete place and the music, the sounds. "ORTH Sounding" is the name of this work and this can be taken literally. Not proportions or otherwise abstract parameters are the basis, but actually the place Orth itself. Josef Reiter has set out with the microphone in search of those sounds that characterize the place of Orth and its surroundings. Sounds from the Au, for example, from birdsong to wind and rain to rippling water. And if I now add, sounds from Orth Castle, then the history of this castle is reflected in the sounds of some Renaissance instruments, a theorbo for example, but above all a conceptual level is added. Here in Orth Castle there is a very fine exhibition about the Austrian composer Karl Schiske. This year marks the hundredth anniversary of his birth, and this exhibition opening and one of the levels of Josef Reiter's work also relate to this. If you go into these memorial rooms, you will find on the left-hand wall in Schiske's handwriting a twelve-tone row written on a stave. And this is a small marvel: a twelve-tone row in the spirit of Arnold Schoenberg is characterized precisely by the fact that allusions to tonality in the traditional sense are absent, that there are no tonal focal points. Karl Schiske, however, compiled a twelve-tone row for his 5th Symphony, which nevertheless consists of small fragments, quotations from motives of other composers. And in this handwritten note here in Orth Castle, Schiske also wrote down exactly which motifs come from where. They are sequences of notes by Bach, Bruckner, Brahms and Beethoven. And that's why I said "Wunderwerk", because actually this is a contradictio in adiecto, a contradiction in terms, to form a classical twelve-tone row from material of four composers who definitely wrote tonal music. And we are talking about this twelve-tone row now because Josef Reiter is obviously also fascinated by it and has made it the constructive basis of the sound installation "ORTH Sounding". Which brings us to the next level: one cannot arrange water or rain sounds in exact pitches. This is where Schiske's musicality comes into play once again: Josef Reiter teamed up with percussionist Lukas Schiske, a son of Karl Schiske. Lukas Schiske played single notes and sequences of notes on percussion instruments tuned to precise pitches, i.e. xylophone, vibraphone or crotales, for example, and Josef Reiter recorded these as well to continue working with. To summarize: The tonal layers you are about to hear are, on the one hand, natural sounds from Orth and the surrounding area, some Renaissance sounds and percussion sounds by Lukas Schiske. The composer Josef Reiter has arranged all this according to certain criteria into a piece of about half an hour, the constructive basis of which is Karl Schiske's twelve-tone series. So what you can't hear right now, if you could hear it: Bach, Bruckner, Brahms, Beethoven, Schiske, Renaissance, birds and other creatures, ships, rain, wind, orth. Some of it you'll recognize, some of it you won't, and the aforementioned twelve-tone row itself in its percussive form could theoretically be heard, but practically it's probably just too slow in this version for us to really identify it. It's all in this piece, which is nonetheless a rather quiet and cautious piece......