ni

Turning away from the external world “toward the inside” was a postulate that recurred over and over again, mostly in the writings of religious thinkers from Meister Eckhardt to Søren Kierkegaard. The religious experience also plays a major role in the works of Mark Andre. The mysterious title ni is an abbreviation for “nach innen” (“toward the inside”), and refers to self-insight and self-knowledge attained through existential experience and shared with other people in the form of music. The key element of Mark Andre’s music is the “sound situation” (Klangsituation), which cannot be defined in terms of musical grammar. His works are recognitions of acoustic forms; details become landscape, and a breath turns into the outline of the macroform. Nach innen is a sequence of seven miniatures in which noise-saturated sound situations operating with dynamic extremes occur one after another with lyrical density.

The first movement of the composition is marked at first by violent impulses, “rapidly descending gestures,” which lead to high-register noise. Shortly before the end, a six-tone melody in the piano emerges from the noise.

In the second movement, the string players play on the strings with their bank cards while the percussionist plays a solo on aluminium foil. What sounds at first like rain beating down turns out to be the process of perforation. In the third movement the flute brings back impulses, taken up by the clarinet and the oboe. The instruments play into the inside of the piano, which creates resonances and transforms them, so to speak, into one metainstrument. The fourth, central movement is a “study of breathing”: The composer makes the winds play asthmatic sounds that are broken up by isolated attacks of the strings and the piano. Woodwind multiphonics and sounds produced by a glass inside the piano finally bring back a richer sound. Various types of textures are combined in the following movements of the composition, produced by means of Styropor, aluminium foil, and the chirping sounds of screws on the stringed instruments. In the last movement, the singing bowls and bell plates resound in an apotheotic manner while the unpenetrated spaces of expression in which we have moved slowly recede. In their brevity and emphatic quality the successive movements of ni bring to mind a Beethoven bagatelle. What they have in common with the bagatelles is the clarity that results from the fragmentation of material. The existential moments do not necessarily last long, but they resound for a long time in our ears.

Patrick Hahn

ni consists of a sequence of short, bagatelle-like movements or parts. While within each movement, on the one hand, musical spaces are developed, on the other it is all about a musical-affective journey “toward the inside”.

The music material has been consistently catalogued here. Each section “visits” one or more musical spaces. The spaces either last for some time, or their musical elements get disturbed and fragmented, or new unexpected spaces open up. It is all about a quest for musical, existential and metaphysical tracks deep in our innermost self.

Mark Andre