What reality is cannot really be answered: with this sentence Stefan Fricke begins his introduction. When Meister Eckhart translated the Latin “actualitas” as “Wirklichkeit” in the thirteenth century, he was not thinking of the notion of reality that has dominated everyday language since the eighteenth century, but of what results from effecting and acting. Music too, Fricke writes, does not simply exist; it needs someone who acts to bring it into being. John Cage taught that there is no silence in the world and that something is always sounding, and ever since every sonic event could be recorded, stored and reproduced at any time, all the sounds around us have been able to become music.
Fricke places the pieces on this CD in a tradition that begins with the Görlitz shoemaker and mystic Jakob Böhme and his saying “Ein jedes Ding hat seinen Mund zur Offenbarung” (every thing has its mouth for revelation) and that has lastingly changed art through Joseph von Eichendorff, Oskar Fischinger, John Cage and Marcel Duchamp: the aesthetic investigation of the everyday in the concreteness of its objects, the remixing of realities in order to make them effective. The 47 miniatures, each about ninety seconds long, themselves disclose what they are and which reality has become artistically effective in them.
The pieces date from 1999 to 2004, most of them from 2002 and 2003. Several composers are represented by series whose parts are either spread across the CD or follow one another directly: Frank Niehusmann’s “Overdrive Boulevard North” to “Overdrive Boulevard East” (1999-2002), Ralf Hoyer’s “ort.rand. 1” to “ort.rand. 3”, Dirk Specht’s “3 Parts of 90 seconds”, Michael Hirsch’s “Three Episodes from ‘Das Konvolut, Vol. 3’”, Harald Muenz’s “dreimal neunzig sekunden wirklichkeit” and Ralf Haarmann’s three-part “Trilogie 1”. Alongside them stand single pieces such as Rilo Chmielorz’s “ff (floor+feet)”, Christian Banasik’s “Glass Cutter”, Hanns Holger Rutz’s “Halbschlaf”, Kirsten Reese’s “Windrad 1” and Bodo Hartwig’s “Golden Goal”; “33.3” is a joint work by Roswitha von den Driesch and Jens-Uwe Dyffort.
Georg Klein opens the sequence with “Ankündigung der Wirklichkeit: imperial news”, Thomas Gerwin closes it with “In 90 Sekunden um die Welt”. The 35 composers taking part were born between 1935 and 1977, from Georg Katzer to Hanns Holger Rutz. The DEGEM, founded in 1991, publishes this CD series; the volume runs to 73:19 and the booklet is a ten-page leporello in German and English.