Günther Becker, born in 1924, trained as a conductor with Gerhard Nestler in Karlsruhe and studied composition with Wolfgang Fortner in Heidelberg and Detmold. From 1956 to 1968 he lived in Greece, taught in Athens and in 1962 set up a studio for new music at the Goethe-Institut there. In 1968 he settled in Essen as a freelance composer and in 1969 founded the live-electronic group “Mega-Hertz”. From 1971 to 1974 he was president of the German section of the International Society for Contemporary Music, and from 1973 to 1989 he taught at the Robert-Schumann-Institut in Düsseldorf.
Becker had his first major success with the orchestral work stabil-instabil (1965), premiered in 1966 in the WDR series “musik der zeit” in Cologne. Its material consists of sonic “archetypes”, dense noise fields in the strings and harsh single sounds in the brass, which first stand on their own and then merge, until a new stability at the end crumbles. After the Darmstadt premiere of the String Quartet No. 1 (1963) in 1964, Hans Heinz Stuckenschmidt singled out its “ecstatic expression”. The Nacht und Traumgesänge (1964) for mixed choir and orchestra set poems by Becker’s friend Odysseas Elytis in the Greek original; Becker breaks the language down into sounds and treats them according to their sonic values, independently of their meaning.
Correspondances I (1966), premiered at the Donaueschinger Musiktage, sets a soloist who alternates between four instruments against a tutti block. The wind quintet Serpentinata (1967/68) takes its starting point from Parmigianino’s “Self-portrait in a Convex Mirror”, in which the hand enlarged by the mirror becomes the main subject; in the same way, the opening cluster here becomes the element that steers the course of the piece. With the Caprices concertants (1968) for mandolin, mandola, guitar and plucked string orchestra Becker chose a scoring rare in new music and drew unusual effects from it, uncompromisingly opposed to anything folksy.
From the mid-1960s Becker worked intensively with electronics. Scanning (1969/70) for brass quintet and two-channel tape transfers the screening technique of newspaper photographs to composition: a musical shape is broken down into its elements, which the brass play live or the tape supplies in electronically altered form. In the Concerto for electronically modulated oboe and orchestra (1973/74), an early document of live-electronic composition, the sound of the oboe is transformed at the moment of articulation. In Passagen (1975/76), on texts by Franz Mon, Jürgen Becker, Ernst Jandl and Ingeborg Bachmann, the speaker triggers the modulation of her voice herself. Becker wrote the Fragments from “Hymnen an die Nacht” (Novalis) in 1979 for the collegium vocale Köln.
The recordings were produced by BR, WDR and SWF between 1964 and 1981. The performers are the Symphonieorchester des BR under Michael Gielen and, with Pierre W. Feit as soloist in the oboe concerto, under Ernest Bour, the choir and Symphonieorchester des BR under Andrzej Markowski, Hans Lemser with members of the Sinfonieorchester des SWR under Ernest Bour, the Parrenin-Quartett, Gisela Saur-Kontarsky (voice), Herbert Henck, Christoph Caskel and Raimund Jülich, the collegium vocale Köln with Wolfgang Fromme, the American Brass Quintet, and Reinhard Froese with the Landesjugendzupforchester NRW under Karl-Heinz Keinemann. The Portrait series gives composers the opportunity to present themselves with works and performers of their own choosing.