Außenansicht

In southern Africa there is a genus of plants that, at first glance, hardly seems like a plant at all. Its botanical name Lithops consists of the Greek words λίθος (Lithos for “stone”) and ὅψις (opsis for “appearance”), revealing much about the look of the bizarre plant. These plants are commonly called “living stones”—not only because of their resemblance to stones, but also because they thrive amongst them, camouflaging themselves to match.

“Living stones” of the genus Lithops karasmontana subsp. Eberlanzii in a rocky landscape

The common name seems strange only because stones and plants seem, in many respects, to be opposites. Both are products of nature, yet they are fundamentally different: Hardness and solidity characterize one, elasticity and growth the other—or, to state it even more pointedly: here death, there life. Cerha’s friend Karl Prantl, who devoted his life to making art with stones, would likely disagree with this statement. For him, stones are living beings—something he explains in the opening of the documentary Die Steinspur:

Prantl’s train of thought provides essential insight into this worldview. There are no opposites between things that exist, only durations: the duration of time on this earth.

In Prantl’s philosophy, trees become the connecting link between stones—prehistoric beings—and humans, temporary creatures. They combine the durable and the robust with the changeable and active. Stasis and evolution are the two poles, but they are not mutually exclusive. It is precisely this tension that cast a spell over Cerha as a composer. On Monumentum, his first piece dedicated to Prantl, he states:

Brücke

Innenansicht

Austrian photographer Lukas Dostal captures the subtle structures, patterns, and imaginative inscriptions of Prantl’s sculptural work:

The equivalent of Prantl’s precision and thoroughness in working the material is, with Cerha, a love for fine and meticulously developed aural structures. The shadowy contours of nested intricacies repeatedly appear throughout the varied sections of Monumentum, mostly in the strings, creating a musical image of vine-like vegetation slowly growing in one direction. The first of the four meditations—the interludes to the five main sections—illustrates this sound concept perfectly. Network-like vocal interweavings alternate with brief rests.

These “tonal root systems” are only momentarily hinted at in the first meditation before they disappear, returning at various points in the composition. Sometimes they stand alone, sometimes they extend underground through a field—as in Kreuzweg—or counteract massive blocks of sound that are in turn reminiscent of Prantl’s sculptures—as in Zeichen. However, this botanical music concept truly culminates in Verzweigungen. Meticulousness and elaboration are elevated to become the sole focus, causing a music of almost endless growth to emerge.
The music created in Verzweigungen is simple yet complex—simple as a whole and in its “tangible” development, complicated in its details, phrasing, and layering. Probably the most impressive testimony to this contradiction is a sketch Cerha drew to document the entire course of the approximately five-minute finale on only four sheets of paper. The music is not written using conventional notes—instead, the notation is almost architectural, with the lines of graph paper serving as the foundation for the graphically astounding work. It is not the first time Cerha uses this system—earlier pieces, such as the gigantic Fasce, were also sketched on paper in this way, especially when the composer needed to create particularly dense and layered vocal fabrics. For Verzweigungen, Cerha uses the tiny squares of the paper like note cells: One square is a whole tone, half is a semi-tone—an octave is made up of six “stacked” squares. The 36 boxes arranged vertically on a page provide an extremely large tonal range of six octaves, which Cerha takes full advantage of. Placed next to each other, the sketches illustrate the evolution of the music at a glance.

Continuing the idea of branching, more and more sound forms interlock, overlap, and densify. In order to distinguish these complexes in the sketch, Cerha subdivides the design with different colours. Black, red, dark green, and blue lines shape the page. The different colours sometimes indicate a later orchestration—and in many places Cerha notes which instruments should be used where.
While the fundamental concept of the piece can be understood directly from the sketch—including some of the details—this is not true of the later formal score. The transfer of the boldly branching sound structure to conventional notation illustrates the pragmatism of conductor Cerha, who uses this type of graphic notation extremely sparingly—as appealing to the eye as it may be. The transformation to a traditional five-line system should not be seen as a sombre compromise. On the contrary: With it, Cerha generates the opportunity to grow his musical “plant”, to coax the developing buds into full bloom.

Ultimately, the final version loses nothing of this underlying idea. A review of the final score reveals the different steps along the way, showing how Verzweigungen is finally embedded in the overall complex of Monumentum.

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