It all started with the news that the Berlin electronic music label Macro was about to release a CD called Late Works by the German avant-gardist Friedrich Goldmann. The occasion is what would have been Goldmann’s 70th birthday (he died in 2009). In addition to conventional distribution, the CD, which contains four of the composer’s key late works (penned between 1994 and 2008), will be given out as a gift to subscribers of the influential British magazine for electronic music The Wire. The release of Late Works sets a precedent in at least two ways. On the one hand, it is extraordinary that a label specializing in dance music such as Macro would publish works normally listed as “contemporary classics”. On the other, this is the first time that The Wire has distributed music by a composer from Germany.
It is also remarkable that in a time when contemporary music is succumbing to questionable crossover experiments and rhythmically boring remixes of electronic classics, this album gives us a chance to listen to and talk about a very different musical aesthetic. Put very simply, Goldmann’s music helps us see our sound environment in a new way. He also had an intriguing connection with Bulgaria, which, among other things, influenced some of his work. But first things first.
Born in 1941, Friedrich Goldmann joined the Dresden Kreuzchor at age ten, and was studying composition with the great Karlheinz Stockhausen by the age of eighteen. [The German avant-gardist Karlheinz Stockhausen (1928–2007) is the author of some of the earliest compositions containing digitally generated sound.] Stockhausen substantially influenced Goldmann’s path in music. In 1962, Goldmann graduated from the Dresden Conservatory with a degree in composition and moved to Berlin, where he studied musicology at the Humboldt University, in part to avoid military service. Around 1967, he met his future wife, the Bulgarian-born Lina, who had just recently come to Germany and was in the same class with him. Two other Bulgarians were also in Berlin at the time – Dimitar Gotschev (today, one of the most respected Germany-based theatre directors) and Ginka Tcholakowa, the future wife of the playwright Heiner Müller. [Heiner Müller (1929–1995) was one of the most influential German playwrights in the second half of the 20th century.] Friedrich, Lina, Dimitar and Ginka met in the theatre, for which Goldmann was composing music. The older generations of classical composers were suspicious of musical experimentation, so theatre provided a much-needed space for innovation. In the late 1960s, the group often spent their summer vacations in Sozopol, where their conversations about art and politics often pushed the envelope of what was accepted and tolerated by the totalitarian state.
On his second visit to Bulgaria, Friedrich expressed an interest in meeting Bulgarian composers who were working in contemporary classical styles. So he met Lazar Nikolov, and through him – Georgi Toutev and Konstantin Iliev, who formed the Bulgarian musical avant-garde in the second half of the 20th century. Friedrich was much younger than them, but age was not an issue. They talked about God and the world, as the Germans say, and above all, music, which was their common passion as well as a medium for communication. Their conversations, especially those with Konstantin Iliev and Georgi Toutev, continued for long hours into the night.
Goldmann’s relationship with Toutev was exceptionally close, partly due to the Bulgarian composer’s perfect command of German. [Georgi’s father Ivan Toutev studied history and philosophy in Germany in the 1920s, where his circle of friends included Dechko Ouzounov, Geo Milev and other Bulgarian artists and intellectuals. In 1929, the German avant-gardist magazine Der Sturm invited Ivan Toutev to edit an issue presenting the work of young Bulgarian artists.] Friedrich Goldmann thought it was incredible that three Bulgarians had started composing atonal music as early as the late 1940s. Although well-received by the Sofia public, the movement was soon smothered by the ridiculous aesthetic platform of socialist realism.
In his villa in Boyana, which he shared with his wife, Goldmann happily devoted his time to his work, away from the phone calls and bureaucratic responsibilities he so detested at home. As a free-lance composer, he was able to spend up to several months a year in Sofia and it was there that he wrote some of his well-known works – chamber pieces, as well as larges compositions for orchestras such as the Berlin Philharmonic, the Ensemble Modern, the Arditti Quartet, the Staatskapelle Berlin, the Scharoun Ensemble, Wittener Tage and others.
In the 1980s, Winfred Brenneke, an editor from WDR, the West German Radio, contacted a group of musicians and composers from the GDR and presented their work to Western audiences for the first time. He traveled to Berlin where he met Goldmann. The East German composer advised Brenneke to travel to Bulgaria, which is how Georgi Toutev’s Calvino Mosaik came to be performed at the Wittener Tage festival, which Brenneke organized.
Following the fall of the Berlin wall in 1989, Goldmann became the president of the German Section of the International Society for Contemporary Music (ISCM). [The ISCM, whose mission is to promote the development of contemporary music, has been active since the 1920s.] With Goldmann’s help and advice, Georgi Toutev founded a society for new music in Bulgaria in 1990, which became an official part of the ISCM in 1992. A few years later, the first Musica Nova festival was held in Sofia, with Karlheinz Stockhausen appearing as a guest conductor of the Sofia Philharmonic. A chamber music piece by Goldmann was also performed in the festival’s first edition.
In addition to composing, Friedrich also conducted some of the best orchestras of his time. In the 1980s and 90s, he led master classes at the Berlin Academy of Arts and from 1991 until his death he was a professor of composition at the Berlin University of the Arts and the chair of the University’s Institute for New Music from 2003 to 2005.
Friedrich Goldmann’s life and career are full of intriguing facts and events; however, we should not get distracted from what is most important: his innovative music. The abstract quality of this type of music makes it hard to define and even to listen to. It is provocative and, some claim, hard to digest, because it questions the very foundation of our understanding of art. And yet, a piece by Friedrich Goldmann was commissioned by the German state for the 10th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin wall – a symbolic gesture of recognition of the force and meaning of his work.
Goldmann’s musical heritage is broad and multifaceted. Today, some of his students have become distinguished names in the field of contemporary music in their own right – for example, Paul Frick from the Brandt Brauer Frick trio, whose specialty is techno music performed on classical instruments. Goldmann’s son, Stephan, is the owner and producer of the Macro label, which for some time now has been successfully injecting a healthy dose of unconventionality into electronic music. The release of some of his father’s works is a perfect example of this.
[friedrichgoldmann.com]
text by ivaylo spassov photography archive
translation by boris deliradev
