Peter Kubelka hates recorded music. “I am not opposed to electronic music, to music created to be heard on records,” he explains. “But the performance of music written to be performed on wood or animal parts or the human voice on electronic equipment results only in an imitation–a ‘photograph’ of music. Recorded music is very much like reproductions of paintings in art books. The use of ‘electrophonics’ causes people to forget that music comes from a living being and has to be set against silence. The musical pollution that exists today is more unhealthy and horrible than air pollution.”
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
Kubelka and the other two members of the group, Ulf and Walther Derschmidt (all of whom sing and play a variety of ancient and modern string and wind instruments), don’t receive payment for their performances or rehearsal time. All three are employed teachers, and travel and other expenses are sometimes covered by grants and donations. This lack of financial dependence gives the group a certain amount of artistic independence. They plan to give two concerts here next week: one in the Louis Sullivan-Dankmar Adler Trading Room at the Art Institute, and one in the atrium of the State of Illinois Center.
Kubelka and his group are very open-minded about the kind of concerts they play. When Kubelka found members of a small bankrupt zoo begging with their animals on the streets of Frankfurt, he decided to stage a benefit concert for them at the Frankfurt art school where he teaches. On the stage with the musicians were an elephant, a bison, and a llama.
The Art Institute concert will include music from the 13th through the 20th centuries, played out of chronological sequence in order to suggest unexpected connections. “Usually in a concert each piece is played only for itself,” Kubelka explains. “I try to make a program so that each piece interrelates with and comments on every other.” Thus two pieces of Austrian music from apparently opposite ends of the musical spectrum will be heard next to each other: an example of Austrian folk music and a piece by the great but rarely heard Josef Matthias Hauer, one of the two originators of 12-tone composition. The group are aware of the historical research into early-music performance that has changed the way such works are played today, and incorporate much of that research into their own playing, but they are not dogmatic. Indeed, discontent with the academic dullness of some early-music groups was another impetus behind the group’s formation, “We reserve the right to use the full extent of our musical heritage for any musical purpose we see fit; what is most important is to make good, living music.”
