Hauke Harder

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Alvin Lucier
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Like all of Hauke Harder's chamber music, Pure Presence involves a small number of fixed pitches that are projected in simple patterns onto a steady pulse or metrical field. Harder notates superficially simple figures that bring out an acoustical illusion space through interference and combination tones and other acoustical phenomena. The narrow gamut of pitches and the repeated rhythms are points of reference from which the listener can orient her attentions. The rhythmic patterns are not developed, but rather begin and end abruptly without logical or rhetorical motivation. Likewise, Hauke chooses his pitches on the basis of their transparence -- and their potential disappearance into the overall gestalt. In his most recent compositions, this transparence is created by taking pitches which relate to one another as do the partial tones in a harmonic series...
...this piece is a kind of Waldmusik, but one in which the question of perspective is never resolved decisively in favor of either the forest or the trees.

Daniel Wolf, 1996. Link to full text.

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