My friend and former colleague Peter Ablinger died today.
It was not unexpected, as such, but that makes it no less sad. Peyee and I went to visit him a few weeks ago, and he was as smiley and charming and kind as ever, and seemed to be in good spirits despite the circumstances. We shared some tea and talked about the projects he was working on, talked about the beautiful view from his new house that they’d recently moved into, he shared a rather extraordinary story of being accidentally right in the middle of the first group to cross the Berlin Wall in October ’89, … but his eyes really lit up when we got to talking about the fact that it was nearly Bärlauch season. He gave Peyee and I detailed instructions on how to get to his favorite Bärlauch patch, on a very specific little clearing in the woods on a lake near Potsdam. We promised to go. We didn’t, this year, but I suspect it will become an annual memorial pilgrimage. A chance to be out in the cold early spring sunshine in Berlin, celebrating one of the most extraordinary human beings to walk this earth.
Around 13 years or so ago, I was asked to write an encyclopedia entry about Peter. It is, alas, behind a paywall, but I suspect I can get away with reproducing the first paragraph here:
Peter Ablinger has arguably done more to challenge what we mean by ‘music’ than any composer since John Cage. If this seems hyperbolic, consider: Sehen und Hören (1994–2003), a series of abstract photographs that Ablinger refers to as “Music Without Sounds”; or Parker Notch (2010) for solo instrument and noise, in which an instrumentalist plays a blisteringly fast transcription of a Charlie Parker solo which is completely obliterated by a thick, dense stream of noise occupying the rest of the audio spectrum, rendering the instrumentalist’s sounds more or less inaudible; or WEISS/WEISSLICH 36, KOPFHÖRER (1999), in which one dons headphones that have a microphone attached, through which one hears what the microphone picks up in real time (as Ablinger writes, “The same is not the same. There is a difference. At least the difference between just being here and: listening. That difference is the piece.”); or any of the various SITZEN UND HÖREN or Stühle pieces, in which rows of chairs are set up in various indoor and outdoor locales around the world, in which “not the sound, but the listening is the piece”; or the Landschaftsoper Ulrichsberg (‘Landscape Opera’, 2009) in seven acts, Act 1 of which consists of planting rows of trees ‘according to acoustic criteria, e.g., colour and intensity of noise, version’; or QUADRATUREN III (“WIRKLICHKEIT”), in which various recordings (of speech, street noise, etc.) are transcribed and reproduced with surprising verisimilitude through a computer-controlled player piano.
There will be time later to properly process Peter’s artistic contribution—and again, without hyperbole, it would be difficult to overstate his immense impact and influence as an artist—but what I hope that paragraph above captures is also something much more personal, and much more human … and I suppose more in tune with why I’ve been in tears all afternoon. What I hope it captures is a kind of impish fascination with what might be possible, or a bit of his wit and humor, or the sheer intellectual rigor that sat behind it all, or the uncanny, almost sage-like ability to, with the smallest, simplest acts, completely reposition how we perceive the world around us.
His ability to change what might be possible came from his approach to life. Open, curious, honest, unassuming, playful, meticulous, generous—his work gets us to reexamine how we listen, how we perceive, in part because he was so thoroughly engaged with the joy of living.
I owe my relationship to Peter to Evan Johnson. When we were both still students in Buffalo, I was at Evan and Genie’s house—I think it was probably an informal dinner party—and there was some music on in the background that I found utterly intolerable. Unceasing, unforgiving, a strange cacophonous stack of repeating octaves and descending diatonic scales on what seemed like a room-full of pianos. I eventually lost my patience with it and said, “Evan, seriously, can you turn this off?!” He went to the CD player, hit eject, and said, “Sure, but only if you promise to go home and listen to it all the way through,” as he put the disc into the case and handed it to me.
I’ve told that story many times. I especially like telling it to my students, because the point of the anecdote is that Peter’s music was the first music I’d heard in many, many years that I didn’t know what to do with. I didn’t know what box to put it in. I didn’t know how to listen to it. I took Evan’s advice, went home, listened to it … and still didn’t know what to make of the piece, so then listened to it again … and still didn’t quite know what to make of it. But I found that uncertainty and discomfort really quite enticing, so I started digging, and the more I dug, the more fascinated I got. That eventually led to a bit of an obsession with his work. I started teaching it whenever I had the chance, and when I was working at Northwestern University and running the little new music concert series a few years later, I had the chance to program a few pieces, which is how Peter and I started sharing the occasional email back and forth. He’d also periodically send me stacks of scores and printouts of articles he’d written … a version, I suppose, of what would eventually become his extraordinary archive of a website.
Five or six years later, when I was on the staff at Huddersfield, we had an unusual opportunity to hire a Visiting Research Professor for a five-year appointment. A few initial names had emerged that fell through for one reason or another, and—I’ll never forget this—by chance I was in the photocopy room with my friend and colleague Monty Adkins, who was the Research Director at the time for the music department, and he filled me in on the current state of the job search. He started floating some possible additional names, none of which were of particular interest to me, and he asked me if I had any ideas of other possible applicants. Without blinking, I said, “If I could hire anyone, I’d hire Peter Ablinger.” Monty replied, “Do you know him?” “Yeah, a bit.” “Could you contact him and see if he’d be interested?” Which I did, right away … and which is how, after some pretty comical hoop-jumping (among other things, I personally rewrote Peter’s CV to make it palatable to the university’s senior administrators, and I had to create a hypothetical ‘Research Excellence Framework’ submission for him, which included trying to figure out a way to submit the Landscape Opera to be assessed by a panel of academics (“Do we have to submit the actual trees or would a photo be enough?”)), I ended up getting to work alongside him for five of my 15 years at Huddersfield. (One of my proudest moments in those 15 years was watching Peter present Wachstum und Massenmord to those senior administrators, all in a row, clad in their charcoal suits in one of our little music classrooms, during his nominal pro forma ‘interview’. You couldn’t wipe the grin from my face.)
A year or so later, I took over the Research Director role from Monty, which led to some pretty amazing opportunities for various projects with Peter, including a few terrific extended workshops with the students, a few recording projects, and, eventually, the translation and publication of a fairly significant portion of his writings into English, which we helped fund and support. But more than that, he shifted from a larger-than-life artist whose work I deeply admired to, simply, my friend. When Peyee and I moved to Berlin a few years ago, one of the very first items on our to-do list was to go visit him at his workshop, not so far from our new home (where he gleefully demonstrated the first stages of what eventually became this utter gem of a piece).
In my new role in Hannover, it’s been a priority for me to introduce Peter’s work not only to my students but also to the Hannover community more generally. We did a wonderful little collaborative four-event project with the local Volkshochschule, which included a seminar on Peter’s music led by three of my students. (The session included a few impromptu performances of some of the pieces from the Weiss/Weisslich series, and I absolutely loved seeing the participants—just interested non-musicians from the area—suddenly start to become aware of their own act of listening.) The project culminated in a terrific performance by Erik Drescher of Peter’s Covid-era piece Wider die Natur, a typically ambitious, sprawling work in 59 movements for something like 150 flutes. And this year’s Klangbrücken Festival, which starts a week from today in Hannover, includes a concert by Ensemble Incontri that I’ve curated, which features a few pieces of Peter’s, both in the concert and in an installation that will run in the lobby before and after our concerts. The theme of the festival is “Geträumte Revolutionen.” It seemed an ideal match. Although I knew it would be unlikely, I’d hoped Peter might be able to join us for Erik’s concert. And I have to admit, I programmed those pieces for Klangbrücken thinking that we would be able to introduce Peter to the Klangbrücken audiences while he was still with us. Instead, the concert will be dedicated to his memory.
When I got the news earlier today of Peter’s death, in the midst of the sadness and tears, I felt an overwhelming need to do something, anything, to acknowledge the situation, to acknowledge the loss, to make at least an initial memorial to a person I really cared very deeply about. So I … went for an ice cream cone. It’s suddenly very warm and summery here in Berlin, and it was somehow the perfect thing. A small gesture, simple but full of joy, an opportunity to simply enjoy being outdoors, connected to the world, and a chance to stroll slowly and quietly and think. Peyee describes that aspect of Peter as ‘rigorous joy’, and I can’t think of a better way to describe his incredible, beautiful contribution to this world.
I will miss him deeply.