Stanislaw Hansel
Composer and teacher of music in and around PeterboroughOne way to look at my compositional work is to see it as a stimulus for music.
I am very interested in using notes to create tensions and in setting them off against each other but with the outcome that the music becomes a mental experience for the audience. Most of my work is very soft and employs high, staccatissimo notes, almost as if one was trying to dissemble a poem through tissue paper.
Since the mid 1980’s I have been using psychological techniques to make something creative happen for the listener. I began using sequences of sound elements which in themselves could bring about an expectation for the next value of note in the sequence. By using basic techniques of condition and reflex ( conditioning through signal-like sounds ) I have been able to compose pieces which hold ,I believe, their own interest. I call my sequences ‘forcefields’ since they are composed to create a musical force. There is a more detailed account of my approach on this website.
Once the power of musical forcefields was clear to me I needed to further amplify their mental effect. Clearly ,musical force is at its strongest when freshly manifested and I found it necessary to find a way to refresh the energies of my music as the piece went along .To this end I use passages which are not related at all to previous material . These passages are usually very soft and staccatissimo; I see these as being ‘suitably irrelevant’ in order to enhance the force of the preceding music. This is a technique I have borrowed from the psychologist de Bono who coined the term ‘lateral thinking’. Just as the mind seems often in daily life to solve ongoing problems when the person is thinking about something unrelated, my irrelevant passages are there to enhance the previous music.
This structure is one I have tried to incorporate into an unfinished symphony which has proved impossible to perform as there proved to be too little guidance within each part to keep together enough. It is a concept I am still working on – how to write my kind of music for larger forces. (I wonder if this is akin to the difficulty some of the avant-garde composers in the mid twentieth century had when trying to write for orchestra? ). Gradually, I found a way to open up some of the staccatissimo notes. For this I use the concept of micro music. Briefly, micro music presents a lot of musical information within a very short time span. They are mini forcefields in their own right and usually, because the notes are staccatissimo, played quite high. I found after a while that it was possible to slow some elements within micro music down or, even, speed them up. My Micro Sonata ( 1996 ) for piano was a full length piece in four movements exploring such techniques. In this work the performer is expected to differentiate between notes down to 1/32 fractions of a crotchet! This is an ideal and a live performer can only attempt these kinds of durations after working on them. In effect these durations amount to different levels of unevenness of note length. When 2 or more notes are played almost together the effect may be that of someone trying to play notes perfectly together but who can not quite manage it. Working like this gives the work both tension and a certain vagueness of effect which I find appealing. The combination results in a tightness to the structure.
By writing in four movements I discovered a very interesting thing which applies right through to the earliest multi movement sonatas in history. I could see the first movement as setting up the fundamental musical tensions and the subsequent movements, being musically largely or completely irrelevant, as lateral thinking upon both the first movement to enhance its tensions. Further, it became apparent that, not only did the fourth movement of a sonata or symphony actually amplify the musical forces of the first movement in this way, but it was also amplifying the musical forces of the preceding movements.
One of my techniques requires further explanation. For years I found myself unable to write the music I wanted to but I could feel the tensions. I found that by using notes of fractional duration there were strong possibilities.I would write a series such as 1/5, 1/3, 1/6, 1/5, 1/4 .Playing these accurately is very difficult – especially when I expanded the list to minute proportions. Having said this, the desired effect was developing well. I also use brief passages which work upwards, as if pointing to some very high note which can only be implied . These passages are usually played accelerando. Such passages are then used again downwards in the dewind sections of my forcefields in decelerando mode.
© Stanislaw Hansel 14.01.07