music Archives - Page 8 of 13 - understand-culture

The Hidden Orchestra

In the Festspielhaus in Bayreuth, the audience cannot see the orchestra. The pit is covered. It is called the mystischer Abgrund, the mystic abyss. Among opera houses, the hidden pit is unique to Bayreuth. The festival was first held in 1876.

The festival’s own magazine explains why. Richard Wagner wanted the Mühe der Tonerzeugung, the effort of producing the sound, to remain invisible. The musicians were not to be seen by the audience, and no light from the pit was to reach the auditorium. The listener should fall under the spell of the music ohne jegliche Ablenkung, without any distraction.

Stand-Ins for the Band

In May 1978 the German band Kraftwerk released the album Die Mensch-Maschine, The Man-Machine. The band members had life-size mannequins of themselves made by Obermaier, a mannequin maker in Munich. Each one cost 4,000 marks.

The dummies were on show at the album’s launch in Paris, at a nightclub on the 56th floor of the Montparnasse Tower. In later concerts, robots made to look like the musicians at times replaced them on stage.

The Ceiling Went Up Five Meters

The renovation of the State Opera Unter den Linden in Berlin was planned to take three years and cost 239 million euros. It took seven years and cost about 400 million euros.

At the request of music director Daniel Barenboim, the ceiling of the hall was raised by five meters. A new gallery under the ceiling raised the reverberation time from 1.1 to 1.6 seconds. The house reopened on 3 October 2017.

Barenboim said: Ich bin erstaunt, wie hervorragend der Klang geworden ist. I am amazed at how excellent the sound has become. He also said: Natürlich wäre es besser gewesen, wie geplant nach drei Jahren wieder zu öffnen. Of course it would have been better to reopen after three years, as planned.

The Wire-Mesh Fence

In 1999 Regina Zindler of Auerbach in Saxony took a dispute with her neighbor to Richterin Barbara Salesch, a court show on the channel Sat.1. It was about a snowberry bush, a Knallerbsenstrauch, at her Maschendrahtzaun, her wire-mesh fence. Her claim was dismissed.

Stefan Raab made a song out of her Saxon pronunciation of the word. Maschendrahtzaun spent six weeks at number one in the German charts. Fans besieged her property, stole parts of the fence and damaged her house. She moved to Berlin and returned to Saxony only years later.

Musicians With Patents

In an interview with the magazine Musikexpress in December 1976, Ralf Hütter and Florian Schneider of Kraftwerk talked about their instruments. Alle Instrumente, die wir mit unseren Ingenieuren entwickelt haben, sind patentiert. All the instruments we have developed with our engineers are patented. They wanted to produce them in series and sell them. They had also built an electronic flute themselves, which they called their magic flute.

The Organ of 1693

Arp Schnitger built the organ of the Church of St. Jacobi in Hamburg in 1693. It is the largest surviving Baroque organ in northern Europe. It has more than 4,000 pipes, and some of them are older than Schnitger’s work. A thorough restoration was completed in 1993, and the organ is played regularly.

In December 2017 UNESCO recognized German organ building and organ music as intangible cultural heritage. More than 50,000 organs are in use in Germany. About 400 workshops with about 2,800 employees build and care for them.

Composition From the Overtone Series

In 1937 the publisher Schott in Mainz brought out the theoretical part of Paul Hindemith’s Unterweisung im Tonsatz, instruction in composition. Hindemith based his theory on one acoustic fact, the overtone series. From it he derived an order of the tones and an order of the intervals by their tension.

Tonic, Subdominant, Dominant

In 1893 Hugo Riemann published his Vereinfachte Harmonielehre, simplified harmony. He traced the chords of a key back to three functions: Tonika, Dominante and Subdominante, written T, D and S. Each chord is read as a form of one of the three.

Riemann’s function theory is still used to teach harmony in German-speaking countries. A sample exam in music theory, published by the University of Music and Theatre in Rostock for applicants to music teacher training, asks for voice leading such as D7 – T, and for an extended cadence with secondary functions.

The Trial Shot in Der Freischütz

Carl Maria von Weber’s opera Der Freischütz had its premiere in Berlin on 18 June 1821. The libretto is by Friedrich Kind. The young hunter Max wants to marry Agathe and become the successor of the hereditary forester, the Erbförster. For this he must pass a Probeschuss, a trial shot. If he misses, he cannot marry Agathe. At a shooting contest, Max does not hit the target a single time, and the onlookers mock him.

He then agrees to meet the hunter Kaspar at midnight in the Wolf’s Glen to cast Freikugeln, magic bullets. At the end, a hermit speaks for Max. He argues for abolishing the trial shot. Instead, he proposes a Probejahr for Max, a probationary year, so that Max can find his way back to the path of virtue. The prince accepts his judgment.

The Permit for Rock am Ring

In June 2016, the festival Rock am Ring took place on the airfield at Mendig. On the Friday evening, lightning injured a total of 71 people, according to the Red Cross. The organizers interrupted the festival after a crisis meeting with the interior minister of Rhineland-Palatinate, Roger Lewentz. Wir müssen alles dafür tun, dass keine neuen Verletzten hinzukommen, Lewentz said. We must do everything so that no more people are injured.

Because another storm was expected for Sunday afternoon, the Verbandsgemeinde, the local association of municipalities, then withdrew the organizers’ permit to continue the festival. About 90,000 visitors had come. The concert promoter Marek Lieberberg spoke of höhere Gewalt, an act of God. He accused Lewentz of having pushed the responsibility for the cancellation onto the municipality. A spokesman for the interior ministry replied that Lewentz had already demanded that the event be stopped the day before.