[ISEA2011] Panel: Georg Hajdu – Real-time Com­po­si­tion, Real-time no­ta­tion, Spec­tral Com­po­si­tion

Panel Statement

Panel:  Chasing Ghosts: Reactive Notation and Extreme Sight Reading

Schwer…un­heim­lich schwer (dif­fi­cult…in­cred­i­ble dif­fi­cult) is a piece for bass clar­inet, viola, piano and per­cus­sion about Ger­man Red Army Fac­tion mem­ber Ul­rike Mein­hof. It zooms into the mo­ment when she, in a TV in­ter­view, talks pub­licly about the fate of po­lit­i­cally ac­tive women and ex­presses the pos­si­bil­ity of leav­ing her chil­dren in order to pur­sue her in­ter­ests. In this piece, based on the tran­scrip­tion of Mein­hof’s speech and com­posed in real time by a com­puter (send­ing parts onto com­puter screens), the dif­fi­culty of ex­treme sight-read­ing, in­clud­ing mi­cro­tones and large leaps for viola and clar­inet as well as com­plex har­monies for marimba and piano, con­veys a sense of the dilemma that Mein­hof is clearly ex­pe­ri­enc­ing. The real-time com­po­si­tion was done with MaxS­core, a com­po­si­tion and no­ta­tion en­vi­ron­ment de­vel­oped by Nick Did­kovsky and the au­thor.

  • Georg Hajdu was born in Göttin­gen, Ger­many in 1960. He is among the first com­posers of his gen­er­a­tion ded­i­cated to the com­bi­na­tion of music, sci­ence and com­puter tech­nol­ogy. After stud­ies in Cologne and at the Cen­ter for New Music and Audio Tech­nolo­gies (CNMAT), he re­ceived his PhD from UC Berke­ley. In 1996, fol­low­ing res­i­den­cies at IRCAM and the ZKM, Karl­sruhe, he co-founded the en­sem­ble Wire­Works with his wife Jen­nifer Hymer, a group spe­cial­iz­ing in the per­for­mance of elec­tro-acoustic music. Georg Hajdu has pub­lished ar­ti­cles on sev­eral top­ics on the bor­der­line of music and sci­ence. His areas of in­ter­est in­clude mul­ti­me­dia, mi­cro­tonal­ity, al­go­rith­mic, in­ter­ac­tive and net­worked com­po­si­tion. Cur­rently, Georg Hajdu is pro­fes­sor of mul­ti­me­dia com­po­si­tion at the Ham­burg School of Music and The­ater.