>> Marcus Schmickler
bio: Positioning the rhenish polystylist and Brüsseler Platz 10a-musician isn’t easy. Next to C-Schulz (Pol)? As a latter-day Krautrocker next to Jackie Liebezeit (Pluramon)? Next to Keith Rowe and John Tilbury (Mimeo)? As a fresh improviser next to Thomas Lehn (Bart, Rabbit Run)? As an electronics engineer from Cologne – and hence heir apparent to Stockhausen (Sator Rotas)? Ever since his invitation to the Wittener Tage für Neue Kammermusik 1999, his reception of the Bernd-Alois-Zimmermann-grant from the city of Cologne in 2001 or the subsidy award of North Rhine-Westphalia in 2002, but definitely since Param, his seven, mostly minimalist-droning exercises in contemporary “serious” music, Schmickler – similarly to Michael Wertmüller – seems to regard the legacy of Ligeti, Scelsi, Schnebel and Xenakis as worthy of emulation. With Demos he now presents – choir music. Besides “O” and the excerpt “Rache ist des Willens Widerwille“ – the former written for a performance of Maria Stuart, the latter for a presentation “Die Räuber” (thus being Schmickler’s contribution to the “Schiller year”) – it is the title track which turns out to be an intoxicating and grand main work. This allusion to drugs is legitimate, since the subject matter was provided by the “Ewige Wiederkunft des Gleichen” (“the eternal recurrence of all things”), Nietzsches grand da capo, and the “Trunkenes Lied” (“drunken song”) from the Zarathsutra – his yearning for convalescence and metamorphosis into the “singende Seele” (“singing soul”) with new songs and new lyres. Transformation from the dionysian spirit of music, rite of passage for everyone and no one. In a flaring and clashing orgy of recitative and declamation, Schmickler condenses the desire lying dormant in all of us (stimulated by the satyr-chorus and the “swelling goat-song”) to revoke the “Culturmensch”, as Nietzsche put it. “[S]tate and society, in fact all that separated man from man, gave way before an overwhelming sense of unity which led back into the heart of nature. The metaphysical solace—… that, despite every phenomenal change life is at bottom indestructibly joyful and powerful, was expressed most concretely in the chorus of satyrs, beings of nature who dwell behind all civilization and preserve their identity through every change of generations and historical movement.” Nietzsche regarded the Greek tragedy as an ingenious mechanism which on one level exposed failure as a brutal truth but on a second level (the Dionysian choir) celebrated this failure as an “instinct of freedom” and a will to sovereignty. Thus the tragedy served the „Ja-schaffenden Gewalten des Lebens“ („affirming forces of live“) under the premise of “stop[ping] courageously at the surface, the fold, the skin, to adore appearance, to believe in forms, tones, words, in the whole Olympus of appearance”, yet not supplanting the real world in this process, but suspending it. Thus, “appearance” does not stand in contrast to “being” but to lie and self-deception. The choir does not represent “us”, but the indifference of Thanatos and Eros. In short: Cioran makes you merry, Verdi nurtures your animal spirits. Even shorter: All Blues. Schmickler lets his Zarathustra “singspeak” in a mixture of English and German. He also sounds completely non-wagnerian, because Demos – in keeping with Nietzsche – is totally dramatic and appellative. This tumult rather reminds one of revolution operas, of Henze and B.A. Zimmermann. It is only in the background of the dominant, but at no time striving to be intelligible web of quotations that associations to Ligeti’s Lux Eterna, Berio’s Coro or Nono’s Prometeo can be faintly discerned as will-o’-the wisps. “But wilt thou not weep, wilt thou not weep forth thy purple melancholy, then wilt thou have to SING, O my soul!- […] Thou wilt have to sing with passionate song, until all seas turn calm to hearken unto thy longing -.” advanced by skilful, carefully calculated manipulations. Marcus Schmickler’s work has contributed to these developments in that he never pins himself down, but is always ready to rise to the challenge of cutting-edge sound. Of a later generation than the founders of the Cologne School, now in his own way he is transforming it and taking it forwards. .
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