OTTO VOKAL - SYSTEME, TONBEARBEITUNGEN 1971/72
(DOM EK 019) 8cm CD

(limited edition: 100 copies)

Otto Vokal’s starting point is the consideration that, in suppressing the creativity and novelty of actual musical experience, the abstraction of analysis misrepresents music’s temporal nature.

What Vokal is trying to do is to take this temporal nature into account, and to find "ways of speaking of music’s very evanescence and thus of developing concepts that would capture both the determinacy and the indeterminacy of events in passage.

He acknowledges a discrepancy in using the word rhythm between a non-musical and a musical language, even though the central notion of what we call rhythm is the same: the notion of regular repetition. In non-musical language we call rhythm the regular alternation of seasons, the ticking of a clock, even the rhythm of life, from birth to death. Every phenomenon that presents a periodicity in its becoming is called rhythmic. But “we can use the word rhythm to characterize phenomena in which periodicity is not apparent: a fluid gesture of the hand, a still life, the course of a narrative, the "shape” of a musical phrase.

For the first time available to the public: Otto Vokal’s secret “DDR” compositions from 1971/72.