Hans Wüthrich

The music of Swiss composer Hans Wüthrich (1937-2019) is as unusual as his career itself. In addition to his work as a composer, Wüthrich was a linguist, a teacher, a performer of his own work, and the founder of an ensemble specialized in musical theater. He continually asked questions that pushed outside the borders of music as a strictly defined field. His catalogue contains only around twenty pieces, most of which drew inspiration from extramusical content or formal models — more specifically, from linguistics, the visual arts, or the sciences. Wüthrich used music to frame individuals’ existential circumstances in their relations with contemporary society.

He described his stage pieces either as “Musiktheater” (his term for his Happy Hour cycle), or simply as “scenes” (the Leve cycle). Otherwise, he described his television production of Das Glashaus as an “operetta in seven acts.” This article will use “musical theater” in the broad sense of that term to encompass all of these different concepts.

The organization of society and language

Wüthrich’s work has two main preoccupations: the organization of society, and language. He brought these two elements together early on, in one of his first musical theater pieces, Das Glashaus (1974-1975). In it, extremely hierarchical relationships govern the interactions of seven characters as they struggle to maintain their positions or to climb the rungs of the power hierarchy. This hierarchy is symbolized in the stage set composed of platforms of different heights. The characters express themselves in an imaginary phonetic language inspired by Suitbert Ertel’s theory of psychophonetics: the quality of the sounds produced reflects the psychology and more specifically the dominant or submissive nature of each character. The work ends as it begins; although the characters have changed position in the hierarchy, its power structures are maintained.

The pessimism of Das Glashaus finds its opposite in the musical utopia Wüthrich created in Netz-werk I, II and III (1982-1989), three works for orchestra without a conductor. The first Netz-werk relies on a network of interdependence among groups of chamber musicians. In the second, two ideas interact spatially and musically, moving from one instrument to another in the orchestra. In Netz-werk III, instrumental groups coexist more freely. The audience, seated above the orchestra, is able to perceive the spatial and visual dimensions of the piece as they follow the interactions among the members of the orchestra. While no language or vocals are used in the Netz-werk pieces, communication and listening among the performers remain central elements in their performance. Their interactions are used to represent the utopian ideal of a society without hierarchies. Communication and listening thus link the domains of language and social organization we have already evoked.

The idea of representing communication models in music was earlier at the heart of Kommunikationsspiele from 1973. This “concept piece” is built on the idea of “communication play,” including dialogues, orders given and followed, arguments, and alliances formed within a group. The piece can be performed freely by musicians or non-musicians.

The influence of the events of May 1968 becomes visible in these examples of utopias or dystopias as they criticize hierarchies and advocate for the democratization of art, as well as more broadly in Wüthrich’s work from the 1970s and early 1980s. From 1967 to 1973, Wüthrich studied German literature and linguistics, philosophy, and musicology. His graduation thesis proposed classifying German consonants based on the statistical analysis of hearing tests.

From 1968 to 1972, Wüthrich also studied composition with Klaus Huber. By his own recollection, what he retained above anything else from these studies was an approach that “goes to the bottom of things.”¹ Wüthrich applied his teacher’s methods both in his own writing and in his teaching. Swiss composer and improvisor Alfred Zimmerlin, who was one of his students, remembers that Wüthrich possessed the art of asking questions until a project was clear in all of its consequences.² In Wüthrich’s work, specific concepts translate this same attitude. The many facets of phenomena both musical and extramusical are taken into account during the process of creation.

Later, as a professor of phonetics and phonemics at the Universities of Basel and Zurich, and of music theory at the University of Winterthur, Wüthrich described his teaching as simply a way to earn a living while continuing his composition work.³ But music and linguistics crisscross through his compositions, and Wüthrich often cited contemporary music as a field of application for his dissertation work.⁴ For example, in Wörter Bilder Dinge (1989-1991) and Ogott (1992), consonants glide into one another based on their auditory similarity. In the latter, which is part of the musical theater cycle Leve (1992), the interjection “O Gott!” is progressively transformed into the noun group “a dog.” Here again, Wüthrich uses irony to defy authority, with a subtle nod to the end of Ernst Jandl’s poem ottos mops.

Wüthrich never set his chosen texts to music simply. Even in a piece with classical instrumentation, such as Walser Arabien (2002), for soprano and piano, fragments of Robert Walser’s poem are only to be thought of by the singer, displayed in the score, or performed optionally.

Such text treatments are more pronounced in Wörter Bilder Dinge (1989-1991), for alto and string quartet. Wüthrich took passages from the Convention on the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms, translated them into hieroglyphs, and then re-transcribed them into four European languages. The singer slowly vocalizes these “word images” within the drawn-out tempo of the piece.

Wüthrich drew his inspiration from texts from very different eras, languages, and styles. For example, excerpts from the counterculture publication Whole Earth Catalogue, poems by Heinrich Heine, and modern French theater monologues (excerpts from Jean Anouilh, Henry de Montherlant, and Jean-Paul Sartre) all find a place in the musical theater cycle Happy Hour (1994-1997). Whatever the source he had chosen, Wüthrich created distance from it, often with humor: the romantic poem is read backward; the four French monologues are layered over each other, and silences interrupt their dramatic impact.

To conclude this overview of Wüthrich’s use of language, it should be noted that language also influenced or infiltrated his instrumental music, either linguistically as a grammatical model, or as a model of vocal sounds. For example, in Wörter Bilder Dinge, the formants of the vocal part are recognizable in the chords of the string quartet. To compose Procuste deux étoiles (1980-1981, for orchestra and tape), Wüthrich first recorded vocal improvisations in order to analyze and transcribe them for the instruments.⁵

“The Wüthrich spirit”

Wüthrich’s works are often seen as individual, carefully developed pieces, each shaped by precise ideas over a long period of time — which helps explain why he wrote relatively few of them. Rather than developing a consistent style, he approached each work on its own terms.⁶ Zimmerlin said there is more a “Wüthrich spirit” than a “Wüthrich style.”⁷ Among the defining traits of this spirit are social and political sensibility; an effective sense of theater; an artistic approach at once human, communicative, and local; and, according to those who knew him, a particular form of attention in the way he listened, asked questions, and offered criticism. Even if there are no fixed constants, certain tendencies and themes recur in his music — particularly his approach to time, listening, and conceptual thinking.

Wüthrich played with different understandings of time that dovetailed or sometimes overlapped with one another. The string quartet Annäherung an Gegenwart (1986-1987) features a succession of musical ideas that seek to “approach the present,” as the title indicates, by deliberately avoiding development or repetition. The two musical theater cycles Leve and Happy Hour began similarly, with several pieces written over the same period and put together to form fairly heterogeneous cycles. In Chopin im TGV Basel-Paris, die Sonne betrachtend (1989, for flute, violin, and piano) Wüthrich was inspired by relationships between the speeds of different bodies and objects — within the human body, the high-speed train, the earth rotating around the sun — and the music’s tempo — an Anton Rubinstein performance of Chopin. He imitates a wide range of electronic time-based manipulations, including time stretching, reverse playback, and freeze effects, which he recreates in his musical theater as well as in his instrumental pieces.

In an essay on listening to contemporary music, Wüthrich points out that while composers generally describe how their work should be played, they rarely say anything about how it should be listened to.⁸ A few years earlier, in 1979, Wüthrich had written a piece in which he approached musical composition backward, starting with listening. Singende Schnecke (The Singing Snail, the snail being a reference to the spiral form of the cochlea, a part of the inner ear) invites listeners to activate their inner ear and extend the sounds they hear. The idea of listening as a form of communication has already been evoked and illustrated in this essay through works such as Netz-werk I, II and III and Kommunikationsspiele.

Wüthrich experimented with another form of dialogue and listening in Brigitte F. (1978) and Procuste deux étoiles (1980-81). Both of these pieces were written for and with people at the margins of society, in an effort to “compose with another me.”⁹ This meant listening through other ears and encountering different stylistic tastes. When Brigitte F. premiered at the Donaueschingen Festival, its experimentation with documentary theater and realism elicited mixed reactions.¹⁰ For the composer Mathias Spahlinger, Procuste deux étoiles renewed the question of how music might convey a specific emotion or personal story — an approach that many composers in the second half of the twentieth century tended to view with skepticism.¹¹ When listening to the piece, it is important to consider the shift in perspective these works introduced: they invite the audience to hear them in relation to the context in which they were written.

Concepts, as well as context, are also central to Wüthrich’s work. In a radio appearance, he pointed to the preeminence of concepts and innovative ideas in the personal composition styles of John Cage, Alvin Lucier, Manos Tsangaris, Peter Ablinger, and Dieter Schnebel.¹² A similar tendency can be seen in his own work, particularly in the range of performance possibilities his concepts allow. Singende Schnecke, for example, can be a concert piece or an installation, while Brigitte F. and Procuste deux étoiles are actually two possible performances of Genossin Cäcilia, a concept he developed several years earlier, in 1976. The string quartet Annäherung an Gegenwart was performed in a version titled Landschaft mit Streichquartetten, a “landscape performance” for twelve string quartets dispersed across the countryside at the Festival Rümlingen. In several ways, Das Glashaus is a detailed and more developed realization of the concept behind Kommunikationsspiele.

This multiplicity of possible realizations should not be mistaken for performative freedom, however. Wüthrich’s works are characterized either by extremely precise and restrictive writing, or by openness and risk-taking — but only rarely by an intermediate approach that combines the two. Even when the compositional process is open and experimental, the resulting score often imposes strict constraints on the outcome.

This article will close with two other aspects of Wüthrich’s work: several of his later chamber music pieces, which are specifically selected here for their relationship to electronic music, and his works of musical theater.

Toward chamber music

To date, Wüthrich’s late chamber music compositions have received the least comment of any of his works. Little is yet known about the linguistic models and extramusical content on which these early twenty-first century works were based. Wüthrich began using real-time electronics only in his last two pieces, Peripherie und Mitte (2009-2011) and Strange Mental Fields (2016). Before that, he used tape; for example, in Procuste deux étoiles, he used it to capture and transmit reality from a stylized documentary perspective. In Wüthrich’s two final chamber music pieces, the electronics have a different function: to collect and accumulate the sounds recorded during performance. The music culminates in tumultuous final movements in which the performers cease playing and listen. This approach is in no way a pompous finale; rather, it evokes a loss of control, the closed circuit of memory, oppression, and the intensifying and, indeed, exacerbating effect of combinatory processes.

In Peripherie und Mitte, two percussionists each play a cymbal and, in a section at the end of the piece, a gong. The electronics expand this very limited base material, combining it to create a dense and immersive sound world. The effect becomes even more striking when the performers move the microphones just above the cymbals, subtly shaping the sound.

According to Moritz Müllenbach, who commissioned the piece, Strange Mental Fields (for violin, viola, cello, double bass, and live electronics) is one of Wüthrich’s most personal compositions. In it, he sought to represent the way thoughts and memory function, at a time when the first symptoms of his own Alzheimer’s disease were beginning to appear.¹³ The piece has three distinct sections, each of which explores an idea, a character, or a mode of instrumental play. The section titles evoke existential states: scattered or chaotic thoughts, audible silences, fragility or suffocation (evoked by playing techniques such as brushing over strings, or, to the contrary, pressing down hard on them). The piece ends in a moment of grace titled simply schön (beautiful), just before the electronics spill over with all of the sounds recorded during the piece’s performance.

Musical theater “beyond the territory of music”¹⁴

Several of Wüthrich’s concert pieces incorporate staged, communicative, documentary, or oratory elements that bring them close to musical theater. He made his most significant contribution to the genre, however, in three works: Das Glashaus and the cycles Leve and Happy Hour. Lightness and language play characterize Leve (in Portuguese, the word means “light” in the sense of “lightness”), while Wüthrich’s characteristic use of humor takes a darker turn in Happy Hour.

The final scene of Happy Hour is the most striking in scale. Set at a cocktail party, it features eleven guests, a server, and a bartender, who speak and move in distinct phases. Over the course of a quarter hour, moments of action alternate with stretches of silence and stillness, as if the audience were watching a video being paused and resumed. During the final phases of action, the server — acting in collusion with the bartender, who places a pistol on their tray — shoots the panicked guests. (Wüthrich employed inclusive language in his written instructions in order to avoid assigning a gender to most of the characters and performers of his pieces.)

In Happy Hour, as in other works, Wüthrich plays with speed, reading directions, and interruptions, as well as with clearly legible geometric staging. He frequently structures movement along vertical and horizontal axes, diagonals, and pendulum-like swings. For example, in O miseria umana — the first piece in the Happy Hour cycle — a crescendo of objects cascade from the theater’s fly loft, beginning with a light dusting of powder and ending with massive objects such as bathtubs and refrigerators. The score extends this crescendo into the audience’s imagination by listing even larger objects — cars, cannons, shipping containers — that could, in theory, be dropped from above in an open-air performance. The piece was directly inspired by a drawing and text by Leonardo da Vinci, in which he criticizes human dependence on material possessions. Transposed into the twentieth century, it becomes a critique of consumer society.

While his work nods to the instrumental theater of Mauricio Kagel, which perhaps is the closest parallel to his own approach, Wüthrich nevertheless distinguished himself from it. In a 1977 interview, he underlined the fact that his creations (referring here to Das Glashaus) were not intended as deconstructions of musical gesture meant only for other musicians.¹⁵ Instead, he envisioned a much broader role for his work, reflecting his sensitivity to the post-1968 impulse to democratize art.

This vision was inseparable from the Ensemble Mixt Media Basel, which he founded in 1974 and whose history remains to be written. His wife, singer and flutist Béatrice Mathez, was one of its early and foundational members.

Wüthrich’s music, and in particular his musical theater, had a lasting influence on later generations of composers, including Daniel Ott¹⁶ and Annette Schmucki.¹⁷ According to pianist, director, and teacher Pierre Sublet, Wüthrich belongs in the canon of the leading composers of musical theater, alongside Mauricio Kagel, Vinko Globokar, and Georges Aperghis.¹⁸

Sublet suggests that if Wüthrich’s pieces are performed less often than those of his peers, it is because of the complexity of his writing and the demands of his scenography (coordinating movements and visual elements with the music, memorization, rehearsal time, and budget). These constraints reflect the precision and commitment with which Wüthrich approached the composition of each piece in his oeuvre.

^{1. Hans WÜTHRICH, “Den Dingen auf den Grund gehen,” in Dossier Klaus Huber, Bern, Zytglogge Verlag, 1989, p. 103. ↩}

^{2. Alfred ZIMMERLIN, “zutiefst human, politisch engagiert und existentiell,” Musiktexte 161, May 2019, p. 49. ↩}

^{3. Gisela NAUCK, “Zwei Minuten gegen das Vergessen. Der Schweizer Komponist Hans Wüthrich - ein Porträt,” in Musikwissenschaft zwischen Kunst, Aesthetik und Experiment. Festschrift Helga de la Motte-Haber zum 60. Geburtstag, Würzburg, Königshausen & Neumann, 1998, p. 395. ↩}

^{4. Hans WÜTHRICH, Das Konsonantensystem der deutschen Hochsprache, Berlin, De Gruyter, 1974, p. 92. ↩}

^{5. Hans WÜTHRICH, “einholen – betroffen sein – ausholen – treffen,” Musiktexte 161, Mai 2019, p. 64 [Originally published as a lecture manuscript in Interface I-2, 1983, p. 429–432]. ↩}

^{6. Thomas MEYER, “Idealerweise ist bereits der erste Einfall multimedial: Zum Musiktheater von Hans Wüthrich,” Musiktexte 161, May 2019, p. 65 [Originally published in Dissonance 60, May 1999, 24-29]. ↩}

^{7. Alfred ZIMMERLIN, radio interview with Cécile Olshausen, “‘Verstreute Gedanken’ – zum 80. Geburtstag von Hans Wüthrich," broadcast 27.12.2017, SRF 2 Kultur, Musik unserer Zeit, https://www.srf.ch/play/radio/musik-unserer-zeit/audio/verstreute-gedanken---zum-80--geburtstag-von-hans-wuethrich?id=483a5b5b-0eca-4b0d-b033-16c535d235a6&startTime=1.525079, link verified 19 September 2020, 18'45''. ↩}

^{8. Hans WÜTHRICH, “Mit oder ohne Leim. Zum Hören von Zusammenhang in der neuen Musik,” Musiktheorie 3, 1987, p. 248. ↩}

^{9. Hans WÜTHRICH, “einholen – betroffen sein – ausholen – treffen,” p. 64. ↩}

^{10. ZIMMERLIN, radio interview with Olshausen, 11'45''. ↩}

^{11. Mathias SPAHLINGER, “Veruneinheitlichende Ideen. über Hans Wüthrich,” Musiktexte 161, May 2019, p. 73 [Original radio program by Bernd Künzig, Composer’s composer — Mathias Spahlinger über Hans Wüthrich, SWR2, broadcast 17.05.2010]. ↩}

^{12. Hans WÜHTHRICH, radio interview with Carolin Naujocks, "Mich fasziniert der Aspekt des Möglichen“ Carolin Naujocks im Gespräch mit Hans Wüthrich", produced in 2000, DeutschlandRadio Berlin, www.deutschlandfunkkultur.de/hans-wuethrich-ueber-die-musik-der-zukunft-mich-fasziniert.3819.de.html?dram:article_id=455119, link verified 19 September 2020. ↩}

^{13. Moritz MÜLLENBACH, radio interview with Cécile Olshausen, “‘Verstreute Gedanken’– zum 80. Geburtstag von Hans Wüthrich,” 48'45''. ↩}

^{14. Wüthrich uses the expression “über den Bereich des Musiklebens hinaus” in Jürg ERNI, “Machtstrukturen zeigen: NZ-Gespräch mit dem Komponisten Hans Wüthrich,” in National Zeitung Basel, 21 January 1977, p. 30. ↩}

^{15. ERNI, “Machtstrukturen zeigen: NZ-Gespräch mit dem Komponisten Hans Wüthrich.” ↩}

^{16. Daniel OTT, “Gesellschaftliche und linguistische Fragestellungen,” Musiktexte 161, May 2019, p. 54-56. ↩}

^{17. Annette SCHMUCKI, “musik als bild, raum, korper,” in Musiktexte 161, May 2019, p. 53. ↩}

^{18. Pierre SUBLET, radio interview with Cécile Olshausen, “’Verstreute Gedanken’– zum 80. Geburtstag von Hans Wüthrich*,” 20’57’’. ↩}