.Publication:
Komponisten
in Bayern: BERTOLD HUMMEL
Reinhard
Schulz: Notes on Bertold Hummel
S. Fink, C. Kuehnel, W. Osthoff, H. Schmidt-Mannheim, K. H. Stahmer, F. A. Stein
Komponisten
in Bayern, Band 31:
BERTOLD HUMMEL
Verlag
Hans Schneider, Tutzing, 1998,
edited
in order of
Landesverbandes Bayerischer Tonkuenstler e. V. im DTKV
from
Alexander L. Suder
ISBN 3 7952 0944 7
Notes on Bertold Hummel
The break-down of unity within contemporary music has as one of its consequences the risk that the musician is going to be left behind, fallen by the wayside. The unity between instrumentally typical writing and importance of the statement seems undermined. The debate about whether modern music should be part of season-ticket concert programmes or should be found room elsewhere is basically another side of the same dilemma. In the meantime, however, a generation of young performers is growing up - at least in part - with the feeling of having been abandoned by their composer colleagues. The latter demand from orchestral musicians highest levels of technique, flexibility and concentration but largely neglect the need for presentations satisfying on all levels. Particularly amongst the critics there developed a harsh judgement on "Spielmusik" ("music for the joy of playing"), which was considered to rotate in its own little circle without taking account of progressive musical tendencies of the time.
But the need remained unmet. To counter this, there developed in Germany a style of composition which took its direction particularly from the works of Paul Hindemith. Today, these compositions have again found a much more convinced audience. Bertold Hummel is one such composer and can be seen as a "grandchild" of Hindemith via his teacher Harald Genzmer. Here there is no timidity about getting involved with forms catering for the pure pleasure of instrumental playing or about music reflecting pedagogical needs. These compositions meet with great resonance, as is evident from the number of performances, which often exceed those of the avant-garde by a long way.
Bertold Hummel, born in 1925 in Huefingen, which happens to be near Donaueschingen, where Hindemith at that time organised his concerts with contemporary music, is not considered as part of this avant-garde with its self-isolating tendencies, in its self-imposed ghetto situation. He has never attempted with his music to break out of the traditional concert forms but sees it rather as a deeply-rooted form of musical communication with wide-ranging possibilities from great concert halls to the church. Thus church music was for the Catholic Hummel one of the central areas of activity. It was in this field that last year a monumental, two-and-a-half-hour major work, the oratorio, "The Shrine of the Martyrs", was composed and performed for the first time in Wuerzburg where Hummel was active from 1963 onwards as a teacher of composition. Between 1979 and 1997, he was president of the state music college in Wuerzburg and was besides this director of the Studio for New Music, Wuerzburg.
Many of Hummel's compositions were written in connection with concerts for the Studio for New Music and also in collaboration with the percussion class of Siegfried Fink. In these works, there is a combination of pedagogical intention with a completely personal style offering room for the performer to exploit his instrument.
Originality as well as "usefulness" of the music were always at the centre of Bertold Hummel's compositional thinking. In this, he relied in large measured on the musical schemes of the baroque and classical periods, the Sonatina, the Divertimento and also the Suite recurring as the basis for his works, particularly when the emphasis was on the combination of instrumental enjoyment with pedagogical aims.
In more freely conceived works, of perhaps greater significance than the category mentioned, there resulted from impulses he absorbed from contact with the new discoveries of the avant-garde a "sound-colour" style, linked closely to Hummel's unusual abilities in the area of instrumentation. Here again he saw himself however as being on the side of the "users", as meant in his fundamental definition of two basic types of artist, of composer, as he saw them in history: the "discoverers" (Hummel described them as lighthouses and included here such figures as Haydn, Beethoven, Liszt, Debussy or Schšnberg) and the "amalgamators", amongst whom he mentions Bach, Mozart or Brahms. Hummel felt himself closer to the second group in his creative work, he attempted constantly to integrate harmoniously experiments and their results in his work, to place these, seen as it were through his eyes, at the disposal of performers. This does of course always run the risk of becoming schematic, but the element of originality provides the counterweight to this. It is on this latter element that the success of a work ultimately depends. But the work has to be able to resist the pressure from pedagogical impetus, from the wishes of the instrumentalist for enjoyably performable material and from the wish for individuality. Otherwise the work will fall under the wheels of banality or of elitism.
(from the programme booklet of the Munich Philharmonic: 2nd Chamber Concert, Munich, 1990, p.4-5)