Flow

“I wanted you to be able to hear the room on the CD as well.”

Harry Pepl on “Flow” in his interview with Martin Schuster, which bears the title of the album's sixth piece, “Man könnte Klavierspielen müssen” (Concerto 2/1998).

It was recorded on Sunday, 10 March 1996, digitally and in a single take in the Brahms Hall of the Vienna Musikverein, home of the Vienna Philharmonic, on the house Steinway; Reinhard Buchta recorded and mixed it, Daniel Pepl and Stephen Ferguson edited it, and Paul Zauner produced it.¹ The illustration and calligraphy, including the handwritten “flow”, are by Pepl himself; the inlay photo, artwork and cover design by Andreas Ortag, the inner photos by Daniel Pepl and the photo on the back of the booklet by Peter Schramek. The album is dedicated to the “Musikhochschule Graz”, today the University of Music and Performing Arts Graz.¹ Pepl explained that he did not have the music in his head; it was a flow with nothing in between. “Flow” is also a term from psychology, coined by the Hungarian-American psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi for complete absorption in an activity; the title of the piano album is no coincidence: Harry Pepl was very interested in this flow research, read a great deal about it and, as seriously and methodically as with his own recordings, kept newspaper articles about Csikszentmihalyi and flow.² He was very proud of “Flow”: shortly before his death he still called the album “wirklich sehr leiwand” (Viennese for “really terrific”).² Stefan Heckel, who wrote his 2024 doctoral dissertation at the University of Music and Performing Arts Vienna on Pepl’s late work, likewise uses the term to describe Pepl’s real-time compositions.³

The booklet texts

The booklet contains two texts. The pianist and composer Stephen Ferguson, then assistant to György Ligeti, writes:

On the guitar, he writes, Pepl is “one of Europe’s undisputed jazz masters”; on the piano he is a virtual stranger, and that is what gives the music its magic: “a dream played awake, full of snatches of music, gestures, spaces”, a response to the “big black Steinway, the great polyphonic beast, singing proud in the acoustics of the Musikverein”.¹ Ferguson ends with the master of the strings becoming “a masterly novice full of music”.¹

Georg Pepl, Harry’s elder son and a musicologist, places the album in the tradition of free piano improvisation, from Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach’s free fantasias to jazz, and reads the flowing that gives the album its name through Rousseau, Goethe, Freud and Herbert Marcuse. Ferguson translated his text for the booklet:¹

In “Grace & Gary” and “2 Klavierpianos” Pepl improvised a second piano track over the first, one “which fits perfectly into the first”. He played the piano, Georg Pepl writes, because he relished a situation where he was inexperienced and “because he simply has to”; “Man könnte Klavierspielen müssen” (roughly “One might have to play the piano”) alludes to this, a reminiscence of Glenn Gould. “Improv 2” recalls the Schubert impromptus Pepl played in his youth, “Grace & Gary” the film “High Noon”. Of “3 Mo” Pepl himself said: “3 Mo stands for mothy, momenty, minory.”¹

Both texts can be read as PDFs in the press archive: Georg Pepl’s German text freely, Stephen Ferguson’s text and his English version of Georg Pepl’s text for signed-in users.

The booklet and the barcode give the catalogue number CD 10140-2, Heckel and Discogs CD 101040-2. A digital reissue followed in 2023 as “Harry Pepl Piano” (PAO Records, label of the trombonist and INNtöne festival founder Paul Zauner, same barcode).