Schönberg Improvations

The idea

Pepl was one of the first jazz musicians in the world to work with the MIDI guitar; Stefan Heckel calls him one of the first in Austria.¹ With it he composed at home using the method of Instant Composing: first he improvised the left hand with a piano sound, then, in response, the right; the recorded improvisation was printed out as a score.² He presented the idea to Wulf Müller of Polygram, and together they visited Bösendorfer, where the computer grand piano 290 SE could turn the MIDI data into keystrokes.³ Kohler explains the title as a blend of improvisation and variation; as inspirations Pepl named Glenn Gould's recordings of Schönberg's piano works, the Goldberg Variations and Giacinto Scelsi.⁴

The recording

The recording took place in November 1989 in Vienna, in the former Austrophon studio in the basement of the Wiener Konzerthaus, with the sound engineer Richard Österreicher Jr.⁵ Because the piano has 1,200 volume levels but MIDI only 127, Österreicher and Lukas Filz wrote a conversion program in two days. Pepl operated the sustain pedal in real time with his foot.⁶ The saxophone themes belong to the composed right hand and were read from the computer printout; Reisinger improvised the drums to it.⁷ Nine studio days produced ten tracks: “FM-Syndrom”, “Schönberg Improvations”, “Alone Is a Golden Stone”, “Magnet Resonance”, “Wide One”, “The Last Bars of Mankind”, “3 Days Before”, “Herbstzeitlose Arbeitslose”, “Einsicht Ins Mich” and “Eastern Island Ears”.⁸ For the harmonies of “Alone Is a Golden Stone”, Pepl named “Every Breath You Take” by The Police as an inspiration.⁹

The presentation

On 7 February 1990 the programme was presented at the Wiener Konzerthaus, with Wolfgang Puschnig instead of Liebman on saxophone. Pepl sat at the self-playing piano and operated only the pedal.¹⁰ Three weeks later he played guitar to the computer grand piano at the composer portrait at the Musikverein.¹¹

Response

Tschinnbumm spoke of a „musikalischen Quantensprung“ [“musical quantum leap”], Harry Lachner in Jazzlive, the Austrian jazz magazine, of a „vorläufigen Extrempunkt auf der Skala der Klangerzeuger“ [“provisional extreme point on the scale of sound generators”]. Andreas Felber called the 2004 CD edition the „bisher kompromissloseste Dokument“ [“most uncompromising document so far”] of Pepl's Instant Composing.¹² Because of an error in the layout, the 2004 edition from Universal bears the title “Schoenberg Improvisations”; Kohler writes that the title was changed against Pepl's will.¹³ Liebman and Reisinger have played “FM-Syndrom” live since the mid-1990s.¹⁴