I Don't Need Secrets: An Interview with Winfried Ritsch
By Ellen Wiese
Last month, The Gray Center for Arts and Inquiry was honored to welcome musician Peter Ablinger to campus for a nine-day artist residency as part of its new initiative, Gray Sound. Gray Sound is “a new performance series focusing on experimental music and sound,” founded by Gray Center Director and UChicago Associate Professor of Music and the Humanities Seth Brodsky. Over his long career, Ablinger has composed scores, electronic pieces, installations, and conceptual works, always finding ways to put the ear’s organization of reality in doubt. The Gray Sound residency centered on a collaboration between Ablinger and media artist and engineer Winfried Ritsch titled “MUSIC’S OVER”: a computer-controlled piano performing a “phonorealist” transcription of a live Doors performance from 1970.
UChicago Arts stopped by the Gray Center to press the red button that controls the piano machine and witness the piece in action. This simultaneously festive and eerie performance ran the gamut from a confusion of chords and discordant notes to a clear rendition of guitar riffs and the screams of the crowd. At times, the piano almost seemed to speak with a human voice.
We sat down with Winfried Ritsch, Ablinger’s longtime collaborator and the architect of the piano machine, to discuss his work.
I'd love to hear more about why the collaboration with the Gray Lab came about and why you think Chicago is a good place for this piece.
This piece is very accepted in some musical scenes of new music in Europe, but much more often as electronica. It works really good as a sculpture, so it's not only a musical piece. I think it was really important to find a place where there was a music department and places interested in new music, which is not so historical coming from the new music of Germany and Europe. It’s much more free thinking. The U.S. is a source of pieces for Peter Ablinger.
So this for me is much more U.S. culture than European culture. I think Chicago's really nice for this, there are a lot of people who are really interested in music. It's a city of music.
“If there’s enough trust in each other, then you can work very efficiently even if you’re not living in the same city. You’re thousands of kilometers apart, but that’s not the point.”
Could you say a little bit more about your collaboration with Peter Ablinger? How that got started, how the two of you work together, and how that led to this piece.
It's really hard to say, because we work so much and it leads to so many other pieces. The last piece, of course, one of the highlights in the collaboration was that I could build the robot piano players which are able to play his pieces. He’ll request something, and then we’ll test it and we rehearse it and we can see what's good, what's bad, what can be made better and where you can use it. And so the development is really a cooperative development. And I’ll bring in some algorithms, and he uses them for his pieces. And this is the vice versa stuff.
But for this piece, the main turning point was that we developed this playing machine after we had worked together before. If there's enough trust in each other, then you can work very efficiently even if you're not living in the same city. You’re thousands of kilometers apart, but that's not the point.
I noticed after the piece was over, you went to the computer and made some changes to the program. What were you tweaking?
Today we realized that it's really on the border of loudness. If you sit in front, you might need earplugs, it depends on the person. Even if it's only a piano—it can’t actually play so loud that it can damage your ears.
And then I have to tweak to add a little bit more contrast, so that it’s not so loud all the time, but in the end, I think this is only to adjust to the piano and the acoustics of the room. It's not a problem for the piece to have a lot of echoes, it's only because of the volume.
There are always people asking, “Will the piano break?” But for a normal piano, it should be no problem. Because the only difference is that nobody presses as many keys at the same time normally playing a piano, but each key is independent, so there’s no problem.
I'm really pleased that I can present this machine's hardware, because some composers, not only Peter, but other artists have made special pieces for these machines. And so it's always good to have a machine around somewhere so the pieces are really played. And the question was, “I am now writing a piece which is only playable by a special tool, by a special machine, by a special software.” I said no, this is no problem. Because I make it open hardware, so it's documented well. So in 50 years, everybody can build the same machine or a machine which is the equivalent of this. Because the information is there and the software is open, so they can correct and adjust to new systems. And this is why I've chosen to make it open source and open hardware—for the composer.
“There are always people asking, ‘Will the piano break?’”
It was always a problem with electronic music and computer music. When we had new computers at the beginning of the nineties, the composer said, “Yeah, but in 10 years, if the computer does not work anymore, I cannot play the piece anymore.” But in this case this should not happen. I want to distribute the knowledge as much as I can. So this is a really good opportunity.
I think of electronic music as something computer-based, but then this is very physical and is using a traditional instrument. Is that sense of parallel types of music, or the music’s “reality” for lack of a better term, is that something you interact with?
Yeah, of course. It has a double meaning in this thing. Peter says that he uses phono-realism, like the realism of the painters, photorealism. In electronic music, we had a movement where first we had the synthesizer and loudspeakers, and then the system became much more sophisticated over time and it became laptops. And then you see there's a laptop on the stage and you can read your email. The same music comes out, so nobody knows what you are doing.
Artist and engineer Winfried Ritsch
And then you can do everything and you’ve heard everything and it’s not, "I’ve never heard this before," because we hear a lot of different media. So I think there was a movement in the last few years in the new scene that we go back to physical objects and to have real instruments, to have real physical objects. And then to do the concepts of electronic music, to play these concepts, we need robots. I wanted to use the robot, and I can get rid of the loudspeaker also. And get rid of the virtual behavior. Even if there is still a lot of virtual behavior, because you hear music on the piano which is not the piano. So this is not real. This is also virtual, and it's used like a loudspeaker in some way—but it's not, because you have the physical experience. And this is really important. It's always hard to record these kind of pieces, because it’s really different if you hear it real.
And with other machines, I think this is a movement that will come back and more and more robots will be on stage, not instead of musicians, but instead of loudspeakers. Maybe also instead of musicians, because this has happened everywhere else, but they don't have to fear too much, I think.
The audio for this piece was initially from a Doors concert that was recorded and transformed. Could you talk a little about MUSIC’S OVER?
Yeah. Music is always of course a statement. Just from the title, because “music's over” means that, because you can play everything and you can simulate everything virtually, you can have opera singers which are much better than real opera singers. And you have instruments which sound much better than real instruments. And so “music is over” means that the time where you play better than others is over. In a music performance I may be faster and better and more expressive or something like that, but this becomes more and more obsolete.
It’s a really big burden I see on the young people, composers as well. That everything has been done—and it had been before, but we didn't know it because we had no internet. And so we were much more free to do crazy things. Nowadays, you’ve seen a video of it. To free yourself from that means you cannot do anything anymore, because everything in this time has already happened—which means that music in this traditional thinking is over. So we have to take a new step, to go back to physical absolute stuff and think, what is the emotional factor, what is the physical factor of things. And you don't even need to have learned the instrument very well and you can make very good music.
I know some of my colleagues don't want to hear this, because in the university view, you always want the best musicians, but in fact you have heard, you are confronted, you cannot ignore this. You can believe it or not. You can handle it or you cannot, but it's already in your mind manifested in some way.
You can also hurt with too many new ideas, some kinds. And so we have to be careful with this mission. That's our responsibility in this kind of engineering. That's why I always say I want to release my ideas and make it open. I don't need secrets.
That leads to my next question: what's the next step? You mentioned the world premier of this project.
For Ensemble Mécanique, I had made a lot of stuff, but I don't know what will be the next step with Peter Ablinger. There's some tweaks in front of us to make it better, mostly to make it better to handle for a composer, not only the technical aspect. We have to do something so that he can compose much better things and handle it.
But the other thing is that I'm working on an organ goal. I just got for very cheap a whole church organ with seven registers, 640 pipes, very big pipes and small ones. And so one idea is now to optimize the pipe playing, go beyond the church organ, so that every pipe is dynamically played. So it's not only one volume. And the second is you can overblow it, that it can be played much faster. So then maybe we get a church organ to talk. That's the next project. We don't know if it really works, but this is a vision of mine.