Drei Allmenden by Klaus Lang, Konus Quartett

Over the course of music history scores have become increasingly prescriptive. The greater the composer's ego, the more they/he saw themself/himself in the role of the artistic genius, and the more counterpoint was replaced by emotional expression, the more detailed the scores became. All aspects of the music and its execution should be precisely determined by the brilliant composer and specified with the utmost completeness in the score. At the same time, the until then natural collaborative unity of musician and composer was slowly dissolved and with the Nazi prohibition of “degenerate” music in the 20th century, the connection between composer and interpreter on the one hand completely cut and, on the other, a canon created that has been going in circles, remaining unchanged for 70 years. By banishing living composers from mainstream musical life into small niches, the relics of dead composers, namely their scores, have become objects of quasi cult-like veneration within the operation of major concert halls, opera houses and conservatoria. The introduction, transfer and application of the Protestant principle “sola scriptura” from religion to music has led to phenomena such as historical performance practice and the Urtext edition: the scores were canonised, so to speak, with musicians thereby resembling priests and theologians. But is a score really the music? Where is the music? Is it in the composer's mind? Is it in the score, in the concert space or in the mind of the listener? With all this in mind, the music resulting from the collaboration with the Konus Saxophone Quartet, as well as other works of mine, are more closely related to the scores of the 16th and 17th centuries: many of these scores are very simple and clear, but they demand musicians who, through their powers of diminution and figuration in performance give the notated framework a certain sonic shine or are able to conjure up a susurrant soundscape using only a few instances of figured bass notation. However it must be noted that the more clearly formed and organised the fundamental structure, the more freedom there is for the player at any given moment in performance.

Klaus Lang, 2020

The saxophone quartet is mainly known as a classical jazz instrumentation, but also as a sounding body for arrangements of baroque, classical and romantic pieces. Another particularly interesting approach is practised by the Swiss Konus Quartett, which has dedicated itself to a radically contemporary version of playing with four saxophones. They interpret mainly contemporary original literature.