Wolfgang Mitterer studied in 1977 in Graz in Otto Bruckner, then from 1978 to 1983 at the Musikhochschule in Vienna organ with Herbert Tachezi and composition with Henry Gattermeyer before 1983, a year at the Studio for Electroacoustic Music (EMS) graduated in Stockholm. Es folgten Studienaufenthalte als Stipendiat in Rom 1988 und in Berlin in den Jahren 1995/96. This was followed by study on a scholarship in Rome in 1988 and in Berlin in 1995/96. Mitterer 1991 founded the label Olongapo. [1]

Mitterer is considered one of the most important contemporary Austrian composers and pioneer in the field of electroacoustic music. Today, he works a lot with other artists, often with international improvisers and jazz musicians such as Wolfgang Puschnig, Wolfgang Reisinger, Linda Sharrock, Klaus Dick Bauer, Sainkho Namtchylak, Cho Theissing, Tom Cora, Ernest Reijseger, Hōzan Yamamoto, Roscoe Mitchell, George Breinschmid, David Liebman, David Moss, Max Nagl, Achim Tang, Patrick Pulsinger, Christof Kurzmann, Christian Fennesz, Marc Ducret, Francis Koglmann, Label Bleu, Harry Pepl and more.

Mitterer also occur on as an organist, where he interprets his own in addition to works by Bach, Messiaen and Ligeti. He played in off-location, as in a quarry and an abandoned fortress in Tyrol. He also acted at the Donaueschingen Music Festival, the Styrian Autumn Festival, as Darmstadt and at the summer schools.

Wolfgang Mitterer wrote beside sound installations, and numerous electronic collages and chamber music, theatrical works, including operas, a piano concerto and music for orchestra and organ. In addition, he works on experimental films, radio plays and theaters, has silent films live set to music, but composes music for the shows of a fashion designer.

Wolfgang Mitterer was a lecturer at the Vienna University of Music and at the Darmstadt Summer Courses for New Music. He is also a board member of the Austro mechana.

Creation and Works

Wolfgang Mitterer composed works in the field of collective improvisation, music, plays the organ and electronic instruments. Dimensional space, which he often set to music in his tracks, gave works such as "forest music", "silver sand music," "Babel," "horizontal noise" , vertical silence "and" Labyrinth 6-11 "special form. Because sometimes working up to 100 people were also many traditional ensembles, such as heritage Blas and choral societies, are used. These projects are ultimately caused by Wolfgang Mitterer's recordings in different musical genres and through joint appearances with representatives of the DJ scene and

concerts, but also by new Add sound of classical pieces by Bach and Schubert.

Wolfgang Mitterer also works on theatrical and dramatic productions, some of whose lyrics he composes himself and adapted, such as in "Ka and the baboon," based on the Egyptian Book of the Dead [2] and "Massacre", based on religious killings in the 16th century after Christopher Marlowe or the song cycle "The Storm" based on songs by Franz Schubert.

Coloured Noise:

1 langsam      19:46

2 scherzo 1    10:36

3 scherzo 2    8:38

4 scherzo 3    7:57

5 attacca        21:20

 

Wolfgang Mitterer - organ

Klangforum Wien / Peter Rundel

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The foundation of the work is a constant layer of multi-channel electronics, which Mitterer has put together from his collection, snippets of older works, like KA and the Pavian, or networds 1-5, or

from solo recordings from collaborative projects with Wolfgang Reisinger, Reinhardt Winkler, the Callboys and others. One thing unites them all: they all were created as free improvisations, not on the computer, not generated, not notated, intact results of the direct union of person and instrument. (Walter Weidringer)

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Christopher Culver reviews Coloured Noise on amazon

Wolfgang Mitter's "Coloured Noise" contrasts two sound sources. On one hand, there is a live ensemble of 23 musicians performing from a score. Here Peter Rundel leads Klangforum Wien. On the other hand, there is an electronic part consisting of various improvisations that Mitterer, an accomplished organist, has recorded over the years. The two coexist: notated score against improvisation, unplugged against electronic, and solo organ against instrumental ensemble.

At times the piece sounds like Lachenmann gone electronic, at other times like Ligeti's wild organ pieces. For me personally, though, "Coloured Noise" is a gimmick that gets old fast and sitting through the entire hour-plus is wearying. I think that this disc will appeal more to fans of noise music (i.e. the Japanese or Detroit scenes) than fans of contemporary classical music. As someone who prefers the latter genre, I find Kairos a label worth taking a chance on, but this disc was one of the rare disappointments.

***Autonomeus reviews Coloured Noise on amazon

Wolfgang Mitterer (b. 1958) is an Austrian composer and improving organist from Austria. His work tramples the boundaries separating contemporary classical from improvised, electronic, and even dance music. What we have here, "coloured noise (2005): brachialsymphonie fur 23 musiker und electronics," is 68 wild minutes of electro-acoustic music, with 1) the Klangforum Wien playing over 2) a constant layer of multi-channel electronics created by Mitterer from recordings of collective improvisations performed by Mitterer and various collaborators, and 3) Mitterer live on organ. Peter Rundel conducts, but this is not ordinary conducting given that the players only partly follow a score and improvise the rest -- Mitterer does not intend that the conductor can control everything. The piece is anchored by time-codes, and a bass player and two pianists along with the conductor make sure that everything comes together at certain points, maintaining synchronization with the recorded electronics. The resulting textures and chaotic flow are exhilarating! "coloured noise" is organized into five movements, just like a symphony.

The liner notes by Walter Weidringer are quite informative, though they do not unravel all the mysteries of the work's construction. According to the dictionary, brachial means raw energy, says Weidringer. "Brachial, Mitterer reveals, means for him organic, multi-faceted, corporeal, transparent, incomprehensible." So much for complete understanding! The recording was made at the Konzerthaus Wien on November 15, 2005.

It seems to me that this music might appeal to contemporary classical listeners, electronic music listeners, or free improvisation listeners. I listen to all three. In particular, if you like the amazing electronic and electro-acoustic works of Iannis Xenakis, especially his masterwork KRAANERG (see my review), you should definitely check this out. If you enjoy the free improvisation of Peter Brotzmann and Evan Parker, and large improvising ensembles such as the Globe Unity Orchestra (see my review) and Evan Parker's Electro-Acoustic Ensemble (see my review), you are likely to find "coloured noise" to be energizing and inspiring.

[The track listing on the Amazon page (above) is an error. It is from another Kairos disc, Shir Hashirim by Hans Zender.]

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Jacques Coulardeau reviews Coloured Noise on amazon.co.uk:

Don't expect the presentation of this symphony in the booklet of the CD to enlighten you about what a standard listener could get out of it. The point of view is "how did the composer do it?" which is for the audience of no avail. But get into it and just listen. The composition that associates the instruments and musicians of the orchestra and the samples and sampled tit bits produced by the computers are built in a very complex architecture. That it rejects all the facades of standard music is not a characteristic of this music. It creates a depth in space, hence in time, and if architecture there is, façade there is too. The point is that you cannot just let yourself expect being transported into a traditional universe with an effortless because already learned listening. You have to let yourself slip into the music and you have to learn how to devise a way to listen to that music in order to get into its architecture, deep architecture and not superficial façade. Every single sound, no matter what it is, is in a way or another an isolated island to which all the other sounds of that very moment are the surrounding environment. The point is that the focus changes all the time from one sound to another and the environment is recomposed every single time. Instead of entering a linear composition that leads you from one note to the next in some kind of audio logic, here you jump from one island to another, from one environment to another with no

apparent logic but only the idea, the feeling, the impression that each island has a color and that the color of each island is like the sequence, the sequel not of the previous one, but of the following one. How can an impression be the result of something coming afterwards? That's the impression I have, the emotion I feel of a sound retrospective architecture. That means we have in a way to reconstruct that retrospectivity and to expect something that is not a sequel but a source after what we have just heard. It is not so much an attempt to question and surprise and even shock your listening habits as a complete reversal of them. You have to listen to what comes as if you were looking backward at what has come from the point of view of what is to come. I have rarely felt that emotion. Yet it is an extremely classic emotion with some great composers of the past. I even think the great baroque composers were dedicated to that kind of retrospective vision. I have always felt that when listening to J.S. Bach's Passions. Every single piece in those passions transforms what precedes them. You constantly have to go back to enrich what you thought was the meaning of any piece with the meaning of the next piece or pieces. But the retrospective sensation was working in your memory. Mitterer who is Bachian in that way, is requiring from you that you envisage what is coming when you are listening to what is being played at this very moment. How can you? That's just the point. Your enjoyment is constantly suspended and your enjoyment is in this very suspension. Your enjoyment is at its highest point when you have been able to foresee what is coming. How can you do that? With a lot of practice and a lot of imagination. And at the same time, every single moment when you have not been able to do it, you are surprised and you kind of feel "Of course, dummy, that I should have seen". In other words Mitterer is turning you into the composer. Either you can or you can't but your pleasure will be all the more important if you can, at least from time to time. You have to learn to imagine how what is coming and has not come yet is going to surprise you, to disturb your expectation, to destroy your standard visions. You constantly have to play with that idea: "How can we disrupt this sound, this piece of music, the impression and sensation and emotion I am feeling right now." We have to live that music dangerously and that is a beautiful experience. What are the clues Mitterer provides you with? Little or few. But rhythm seems to be one clue because it is easier to imagine how one piece of rhythm can be disrupted. But you also have the textures of the sounds because here too there is some kind of disruptive logic. In the past they used the different textures of the different instruments, that they called timbres, in order to create some harmonious, or disharmonious, whole. Mitterer uses this dimension in order to build a constantly jerking progress in the world of sonority. But there is a great pleasure when you have been able to foresee the textural change Mitterer is going to introduce to disrupt your listening façade. I must say my pleasure is maximum with this piece, a lot more than with "The Saint Bartholomew

Massacre" I have had the opportunity to watch live recently, probably because the music is not overloaded here with a not so meaningful visual wrapping. Its architecture is purer, pure sound and not composite.

Dr Jacques COULARDEAU, University of Paris 1 Pantheon Sorbonne, University Paris 8 Vincennes Saint Denis, University of Paris 12 Créteil, CEGID Boulogne Billancourt

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 Wolfgang Mitterer studied organ and composition in Vienna at the Academy of Music and the Performing Arts, and in Sweden at the Stockholm Studio of Electronic Music. Wolfgang Mitterer, a specialist on the organ and in electronic music, and the initiator of collective ensembles, is probably the most important and innovative interpreter of experimental electronic music in Austria. Wolfgang Mitterer’s strategy in his live electronic performances consists of repeatedly putting himself under compulsive pressure. The tremendous intensity in the texture of Mitterer’s music and his radicalism and intransigence challenge the attentiveness and receptivity of his audience.

 

The foundation of the work is a constant layer of multi-channel electronics, which Mitterer has put together from his collection, snippets of older works, like KA and the Pavian, or networds 1-5, or from solo recordings from collaborative projects with Wolfgang Reisinger, Reinhardt Winkler, the Callboys and others. One thing unites them all: they all were created as free improvisations, not on the computer, not generated, not notated, intact results of the direct union of person and instrument. (Walter Weidringer)

Wolfgang Mitterer - Music for Checking E-mails: “…giving the illusion of depth” (Col Legno, 2009)

Another from docperkins:

“What’s interesting about modern music is that if nobody likes it they just can’t shut it off. They have to go on raving about it, against it. I think that modern music should exist and everybody has the right to just shut it off. Just shut it off. But it should exist like anything. Just like I shut off light music or jazz. I’m shutting it off all the time.” Morton Feldman, “Johannesburg Lecture”, August 1983, in: ‘MF Says’, edited by C. Villars

In ‘Music for Checking E-mails’, Mitterer shows that he recognises that many would wish to shut off modern music. However, instead of shutting off, he cuts, pastes, and blurbs the collage onto atonal segments made of electronic flat slates that rather than progressing or advancing in intelligible succession, happened in discontinuity that does not become random, tone by tone. The notion it conveys is of several messengers coming from completely disparate ‘topoi’ dropping by, and leaving impressions on a ‘pocket studio’ whose owner, in charge of shutting off the undesired ones, does not manage to do the editing, gets entangled in the procedures, and ends up creating collage monstrosities as mouths produce saliva. The fun starts when the saliva finds its way out and turns into drooling; oh my…

Mitterer adopts an overtly populist attitude therein. He nods to modalities of — that which I call in one of my RYM Lists — concrete core an naïvetronics in their most Spartan formats, namely, techno, generic and dark ambient, allowing some room for flirting manoeuvre with electroacoustics and pseudo-lowercase. Mitterer is so outrageously successful in his endeavour that leaves me wondering where is the red herring of his atono-drooling that refuses to shut off music à la Morton, The Feldman, but engages pop music fake spontaneity in intercourses they would never have indulged in if left to their own devices.

The microphysical relation of power hatched from within Mitterer’s atono-drooling has a name on it: politics. Therefore, if you refrain from being normative and have a set of rigidly pre-established rules that avant-classical musical shall not trespass — which would be a contradiction in terms —, there is no red herring in Mitterer’s aesthetics. The intercourse with pop is not at all made of trade-offs. Besides, depth is treated with the cynicism it ontologically deserves and akin to the album title, as an illusion. At the most it shows that pop intuition might get intertwined with the sophisticated epistemes and still preserve the appeals to those who are not and probably will never become atonal music fans. A question hangs over the pop+atonal equation, which is the one involving improvisation (the pompous ‘cousin’ of intuition). I will follow Mitterer at this entry and keep the issue of improvisation — present but — at bay, the way he opted to do along the checking of emails.

I begin by looking awry, just to get seduced by a bizarre, disgustingly obvious album, which makes obviousness to crack on me like a joke whereas the joke is my taste (and what are tastes but dull jokes?). Furthermore, the double CD set bears a sort of introductory text that aims and fails at becoming an essay. Thereby, Schopenhauer, Cocteau, Deleuze & Guatari, and Ornette Coleman among others are misquoted amidst infantile name dropping

targeted at proving the en-guard improvable: that anything goes in music if one ‘leaves’ things up to the almighty brain, being ‘brain’ a biological, natural factor. That was gross. Anyways, the text is signed by Paul D. Miller aka DJ Spooky, who might fall short of convincing as usher into Mitterer’s music but ends up — in line with the best of Mitterer’s attempts — validating pop-icon Morrissey when he incites us to hang the DJ.

Music for checking e-mails by Wolfgang Mitterer

http://www.7digital.com/artists/wolfgang-mitterer/music-for-checking-e-mails/02-pjotr-ilijitsch/

01. hallo mr bruckner 7:30

02. pjotr ilijitsch 14:28

03. to morton 12:09

04. bad receiver 17:07

05. background 02 3:06

06. back_klav_01 0:43

07. background 06 5:21

08. back_klav_02 0:41

09. background 04 5:19

10. back_klav_03 0:59

11. background 12 4:37

12. back_klav_04 0:50

13. background 10 5:27

14. back_klav_05 0:50

15. background 01 3:54

16. back_klav_06 1:21

17. background 09 3:18

18. back_klav_07 0:31

19. background 11 4:55

20. back_klav_08 0:35

21. background 14 6:16

22. back_klav_09 0:41

23. background 03 4:16

24. back_klav_10 0:54

25. background 13 3:37

26. background 15 4:06

Wolfgang Mitterer: "Scherzo 3" from "Coloured Noise" (2005). Wolfgang Mitterer studied organ and composition in Vienna at the Academy of Music and the Performing Arts, and in Sweden at the Stockholm Studio of Electronic Music. Mitterer, a specialist on the organ and in electronic music, and the initiator of collective ensembles, is probably the most important and innovative interpreter of experimental electronic music in Austria. His strategy in his live electronic performances consists of repeatedly putting himself under compulsive pressure. The tremendous intensity in the texture of Mitterer's music and his radicalism and intransigence challenge the attentiveness and receptivity of his audience. The foundation of the work is a constant layer of multi-channel electronics, which Mitterer has put together from his collection, snippets of older works, like KA and the Pavian, or networds 1-5, or from solo recordings from collaborative projects with Wolfgang Reisinger, Reinhardt Winkler, the Callboys and others. One thing unites them all: they all were created as free improvisations, not on the computer, not generated, not notated, intact results of the direct union of person and instrument.