Like life, Enno Poppe’s music generally begins from a seed – a single sound or pair of sounds – and a set of rules to make it grow. Yet rarely is a seed a single thing. Even a single note contains multitudes: at what point does a vibrato become a melodic curve? Where, precisely, does the buzz of a snare drum expand into a rhythm? Zoom in close enough and any sound will unravel into fractal complexity.
The rules Poppe applies to such points of friction and ambiguity are algorithms derived from biological processes. From these, he creates flows of music that endlessly self-generate and self-destruct, like the branching of trees or the blooming of algae. Logical but never predictable, they unfold in stepwise fashion without ever leading where you would expect. The first piece he composed in this way, Thema mit 840 Variationen for piano (1993), used a Lindenmayer system (or L-system) algorithm to generate long strings of musical information. Its title tells you almost all you need to know. Over just eight minutes it rattles off 841 variations of a jabbing two-note motif. The piece is both exhaustive and minimalistic in its unfurling energy, yet along the way, it breaks beyond its mechanical origins to suggest a kaleidoscope of other styles: loud declamations in the manner of Galina Ustvolskaya, delicate Ravelian filigree, Bartókian percussion and melodic lyricism. (Poppe himself calls it “Feldman on the motorway”.) Again like life, the infinite variety, not the underlying mechanism is the point.
Over the years, Poppe’s music has moved into ever-more polymorphous bodies. These include the video song cycle Interzone (2003–4), a collaboration with the writer Marcel Beyer and artist Anne Quriynen, and the hour-long Prozession for large ensemble (2015–20). His new work, Streik, for ten drum kits – receiving its UK premiere at hcmf// this year – may at first glance seem dry in its sonic possibilities, but if any composer can transmute his initial material into unpredicted forms, it is Poppe. Imagine those drummers like a squid: a ten-limbed, tentacular shapeshifter.
Poppe’s choice of Tangier as the setting for Interzone is apt. A city whose identity has always been ephemeral and precarious, every new page of its history – from Phoenician to Roman to Portuguese to Moroccan – has erased the last. Prozession, meanwhile, is structured in nine lifecycles that echo the boom-and-bust arcs of natural populations. Yet while such analogies are constrained by social or biological laws of creation and destruction, Poppe’s music faces no such restrictions. For all the systematisation that lurks in the background of his music, its instinct is always to probe the boundaries of the surreal. In Rad (2003), for two computer-controlled keyboards, a progressive narrowing of the instruments’ tuning eventually causes them to stop sounding like pianos altogether and more like the sawtooth wave of an analogue synthesizer. Interzone takes its title and inspiration from William S. Burroughs and includes a long central section of ‘bee music’ (Burroughs’ Interzone itself morphed into his insect-populated novel Naked Lunch). And in the climactic ninth section of Prozession, the music’s percussive clatter is ultimately dissolved, to be replaced by the throb of two microtonally tuned electric organs. But although works like these model a kind of unfettered creative impulse, they never lose sight of the consequences of a complete lack of control. Modern life may be structured on ideals of accelerated consumption (and the piles of waste that accompany it), but Poppe’s music retains a critical stance towards its excessive tendencies. As he notes laconically in his programme note to Rad: “Wheel: mechanical, circular motion. The brake was invented later.”
Profile by Tim Rutherford-Johnson
The 47th edition of Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival, hcmf// 2024, takes place Friday 15 – Sunday 24 November 2024. Tickets for Enno Poppe: 10 drummers (Streik) are on sale now.