For many of the minutes of music accumulated across Eva-Maria Houben’s vast discography of compositions, everything seems still. A space has opened up between the chords she’s playing, often distanced far across the keyboard of her piano. In that space, there can be silence, but just as often, there’s quietness, the tail-end of a pronounced phrase slowly releasing itself from the throes of her sustain pedal. Those moments come from Houben, but they don’t belong to her. The exhales, the fades, they happen on their own. Her music is alive, and it’s decaying.
There are musicians who will tell you sound is its own thing, that we play a bit-part role in it, and that composers serve more as a vessel for music than as the architects of it. And then there’s Houben, who exists at the next level, her music suggesting that sounds are living for themselves. An organist and pianist, she has released a comprehensive amount of work, both through other labels and her own Diafini imprint, that speaks on the subject. Her discoveries are made through what she plays; she’s keen to emphasise the organ as a wind instrument, pointing to the act of release found in pressing its keys. It’s as if she has let something out, rather than constructed it herself.
Houben is letting music talk. Her works are simply titled, and unobtrusively presented. They figure that sound is enough on its own, a mysterious thing with its own temper and timescale. She emphasises the importance of ‘listening’ and ‘awareness’, two words that define her own approach to making music. Her chords sing their whole song, from peak to fade; if you stay in the moment, you’ll actually hear them in the ‘silent’ passages of her pieces. You can listen to them disappear.
It’s a very particular kind of music-making that can be attributed to Houben’s affiliation with Wandelweiser. A group of composers that includes Jürg Frey and Michael Pisaro, they’ve cultivated a hushed, measured aesthetic where sound is not only vulnerable, but scarce, blanketed by its absence. Like other composers of the circle, Houben has a slightly different focus to many of her contemporaries. Her music is less horizontally minded, and is removed from a traditional view of narrative world-building. Sounds are not rigidly connected; instead, what they share is a life cycle.
I was initially struck by the delicacy with which Houben’s pieces are realised, and the amount of space and time that’s afforded to each phrase. Was it not kind of sacrilegious that these minute piano notes were being bullied out of earshot by my laptop fan? A’men, written as a prayer chant, sounded intensely focused, with dynamic phrases creating a bubble of their own. Livre d’heures was so full sounding, registering each bell chime so roundly, that it seemed that it should exist in a vacuum. I felt the need to shut up, to create the stillest environment possible. And so I was struck by Houben’s own, reassuring words on the matter: ‘sound and noise do not need any silent location – they are quiet themselves. Their quietness creates silent rooms, which welcome all sounds’.
It’s a beautiful sentiment. Houben relates sound in a slight, unassuming way that expects nothing of the listener, nor the music they’re listening to. There are no right experiences, no proper etiquettes. In recent years, she has turned her focus to drone music, using her skills as an organist to develop soft, subdued pieces that make the instrument sound dreamier than it does in the hands of others. There’s an intentional ambiguity and relativity to this work. Houben is aware of the different ways meditated sounds can be absorbed. Her frequent collaborator Carson Cooman has interpreted many of these pieces, including the 2014 album drones. Some listeners might take the journey passively, experiencing it in their own small way. Others will be switched on by it, focusing on the repeated patterns, looking over the bridge at what lies beyond.
Houben’s new piece, together on the way, gets inside those ideas, suggesting that sound builds a relationship with us. Its title is embracing, celebrating the strange ritual of getting people together to share a room for their own intimate moments of listening. It is both intentional and absolving, her score carrying instructions that can be split up and removed, hoping for music that is both ‘ethereal and embodied’. Most importantly, it doesn’t really end. She says it’s ‘ongoing’, a work that ‘continues after the audience has left the hall, as it began before they entered’. She describes us, as much as she does the music: we’re passengers, moving in and out of place, arriving and receding like sounds across a song.