In 2007, Pierre Boulez was conducting a performance of Mark Andre’s “…auf…II” in Amsterdam when a phone rang. The interruption broke the spell of the score’s opening, in which stabbing harmonies activate a mysterious echo. Boulez stopped the orchestra, went backstage for a few minutes, then started the music again.
Boulez’s response speaks to the exquisite fragility of the music by Andre, 60, who has earned a reputation as one of Europe’s most original composers. His pieces are like spider webs: Close attention reveals their intricate beauty, while a careless gesture can destroy their effect.
His newest composition, a work for piano and electronics titled “…selig ist…,” will be premiered by Pierre-Laurent Aimard at the Donaueschingen Festival in Germany on Oct. 19. (The concert will also be livestreamed.) The piece lasts about 50 minutes and is ferociously difficult. It’s also full of sounds that can easily be obscured by a ringtone.
Five or six years ago, Aimard, a contemporary music virtuoso, began pursuing a collaboration with Andre; this new work is their first world premiere together.
“After having listened a lot to his music I thought, ‘This is the person I would like to dedicate some of my forces and time to,’” Aimard said in a phone interview. “Because it seemed to me that the profoundness of his creation, his deep spirituality, the extremely subtle acoustical world which he works with, and the high discipline in his handwork were what I was looking for at this moment.”
The vulnerability that characterizes Andrew’s aesthetic grew out of the unusual circumstances of his upbringing. He was born in Paris to a French-German family with roots in Alsace. His parents were technical staff with the film production company Eclair, working with directors like Jean-Luc Godard, Claude Lelouch and Abraham Polonsky.
Because they traveled frequently, Andre was raised by his grandparents, Lutherans in a country largely secular and Catholic. This religious belief has remained important to him in art and in life. “The idea or hope that the Holy Spirit can be at work through music is very central to me,” he has said, and he compares the process of composing to revelation.
Alsace changed hands between France and Germany many times, making identities in the region fragile and mutable. Andre’s grandfather had two brothers. One was killed fighting for the Nazis at Stalingrad; the other died in a German concentration camp with the French. (The two men are buried next to one another in Saverne, France.) That sense of historical vulnerability seems to be reflected in Andre’s music, in which sounds arrive tentatively and are always on the verge of disappearing.
Around the time Andre started elementary school, he also began piano lessons. From an early age, he was fascinated by the complex ways with which piano pedals made the notes resonate. “The in-betweens, phenomena of instability — I was extremely aware of that,” he said in an interview.
Andre studied composition at the Paris Conservatory, first with Claude Baliff, then, for a single yet decisive year, with Gérard Grisey. Grisey, known for his luminous harmonies, introduced Andre to the music of Helmut Lachenmann, an eminent cartographer of noise.
When Andre first studied the score of Lachenmann’s “Ausklang,” with its masterful interplay of tone, resonance and noise, it was difficult for him to decipher. Andre “heard maybe 10 percent of the piece” in his head, he recalled. But he intuited that he had a lot to learn from Lachenmann, and in 1993 moved to Stuttgart to study with him.
Andre grew up speaking the Alsatian dialect, which is related to German, and Germany came to feel like home. He has lived in Berlin since 2005, and, in 2007, he changed the original spelling of his name, Marc André, to the Germanized Mark Andre. His titles often take tiny fragments from the German translation of the Bible: On his 2008 album of chamber music, each piece is named after a preposition, particles of language with specific Christian resonances.
He teaches composition at the Carl Maria von Weber College of Music in Dresden, and has found outstanding champions in Germany, including the violinist Isabelle Faust, the clarinetist and composer Jörg Widmann, and the Kuss Quartet.
The violinist Ilya Gringolts, who performed Andre’s violin concerto “an” last year, said in a phone interview that the work was so quiet, a recording of it mostly captured noise made by the audience. “Being in front of an orchestra, which is actually a very big orchestra, which only gets to play super quiet and super fragile is a very special feeling,” Gringolts said. “I never had an experience quite like that.”
In many of Andre’s works, short, violent attacks are followed by passages of quiet, refined reverberation, lending shape and surprise to long stretches of desolate beauty. In “…als…II” for bass clarinet, cello, piano and electronics, amplified resonance makes the music highly tactile. The sounds leave brief but definite impressions, like a thumb pressed against skin.
As a child, Andre was diagnosed with severe asthma. As part of his treatment, his doctor told him to listen closely to the sound of his own lungs. Now, he sees that experience as “his most important early ‘ear training,’” he said.
Delicate variations on breath and breezes are common in his pieces. His 2022 orchestra work “Im Entschwinden” has the musicians of a full orchestra rub their hands together and gently wave their sheet music. Despite the massive forces onstage, the listener hears little but can just about feel the disturbance in the air. Andre’s goal, he said, is to achieve the “most intense fragility.”
His new work, “…selig ist…,” explores familiar areas for Andre. It will include subtle piano resonances, soft trills like butterfly wings, dense harmonies expanding and contracting, and melismas constructed from intricately mirrored motives.
He composed it in memory of a friend’s 8-year-old son who died from a brain tumor. The title is a reference to Jesus’s Sermon on the Mount: A theologian explained to Andre that the text was meant less as a dogmatic lesson than as an act of consolation.
For the electronics, Andre recorded “sound signatures” from a choir the boy sang in and from an oncology clinic where the child underwent treatment. Andre also mapped the resonances at the Palace of Tears, a former border checkpoint between West and East Berlin — he finds it moving that the city retains such a monument to grief — and integrated them into the composition.
He spent over a year on the piece, collaborating closely with Aimard, composing “not less” than eight hours a day and occasionally collapsing straight from his computer into bed. He took breaks for Sunday services and to help out in his church’s soup kitchen.
The death that inspired the piece was hard to reconcile with his faith, Andre admitted. “With a child — as a religious person, it’s very confusing,” he said. But he found comfort in the process of composing. Writing the work was a way to capture the traces a person leaves behind, to counter life’s ephemerality with the kind of permanence art can provide.
“It was a way to help,” he said, “maybe to console.”
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