espite all their modernist polemic and tradition-fracturing rhetoric, composers of the twentieth century found themselves almost obsessively pondering the works of artists past. The modernist desire to ruthlessly probe the works of previous composers stemmed from any number of potentially conflicting motives – the desire to root out history’s damning flaws, to trace the origins of the modernist technical and constructivist obsessions, the potential to find music’s future buried beneath the weight of music’s past. In their struggle to escape from under the shadow of music’s historical idols, many twentieth-century composers engaged in acts of deliberate “recomposition” – attempts to empty the vessel of history by dissection or destruction or works past. Schoenberg’s Concerto for String Quartet and Orchestra, for instance, brutally recasts the Baroque mannerisms of Handel’s Concerto grosso in B-flat major into Schoenberg’s own exquisitely airless Expressionism, replete with alternately desolate and frenzied washes of strangled string textures. America’s Charles Ives approached the American folk and popular tradition with less malicious zeal as he recast popular song and military marches as cacophonous flurries of tone clusters or spacious, stratified layers of delicate dissonance.


On Betrieb, his first solo release, Ekkehard Ehlers draws the source materials for his laptop experiments solely from the catalog of turn-of-the-century Ives and Schoenberg – a recognition perhaps of the need for continued acts of recomposition in the new era of digital modernism. Yet Ehlers reworks the music of both semi-Romantic modernists with a sense of delicacy and reverence apart from Schoenberg’s borderline malice or Ives’ almost-naïve machismo. Instead, Ehlers favors recomposition as forecast by Stravinsky’s masterwork Pulcinella, which placed the nearly banal simplicity of then-antiquated songs by eighteenth-century opera composer Pergolesi in the context of a modern harmonic language. Even more appropriate comparisons could be drawn between Betrieb and Lukas Foss’ lesser known Baroque Variations – a work in which Handel and Bach are bent and blurred into dense, amorphous clouds of sound. As suggested in the slightly garbled and curiously non-Schoenbergian polemic in the liner notes, Ehlers aims to close the divide between the minimalist digital art and the complex music purveyed by the pioneering modernists. Ehlers is not without his successes in his reconciliation of the two camps – yet he too often becomes mired in the tension between his fondness for the source material and his loyalty to current Powerbook fashions.


True to its “classical” origins, Betrieb opens with an overture – the gentle “Auf,” a forty-five second teaser for the potential of Ehlers’ conceptually ambitious music. A sighing string loop ebbs and flows amidst ethereal time-stretched strings, reverberant thumps, and a smoothly swelling tide of spidery glitches that rustle so subtly that they go undetected on the first listen. Later in the proceedings, “Weit” and “Unten” explore similarly beautiful territory; the former treats an obsessive string ostinato with a digital warble under a ceiling of bell-like filtered tones, the latter pitch-shifts cropped string samples into gently dissonant eddies offset by the appearance of harsh harmonic scrapes. Such tracks represent a remarkable conversion of the Romantic subtext in both Schoenberg and Ives into the dialect of digital minutiae – transformation of the true analog “glitch” palette (pizzicato, string scrape, harmonic) into the pops and fizzles of digital distortion. Similarly, they capture the essence of both Schoenberg and Ives without amounting to rote imitation; here, the regularity of Ehlers’ loop cycles reinforce the studied claustrophobia of Schoenberg while the multi-tiered cells imitate the most graceful spatial manipulations in Ives’ music. Even when Ehlers veers into slightly more synthetic territory, such as the academic funk of “Innen” or the clipped piano minimalism of “Aussen,” he retains loyalty to both composers’ intricate soundworlds while retaining a decidedly modern vernacular.


When Ehlers pushes too far into either the organic or digital, however, his music is pulled in to muddier territory by over-competitive influences. While the more successful pieces represent a hybrid of austerity and warmth, the less successful slide into a rut of overused plug-in gimmickry or the snare of seemingly careless reorganization. The whistle-tone squelches on “Schneller,” though fairly charming on their own, lack the warmth and intricacy of those pieces which allow fragments of the source material to peek through untreated – as such, the composition appears unnecessarily stark and one-dimensional by comparison. “Fruher” suffers a similar fate; the subtle harmonic shifts from unrecognizable source samples suffocate in a haze of tremolo and reverb treatments that remain unchanged throughout the track’s six-minute duration. If presented in a more exclusively digital environ, such tracks would be fine exercises in computer-based construction (albeit slightly rigid and academic construction). Yet in the light of Ehlers more organic work, they seem to suffer less from faulty assembly and more from conceptual awkwardness. At other times, Ehlers appears too content to loop his samples into repetitive cells of untreated sound – the results turn Ives’ lush string washes into ponderous tedium and mutes the anxiety in Schoenberg’s composition. Whereas the successful tracks on Betrieb present the source samples as essential, the less successful render the source material arbitrary.


On this outing, Ekkehard Ehlers falls short of crafting a Pulcinella for the computer age. Granted, Betrieb is not without its gems – more than half of the album shines with both audible and intellectual rigor, a thought-provoking merger of traditions old and new, and an obvious undercurrent of good intentions and careful thought. Yet the conflict of loyalties – sentimentality for the now-nostalgic sounds of twentieth-century modernism and the embrace of neo-modernist austerity – too often tears at the edges of Ehlers’ music. Ehlers embraces the ideals of the recomposition tradition, yet this release finds him lacking the clarity of direction that lent the reconstructions of Schoenberg, Stravinsky, Ives and others their musical and cultural weight. All said, the glimmers of true inventiveness that light up corners of Betrieb hint at the more refined works within Ehlers capabilities, as the awkward early exercises of both Schoenberg and Ives would hint at the innovative works of genius to follow.