Gordon Kampe Arien Zitronen Sun Eggen Engel Fischer Creed - Wwe40416 - Contemporary

The American literary scholar Harold Bloom de ned the word Ein ussangst (anxiety of in uence) as the fear of in uential traditions, or the weight of tradition pressing down on artists’ shoulders. In doing so, he developed the image of an artist who is so intimidated by the work of his predecessors that he is barely able to express his own thoughts. The only realistic alternative, he said, was the ‘liquidation of resistance’: a form of symbolic patricide. While Bloom applied this to literature, it can also be applied to other areas of art – (new) music in particular could be seen as a progression of such acts where patriarchs have often been declared for dead such that the birth of their descendants is all the more effective. Gordon Kampe, however, need not metaphorically repudiate his forebear- ers in order to write his music. ‘The driving power of my music forms a positive influence in my case’, says Kampe. Indeed, his uninhibitedly delivered influences are heterogeneous and often stem from ‘the sphere of leftovers and runner-up ideas’. They are formed of ‘things – sounds or tones – which have already existed, but are worth hearing again and being investigated for the present.’ The provenance of such material is disparate: from the classic-romantic musical tradition, to literary or lm sources as well as from those areas often labelled ‘popular’, which commonly represent a taboo for those of a sentimental aesthetic. Gordon Kampe doesn’t lay value on deliberately spiritual music which gains its ‘transcendence’ from the incorporation of elements of high-culture, or by attempting to infect the listener through an arti cial sense of re nement. His music is quite the opposite: direct, forthright and carefree. Titles such as Schmackes, Butter und Fische (Oomph, Butter and Fish) or Gassenhauermaschinensuite (Suite of the Popular-Melody Machine) give just as good an in- sight into Kampe’s avoidance of the pretentious as his performance directions, which include ‘banging and cantankerous’, ‘ever heavier’ or ‘full of carrots’. Though it may be tempting to suspect an element of provocation here, Kampe is no iconoclast. His compositional style doesn’t follow an impulse to oppose any particular musical genre or movement – it is simply the result of an attentive, aesthetic sense of perception which articulates a wonderful inventiveness. This in turn allows Kampe to set the world to music. The word ‘world’ here is meant in the sense of Ludwig Wittgenstein – referring to everything in existence including contradictions, discrepancies and absurdities. Nothing is excluded: the terms ‘inadequate’ or ‘illegitimate’ are foreign to Kampe’s compositional methods. This forms the basis of his desire to grant aesthetic access to the everyday world around us. ‘For me, composition is a game’, says Kampe, ‘using objects which – from a distance – don’t seem to belong together. But in the process of composing, everything you can lay your hands on can be amalgamated – as long as it doesn’t run away!’