Martin Grütter · Composer
Martin Grütter · Composer
Martin Grütter
Composer

Aesthetics

Electronics, interaction, performance

The performance situation, too, has to be transcended. I like unsecured performing situations that force musicians and listeners to leave their comfort zone.
In my piece Heroes of Feedback (2012), two musical bravers – trumpet and percussion – fight against the threat of extermination by loudly whistling loudspeakers. Computer and performers interact live, the rules of the game change continuously, as well as the emerging music – and the musicians run on adrenalin. I've done a theoretical exploration of this piece here.
In Messer Engel Atem Kling (2011), a (failing) rehearsal and a (virtuoso) concert get mixed. In NeandertalerRocketUniversalmusik (2009/10), I allow myself – playing the doublepiano while bawling, screaming & wailing – to degenerate into an ape. And my festival schwelbrand (since 2011, www.schwelbrand.de) melts pieces of various composers into an acoustically and optically coherent performative-theatrical-liturgical hyper-happening.

Music theatre and speech

Surreal-fascinating worlds between language game and dream logic, where nothing is comprehensible and still everything plausible – that's my aim for my music theatre pieces.
My half hour short-opera orlando (2011–13) oscillates between heroism, identity lab, and desperation – just bad that the hero isn't in the mood to take part in the play. The one hour one-man performance Sprachschmelze 1 0 0 1 leads the protagonist into a complexly interlaced, selfdestructive vortex between reality and fiction, stage and auditorium, violence and love, history and myth. The performative concert piece Die Sprache der Jongleure (2007/08) explores the mysteries of the parataxis – from letter sequences to ascending gods, from biblical genealogical lists to burnt peoples.

Silence

Yes, I've also written quiet pieces. Well, at least with substantial passages in piano or pianissimo, even with half and whole notes. Among these works are e.g. Die Häutung des Himmels (2016) with reverberating remote percussion, and Siebenkreiswerk (2008), a kind of quiet echo (with similar material) of my preceding piece Mandala Mossad.