Franz Hautzinger’s Visual-Acoustic Games

The musical thinking of trumpet player Franz Hautzinger can serve as a suitable example for deconstruction. Hautzinger is merely not interested in what can be played on trumpet but rather what not - “what is behind it.” This can be said about his composing, improvisations, scores as well his way of their interpretation. With unconventional blow techniques he carves from “what is behind” the incoherent sound blocks, connecting them together by clear artistic intention and virtuoso technique. The score and the improvisation are equal parts of Hautzinger’s composing “in situ” or “pure composing” as he uses to call it himself. Hautzinger’s scores are very different from the traditional scores and they rather resemble the caligraphies with autonomous visual qualities. Within the wider developmental resp. typological context of the “genre” they represent tendency that synthesizes visual effect with pragmatic purpose. In other words: they are surely scores (in many of them we can find some fragment of traditional european notation or at least the visual alusion to it) and their non-discoursively arranged elementary units can, of course, gain the features of conventional signs already at the lowest level, but the connotative mechanism is always arbitrary in their case. They function similar way as lyotardian “operators” do - they articulate the separate elements into the higher significant units, but they articulate them without the ambition to create the functional communication system. Searching for the semiotic parallel at other author, the scores of Anthony Braxton come to my mind, but the latters differ from the formers already at the first look because of their calculating exactness that goes at the expense of spontaneous calligraphic gestures typical in contrary for Hautzinger. But the scores of both musicians play in the process of music-making same function - creative and restrictive at the same time. The non-discoursive aggregation of their elements is on one hand the nourishing soil for the free improvisation, on the other their binding schema serves as a vehiculum of compositional thought. Order opens itself up to random in order to allow the birth of new order, Duchamp would probably say. 

It seems that Hautzinger’s “gombergian” (acoustic as well visual) events lack subject as well object. In many aspects they resemble deleuzian notions. They are some microprocesses or rather immanent, procedural “becomings” that “cannot be judged according to definite results, but according to the quality of their course and the force of their progression” (Gilles Deleuze in interview with R. Bellour and F. Ewald, 1990). Hautzingers’ philosophy of creation lies in the spontaneous evocation and interruption these acoustic and visual events and in interpolational exploration of the relations between them. Nothing is impossible but neither stabile in it, because it flows from the autoreproductional immanent sources of his momental inspiration.

The aesthetical aspects of Hautzinger’s composing and the physiological effects of the sound of his trumpet are equated with his obsession to improvise and communicate at other than discoursive basis. Postmodern view of creativity, with quick ability to articulate the plurality, doesn’t lie therefore only in juxtaposing the different styles, quotating, copying or repetiting, but it has also its other, similarly exciting side. It is the barthesian pleasure from the reading of ruptures and interruptions on the surfaces of art texts, their multiple interpretations. Both of these principles participate together on the process of doubting the metaphysics and its replacing with subjective interpretations of its surrogates. Visual-acoustic games of Franz Hautzinger are surely the part of this process. They are not dangerous – they just lead to unforseeble results. Well, this is the risk as well the charm of every game that doesn’t obey rules but creates the new ones – topical for every occasion. 
 

Jozef Cseres