Cover Design: Ott + Stein, Berlin; Scan: Christine Berkenhoff

Born in 1938, Volker Heyn is an "outsider", or perhaps an "unloved insider", an avant-gardist when it comes to experimental music, reaching beyond the trends of his generation of New Simplicity, Neo-Romanticism, New Complexity and so forth. In 1960 he left Europe to spend more than ten years in Australia where he joined a travelling theatre company, made ends meet by singing in nightclubs and working the night shift in a metal works.

Heyn's music is the mise en scène of an acoustic condition, whose manifold reflections
perpetually interlock and shatter, like a box of mirrors. It investigates a process, which in itself is inaccessible and cannot be reproduced on paper. Volker Heyn is not interested in sound per se - in the positive acoustic gesture - but, and especially, in the negative form, in the responding tone gesture, in the duplicating of friction and in discontinuous movements.

His composition patterns follow the resonance - the overhang - that we are able to perceive only by restricting our sensors almost to zero, in order not to succumb to its violence. And this must be enough, more would be too much. Then these remnants of sound will be drained and exhausted right up to the merest subversive unit. This is the soundscape that we are given: an intricate, though ultimately innocent structure of endless macro and micro sounding reactions.

Martha Agostini

• K'TEN für Kontrabaß, Violine, Klavier und Perkussion 2005
• Sirènes für Streichquartett 1983
• Préludes zu Ferro Canto #1+#2+#3 Tonband (Fragment) 1989
• Blues in B-flat für Violoncello solo 1981
• Blah 2 für Violine solo und 7 Violinen vom Zuspielband 1985
• Resurrection #1 für für Klavier, Kontrabaß und Zuspielband 2000
• Les Visages des Enfants für Streichquartett 2002-2004
• Graffiti, Risse für 4 Holzbläser, Klavier und 3 Streicher 1998-1999

Ausführende: Kammerensemble Neue Musik Berlin · Steffen Tast; Pellegrini-Quartett: Antonio Pellegrini, Thomas Hofer, Fabio Marani, Helmut Menzler

Koproduktionen: Hans Rosbaud Studio des Südwestrundfunks Baden-Baden und mit dem Rundfunk Brandenburg-Berlin; Konzertaufnahme vom Westdeutschen Rundfunk, Klaus-von-Bismarck-Saal, Köln



Audio sample: Blues in B flat (Format: MP3)



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