Dieter Schnebel - Styles

Styles

And although the majority of his works are considered material aimed toward the “vocal experiment” and 12-tone side of music, his pieces do have a wide range of styles, even with such a small size of composed repertoire. For instance, he put forth many arrangements of Bach, Beethoven, Webern and Wagner; sometimes using their traditional concepts to the idea of untraditional techniques and ways of listening to them.

Theories self-created and inherited were/are often practiced at performances. He believed that you could increase a student’s vocal range through the use of specific psychological methods, or physical placement. For example, placing singers far apart in a triangular shape causes a musically spatial feeling, and therefore sounds much different from the density when singers are close together. Other times he may just take a traditional piece and turn it into an improvised 13-voice canon. Pieces using such theories can be found in his most famous works’ set; the “Fur Stimmen (...missa est)” choral pieces, like “:! (madrasha 2)” and “AMN”. The first, an unpronounceable title, means “a non-verbal outburst or exclamation”, and used to explore the options in human phonetic sounds, such as vocal and musical versions in lips, tongue, glottus, nasal and other pressures through pitches. The second (unvocalized Hebrew) emphasizes the idea of musical space, with several large gaps in the piece, as well as bizarre vocal experiments.