A concert of 639 years duration and 12 keys for John Cage

Today it is a given standard to any keyboarder around the world, that his instrument is equipped with seven white and five black keys per octave. This is also a given standard to all synthesizers – as far as they are played or controlled by a keyboard.

But: there where times, when the distribution of tones across a keyboard was not standardized the way we know it today. The first keyboard featuring this modern aspect of its design was implemented in the Halberstadt Cathedral during the year 1361. It was a truly revolutionary technique these days.

In the year 2000 – that means exactly 639 years after the invention of the modern keyboard – there was a handful of people bothering about the question, how long can a composition last? They concluded, that it may not be possible to play any piece of music longer than the lifetime of the instrument it is performed on. In case of an organ it is the hypothetical lifetime of 639 years. So they started the concert that will have exactly this duration. Performed is the composition „Organ2 / As Slow As Possible“ by John Cage. – Following his tempo-instruction in the most literally sense of the word. Click -> this to read more about this unbelievable concert.

The Invincible, Lem and The Palatin Project

Stanisław Lem was a Polish science fiction, philosophical and satirical writer. His books have been translated into 41 languages and have sold over 27 million copies.

Music meets Poetry

Very often accidential events and erratic incidents start to develop influence on things. One of these erratic incidents was the visist of two innocent Dubliners in our village during the last summer.

We had a nice time at our local vine festival. And as I was looking for native english speakers, I immediateley convinced them to recite some poems in front of my microphone. So it came, that I now own some recorded versions of poems by Robert Graves.

And as I startet to create a first composition featuring one of those poems (Always) ... I developed the idea to dedicate the whole next album to this brilliant writer and poet. So actually I am working on my afternext album with the title Electron, dedicated to Robert Graves.

Enthusiasm for electronic music

It was a long way to go ... for electronic music to achieve its popular, global prevalence as known nowadays. It was a long way to go from the first steps with monsterous machinery to the sounds of our modern society. And so there is a long list of pioneers, who had to overcome resistance. Many of them prepared their contribution to this overwhelming development during times of ignorance and when they where considered as kinky crank weirdos. This page is to give a glipse of how many people where dedicated to electronic music, even a long time before any of us was born. To give an impression of what the early days where like, I would like to tell the following story:

Think about the ringtones of mobile phones, all the beeps and blimps of all the little helpers in our households, cars and in our computers. Not even an eggboiler without beeping his mood and status loudly. Hard to imagine, that first developments of electrified soundgeneration go back in time until the early 1870ies. A man named Elisha Gray invented the "musical telegraph", and even performed a concert in 1874 with that invention. (See the article below). Some 20 years later, Thaddeus Cahil developed in 1897 the so called Teleharmonium. This was a heavy-duty machine, with a weight of 7 tons, generating electronic sounds by using rotating gearwheels. And its successor, the patented socalled Dynamophone was even more monsterous: 200 tons of wires, cogwheels and transformers ... designed to feed music directly into the telephonegrid ! This is an astounding parallel, just think about the modern ways of distributing music. To learn more about the timeline of EM, click here. If you feel, that I forgot someone or you find a mistake in the following data, please don´t hesitate to contact me and I will be pleased to add new items or correct any mistake.

Elisha Gray and the first synthesizer

The very first time when electronically generated music was presented to an audience, was in the Presbyterian Church in Highland Park (Illinois) on December 29, 1874. The american inventor Elisha Gray gave this first public demonstration of his invention for generating musical tones and transmitted "familiar melodies through telegraph wire" according to a newspaper announcement.

This was the first electric music synthesizer using self vibrating electromagnetic circuits. Each of them was a single-note oscillator, operated by a two-octave piano keyboard. Elisha Gray was an American electrical engineer and is best known for his development of a telephone prototype in 1876. So he invented the telephone simultanously with Alexander Bell (who is actually credited to be the inventor of the phone) and he (Gray) invented the telefax as well. (This of course took another 70 years or so, before it was to conquer the globe). Elisha Gray was born August 2, 1835 in Barnesville, Ohio and died January 21st, 1901 (aged 65) in Newtonville, Massachusetts.

Why The Palatin Project

The term "Palatin" within my projects name derives basically from three main factors, related to history and historical fact.

First: my family has its roots in Hungary. In Hungary the Palatin was an high dignitary on court, he was kind of "spokesman" of the king. He was to announce all the news and decisions, tell all the storys about laws and regulations. Kind of a parallel: I´m telling stories, same as he did ...

Second: The Palatin Hill is one of the seven hills, rome is buildt on. (Latin: Collis Palatium or Mons Palatinus) it is the centermost of the Seven Hills of Rome and is one of the most ancient parts of the city. It stands 40 metres above the Forum Romanum, looking down upon it on one side, and upon the Circus Maximus on the other. - The term Palatin is derived from the noun palātum "palate"; The ancient romans (Ennius) used it as a synonym for „heaven", and it may be connected with the Etruscan word for sky: falad. - So even the ancient romans foresaw, that there will be some music, related to sky and space. ; -)

Third: the region I am living in Germany is called the Palatinate (or: Palatinium). So the coincidence of these three facts led to the name as a logic consequence. By the way: it is not by accident, that my logo is carrying a stylised unicorn. The unicorn is part of the crest in my hometown, Giengen upon Brenz. So I carry the unicorn as a hommage to my hometown.

About Unicorns

A unicorn (from Latin unus 'one' and cornu 'horn') is a mythological creature. Though the modern popular image of the unicorn is sometimes that of a horse differing only in the horn on its forehead, the traditional unicorn also has a billy-goat beard, a lion's tail, and cloven hooves these distinguish it from a horse.

"The unicorn is the only fabulous beast that does not seem to have been conceived out of human fears. In even the earliest references he is fierce yet good, selfless yet solitary, but always mysteriously beautiful. He could be captured only by unfair means, and his single horn was said to neutralize poison." Marianna Mayer, The Unicorn and the Lake. To read more about the myth and history of unicorns, click -> this.

Inspired but unpublished

There is a small number of musical tracks I will not be able to publish, because I used licence-protected materials (like soundsamples or recorded spoken word) in producing these tracks. Most of them are nothing to speak of. But there is a duo of tracks which I feel very pitty about beeing not able to publish.

The titles „Two Cybernetic Bodies“ and „Elyseeum – A little Young“ are featuring samples from the 1995 animé „Ghost in the shell“. This animé is to be called a masterpiece of the SF-anime-genre and a milestone for SF in general. It was created by Masamune Shirow.

Johannes Kretz, my austrian namesake

Recently I discovered, that there is a namesake of mine, living in Vienna (Austria). We do not only have the same name in common, but we share our passion for electronic music. Although we have very different attitudes and may be a VERY different output, there is one thing we have in common in the end: it´s the electronically designed sound we adore.

In the works of Johannes Kretz a lot of attention is given to the shaping of timbre and harmony , to achieve a unification of them. Sounds are interpreted as chords, chords fused to let them appear as sounds. Generating synthetic sound material with help of the computer has led to the folowing procedure: Analysis of instrumental sounds (FFT) helps to understand the inner structure of sounds and allows to create models for generating synthetic sounds, but also to derive the harmonic structure of the piece. /// "Computer Aided Composition": simplyfies handling of lots of complex, microtonal chords. /// Control and performance of sound synthesis: Transitions, deviations, modifications ... of sounds are described in a clear syntax.