About Bauhaus: More stories, more music

Adriana Kapsreiter: For me, this meant creating a new concept that delved even deeper and yet allowed for discussion that didn’t feel like a university lecture. I wanted to revisit Bauhaus history in its entirety – one episode for every year.

Each episode focused on a specific topic that played a significant role in the corresponding year. But this time around, the stories about the Bauhaus weren’t supposed to be conveyed in conversation and words alone. The school of art and design deserves a touch of artistic flair, something creative, novel. And with a podcast, there’s one artistic genre especially suited for this purpose: music! The idea is to create a different level of listening through music, to create a mood that allows us to experience our trip back in time to the years 1919 to 1933 even more intensively. In the same way something magical happens when we unpack a world of new ideas in a good conversation, music too is full of magic because it eludes words and yet can speak directly to the heart.

Adriana Kapsreiter: The fact that music played an important role at the historic Bauhaus fits wonderfully in this respect. Listening to music, playing music, composing music, translating music into other artistic genres – all of that was part of the Bauhaus story and even more. Although I’m an art historian and love history and really appreciate historical reconstructions, it was clear to me that in the second podcast season, music should not sound like it did in the Bauhaus era, rather it should convey the spirit and the mood of those years and its themes. It should connect a piece of the past with a piece of the present, a bridge from then to now.

But how does one go about that? I had to find someone who not only understood my vision of a musical bridge spanning the Bauhaus and today, but also someone who could musically build it. Then I found Ralf Merten, a lucky strike for this project in many ways. He is a composer, plays multiple instruments, works as an artist known by the pseudonym Kobat, composes and produces film scores, theatre music and marketing jingles – basically he knows every possible type of performance and purpose in which music plays a role. And most importantly, he immediately understood my vision.

Ralf Merten: When we were brainstorming ideas for music which approached the topic of the Bauhaus from a historical, but even more from a contemporary perspective, we quickly realised that the investigation can’t only be about reproducing the historic sound, the instrumentation and compositional techniques of an epoch whose ruptures and radicality created the foundation of so-called modernism. It would be presumptuous to historically replicate this upheaval or apply it to the current state of contemporary music. Nor would it function as illustrative music for a podcast. The question was more about what exactly we wanted to illuminate about the Bauhaus.

In discussions and brainstorming sessions with Adriana Kapsreiter, we eventually agreed that the founding and early years of the Bauhaus in Weimar were significantly influenced by a community spirit and experimentation. These two pillars would be the basis of our musical conception.There are bandlike structures, improvisation and collective working methods that are suited quite well to translating the spirit of community into music. It’s a working method similar to that practised in jazz, especially free jazz, Krautrock and, to some extent, electronic music.

The way we arranged the setting was not to compose the music conventionally, but rather develop it during the recording session in the collective – not in the sense of historically reenacting the legendary Bauhaus orchestra. Rather our goal was to record improvised music using traditional – but also contemporary – techniques like electronics, granular effects and modular synthesisers which would invoke the spirit of awakening of those first Bauhaus students in Weimar, serve as background music for the podcast, illustrate and tell us about the Bauhaus entirely without words. To avoid reproducing stereotypes and stylistic clichés during improvisation, I picked six musicians for this experiment, all of whom have never performed before in this formation. They all come from different backgrounds and have actively worked as improvisers and composers themselves – the Kubik Kollektiv

The next question was how to make a piece of music through collective improvisation that doesn’t sound random or only vaguely related to the Bauhaus, but rather musically conveys concrete aspects of the Bauhaus, as well as the various phases of the school. The central aspect of our translation into music was sound, by which I mean the choice of instruments and how they’re crafted. Applying experimental performance techniques and alienating effects and preparing the guitar and piano strings and drums with corresponding materials and “objets trouvés”, we met the thematic requirements, like the carpentry or metal workshop. The modular synthesiser and other acoustic equipment express the machine manufacturing and serial production. We also translated the themes we want to talk about and the corresponding subtext into harmonics, scales and rhythmic structures. And finally, for some topics, we needed to structure the instrumental interaction with rules that defined, for example, what complement starts first, which instrument is dominant, and which is the accompaniment, and what predetermined sequence is performed in response to the predecessor’s phrase. But what common knowledge and Bauhaus associations could we as musicians relate to and communicate with one another?

We realised that we needed more clearly defined principles.

Adriana Kapsreiter: It was clear that the principles Ralf Merten needed for getting the Kubik Kollektiv ready should not be overly text-based or cerebral. As he put it, “it should speak to the musicians at an intuitive, artistic level.” That’s why I tried to identify the core theme in every episode, narrow it down to its essentials and outline it with a few keywords. And of course, I could work with pictures from the Bauhaus, drawings, paintings, sketches, buildings, carpets, consumer goods – the school’s entire creative cosmos. That’s how we came up with a kind of “portfolio of musical inspiration”.

Ralf Merten: The musicians received this portfolio in advance to give them a chance to imagine the sounds, harmonic structures, rhythm and tonality. They then met at the studio and performed in this constellation for the first time.

Thinking about where this session should take place, I envisioned a sound studio with a working atmosphere and room layout much like the Krautrock studios of the 1970s, especially the Inner Space Studio used by the band Can and the Conny Plank Studio, where I made my first recording with Erwin Ditzner on percussion 25 years ago. Unfortunately, both studios no longer exist. They were unique in that there were no room dividers and no soundproof booths for the drums; the entire band recorded all together in one room. All crosstalk over the instrument microphones was also recorded and couldn’t be filtered out in post-production. This working method was important to me because it thrives on the tension of collective improvisation, that not a single note can be taken back. Every scrape, every apparent mistake remains an immutable element of the recording.

I finally discovered Kommune 2010, a recording studio in Offenbach, where mainly bands go to record music. The large recording room has an impressive acoustic quality thanks to its high ceiling and offers sufficient space to assemble all the musicians along with their respective instruments.

Adriana Kapsreiter: I’ve always associated “studio” with the sound studio where we recorded the first season of “about bauhaus”. The studio Kommune 2010 in Offenbach, on the other hand, was completely different and something like you’d see in a film from the 1970s about experimental music. Situated inside an old industrial complex with white-washed brick walls and old carpets and a roughshod charm of a former industrial production site. A setting the Bauhaus members would have certainly liked.

Each musician had set up their various instruments at their designated spot for the special recording session. And I also had a job to do during the recording. Before each piece, I briefly explained the corresponding theme in a few sentences, aspects I felt were essential for the music.

What they created in the recordings was, in my opinion, truly a piece of Bauhaus spirit. The musicians – all of them masters of their craft and their respective instruments – ventured into new, free and enormously creative terrain and jointly produced something new – inspired by the stories of modernism.

Ralf Merten: It was only during the recording session that the musicians’ different interpretations came together, supplemented, clashed with one another, merged into a whole, produced contrasts and friction. From this energised atmosphere, we collectively created music that conveyed as many aspects of each corresponding theme as possible from a variety of perspectives.

The music produced by the Kubik Kollektiv can be characterised as something between jazz, electronic music and Krautrock, and also ventures to extremes, like punk or an improvision born out of a Bach cantata. It was important to us not to play music that could be clearly assigned to a single genre, but rather music that represented a fusion of referenced musical styles. The Bach cantata is played on the saxophone and is accompanied by an analogue e-piano from the 1970s which is then distorted by digital granular effects used today. The punk groove is driven by a synthesiser sequence that evokes associations of the Neue Deutsche Welle but is created with a modern-day modular synthesiser. Building on the various influences and personalities of the participating musicians, Kubik Kollektiv blurred the boundaries between free acoustic jazz and contemporary electronic music to create a stand-alone sound. And ideally, listeners will associate this sound with the Bauhaus.

Adriana Kapsreiter hosts the podcast About Bauhaus, for which the Kubik Kollektiv, founded by Ralf Merten, contributed the music. The music is also connected to the film project Bauhaus Forever by director Nico Weber.