Lost Interviews: Gunda Gottschalk

The following is the third in a sort of "Lost Interviews" series of email Q & A sessions I did for another publication, which, due to time constraints and general procrastination on this writer’s part, hasn’t seen the light of day for quite a while. Rather than sit on the interviews, they’ll be published at fakejazz.com… Better late than never, right? Gunda Gottschalk is a classically trained violinist and violist who is very active in the improvised music scene in Wuppertal, Germany. Having played with legendary bassist Peter Kowald and other local musicians, Gottschalk has slowly begun to make an international name for herself with a solo recording, Wassermonde, and a 2002 US tour.

fakejazz: Could you begin by explaining how you began playing violin and some of the defining parts of your musical development?

Gunda Gottschalk: I started to play violin when I was 7 years old. My parents don’t have any musical background, but they like to listen to music. They sent me to the music school and after an elementary musical education I choose the violin and studied for 10 years under a teacher in the music school. Then, I changed to a professor at the conservatory and at the age of 19 I started the classical violin studies at the university. I finished studies 1995 and since then I’ve worked as a free artist. My education is very classical but in Wuppertal where I studied there is a lot of new music and also a lot of free music going on. We learned to improvise (a little) at the university, too. It helps to teach children [improvisation]. So it is part of the pedagogical study. During the studies I stepped more and more into contemporary music. I performed new compositions in a string quartet and other ensembles of chamber music. 1991 I became a member of a Quintet, which still works today. It is called Partita Radicale and consists of two flute players, violin, viola and accordion. We all know each other from the university. From performing very open and experimental forms of compositions we came more and more into improvised music and play our own pieces that develop from improvising and we play completely improvised, too. With this work over more then 10 years, I’ve now learned a lot about improvisation and possibilities of structures, communication, sounds and feelings. Another very important moment in my live was the meeting with Peter Kowald in 1994/95. He did something very amazing: For one year he didn’t leave his house and played only concerts he could reach with his double bass on his three wheeled bicycle. And each Saturday he gave house concerts for his neighbors and friends in his atelier in the Luisenstr.116. It was Peter Kowald’s Project, called 365 days at the ORT (which means PLACE) and during this project he was raising an ensemble of improvised music where everybody could come and rehearse on Thursdays. I stepped into the ensemble and Peter Kowald noticed me. Soon he invited me to play on Saturdays. After his Solo he was always combining some musicians (very often also international guests) for the second set. I think my classical background was a point of interest for him. He was always on search for musicians with a completely different musical tradition who stepped into the improvised music and he was fascinated by the fact that someone can play free without knowing Coleman and all the other heroes of the 60s.... So I had the chance to step into Peter Kowald’s global village group and along with a Chinese woman we kept a fixed trio with international guests since Peter died. So knowing Peter Kowald meant a strong development for me. I got to know a lot of musicians and stepped completely into the free music scene. Peter Kowald was also a kind of mentor for me and I think he was always looking at my development from afar and was quite happy with it. Shortly before he died he visited my last Solo concert in Wuppertal, he helped me with advice and contacts for my US Tour and we where planning to realize a label for improvised music in Wuppertal called elephant, which I will continue of my own now. I will publish unpublished recordings pf Peter (those ones he was planning to publish) and also bring out new productions of the musicians here. The first CD that came out is my Solo [disc]. The label is called elephant.

There seem to be minimalist, or, at least, microtonal aspects that are prominent in your work. Is this an area of music that you’ve explored purposefully?

Yes, I like microtonal aspects, especially quartertones, interferences and strange tuning. I think with a tuning that is not only adapted to classical scales (major, minor for example), I can fill up the performance space in a special way. When I want to play something very clear and simple, maybe also soft and silent. I like to use the classical pitches and I try to play them as tuned as I can. When I want to create big sounds in the room, which sometimes can seem to circulate, I use microtonality and sometimes also voice to support the sound. I don’t feel very close to minimal music like Steve Reich, Philip Glass or Terry Riley (I don’t know the spelling of this name), but during the concert it’s possible that my music could develop into reduced forms that refer to their type of composing, but I like to get in and out of this at the same time, not keeping one rhythm (pulse) or scale for a very long time.

Your US tour was my introduction to your music. How did the tour go? Do you feel that it was good for you as an improviser?

I played 15 concerts in different places. All of them started with a solo set and in the second part I often played with other musicians. Some of the concerts were complete solo performances. All the musicians I played with I did not know, besides Assif Tsahar, who I met several times before. So everything was quite new for me. Every time it was a good "training" to react to a new situation, play in several spaces with different atmosphere, try to reach the audience by creating an open and concentrating tension and trying to find a way to communicate with the other musicians. That was improvising in the best sense and I think my solo playing changed during the tour.

How do you find the improvising styles of American and European musicians to differ?

Of course I can give only a superficial answer to this question, based on my three week Tour and on my visits to New York. The improvising styles are influenced by the "music scene" of the area. That is clear for USA and Germany (or Europe) and you can find different styles her or across the Atlantic. Like the Berlin or London scenes, I discovered the wish to reduce the material very strictly in Boston or Chicago. It sometimes goes so far that it is almost forbidden to play a natural sound on your instrument in the classical sense. A very radical, pure, silent, and sensible music rises out of these rules. Then we have the tradition of "Power play" by the free jazz players of the 60s. We still feel that influence very strongly in my hometown of Wuppertal (Brötzmann/Kowald) and I found similar energies on a very high level in New York. New York costs and brings you a lot of energy at the same time. The music in this town has to be strong and lively and I like it a lot. There also exists a huge variety of different musical cultures who are able to communicate with their knowledge of improvisation. In Germany we don’t have many different musical cultures living and playing together. Chinese, Korean or Japan musicians who play their own traditional instruments are very rare here. (Most musicians from Asian countries come over to improve their knowledge and techniques with the classical European instruments.) But in Germany we have a very nice development, that modern composed music and improvised music are growing together more and more, and there is born a very interesting collaboration. There are orchestras and composers who invite Improvisers for solo parts and improvising ensembles invite composers to create pieces together. I hope that those musical worlds (different cultures, jazz, classical music, folklore composition, improvisation) are having the chance to learn more from each other and we will be able to cross over the strict borders of musical backgrounds. Improvising could be one key to achieve this...maybe...

You mentioned folklore, and I’ve sensed a little bit of that in your music. Do traditional German folklore or history inform your music at all?

There are theoretical texts about improvised music, that this is the music which refuses to be leaded by one person or one system. (Conductor, composer, or a structured form, an appointment). So politically it can be seen as regime denying , and basically democratic. But I think it is difficult to compare a musical form directly with a political attitude. Of course there are a lot of connections, because musicians who play this music don’t like too many rules in their lives, so they might also be sensitive to political restrictions and misused power of single people or parties. The other way round: the radically leftist and liberal thinking of political groups might also provoke a good basic tension for free music. There was an important direction of direct political statements in Art at the late 60s and 70s. Fluxus, Dadaism, Free Jazz were raised with the intention to show a strong opposition to the political thinking of the major citizenship, so this Art provoked many scandals. But this time is over. Great Fluxus works (for example of Josef Boeys) now are shown in the important museums and nobody cares anymore (yes sometimes you can see people passing by this artworks and shaking their heads, but that’s all). But now we have the possibility to build up upon this achievements of the 70s Art. They destroyed a lot of borders and made it possible to now go a lot of new ways and we have a lot of freedom to use the materials we want to use and combine them in the way we want to... I (personally) cannot say that my music is directly referring to our political past or to the actual political situation. And I never made conclusions of German history referring to my own music. Maybe my conciseness is more instinctive and later on it leads to political conclusions.