"I think both the turntable and orchestra are romantic things. They are science from a different age."

“What I do nowadays is a lot of remixing, both stuff from the archives and scores I wrote myself,” says Bernhard Lang. “Sometimes it’s just the beginning of the piece: I destroy it, erase it and reconstruct it again.”

This year’s Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival features two typically intriguing new works by the Austrian composer. On 20 November, Rome ensemble Alter Ego and experimental turntablist Philip Jeck team up for TablesAre Turned, an encounter where each will sample, swap, distort and reimagine the other. Then on 22 November, Amsterdam’s Nieuw Ensemble present the world premiere of Monadologie XIVb. Subtitled Puccini-Variation #2: ‘Im weiten Weltall fühlt sich der Yankee heimisch’ (‘The Yankee feels that he’s in outer space’), the hcmf// co-commission is based upon a snippet from Puccini’s Madame Butterfly, transformed by computer-assisted composition processes into a full piece.

“I’m really fascinated by reflecting upon the subject of the composer himself or herself,” Lang explains, “about identity and this whole process of creating. So my later pieces are all more or less self-referential pieces, where there are different layers of subjectivity and of the creative ego.” This themes of repetition, rewriting and self-referencing are not just reflected in nearly three decades of compositions for the concert hall: these days his work encompasses music theatre – including the mischievously titled I Hate Mozart, created for Vienna’s 2006 celebrations of the composer – collaborations such as TrikeDoubleThree with choreographer and dancer Christine Gaigg, and the soundtrack for Norbert Pfaffenbichler’s short film Conference, an unnerving amalgamation of fictional screen portrayals of Adolf Hitler which screened at the Venice Biennale earlier this year.

Born in Linz in 1957, Lang’s initial routes into music were through studying jazz, classical piano and arranging, only turning to contemporary composition after he had already established a career playing with jazz groups. For some years he combined composing with improvisation; however these days he admits that writing has made him too busy to keep performing and besides, his current interest tends more towards the possibilities of written music.

He found himself considering his attitude to improvisation recently when faced with his collection of recordings from sessions he had participated in: “These are hundreds of CDs and sometimes I don’t even remember the names of all the guys who played on them over the last 30 years,” he says. “I think writing is something else: it’s engraving into some kind of archive of cultural memory and I’ve always been fascinated by that.

“I started to write very early for bands, when I couldn’t even write music very well. I started to write things down and to get a precision into what I was doing. On one hand I loved going freely, improvisation just for itself, nothing fixed, no concepts, absolute musical freedom. On the other hand I was always fascinated by paper and pen and by being re-read by other people, this discourse which opens up by writing, because writing implies interpretation. Improvised music is rarely interpreted: it’s a flower blooming for one evening. So the idea of reinterpretation is more or less focused on the idea of reading a given text. This is what interests me so much.”

Lang started to develop these ideas in earnest with his Schrift-Stücke (‘writing pieces’) series, starting with the solo flute work Schrift 1 (1996), which was written in one draft, “very quickly, like automatic writing when you’re being hypnotised.” This branched out into his Differenz/Wiederholung (Difference/Repetition) series, an exploration of the use of loops that has so far reached its 22nd instalment.

It was the mid-1990s and Lang was inspired by what he heard in the techno music of the period. “One day I started doing a piece using all these repetition brackets. I was very afraid to do this, because it was kind of forbidden at this time, but it became an adventure lasting more than 10 years.” Differenz/Wiederholung: 1 (1998) actually arose out of Lang’s experiment with transcribing a Philip Jeck concert he saw in Graz to make it playable by flute, cello and piano. His interest on transcribing works from one medium to another also led to the 1996 electroacoustic pieces Hommage a Martin Arnold 1 and 2, which applied the same micro-editing techniques to fragments of Mozart’s music as the Viennese film-maker Martin Arnold did with vintage clips, finding sinister new meanings and atmospheres in seemingly innocuous source material.

Of TablesAre Turned, which receives its first UK performance at hcmf// 2011, Lang says, “It’s a work dedicated to one of the greatest improvisers of the century, Philip Jeck. On the other hand, it’s not a free-flight improvisation; it’s more or less an improvisation on scores, one which focuses on given texts. These texts are already present on the vinyl.” The piece is built around a fragment of the song ‘Tables Are Turned’ by German rockers Amon Düül, a group Lang cites as a major influence, both in its messy, politically radical first incarnation and as the more accomplished Amon Düül  II. “The first was a politically very interesting band, but music-wise you could only understand it if you had taken shitloads of LSD. The other one was musically interesting as they did extended improvisations using electronics, which I think to this day are monuments in rock.”

As the work unfolds, Jeck’s performance using turntables, phasing and delay gradually intertwines with that by Alter Ego – “The ideal is at the end you never know who is playing what, the two sources are mixed” – with the musicians simulating the sounds of scratchy vinyl and stuck turntables. Having collaborated with Jeck for several years, Lang is drawn to how Jeck uses the sonic degradation of old records as wider metaphors for imperfection, memory and decay. “I think both the turntable and orchestra are romantic things. They are science from a different age. Also the vinyl is a scripture which is being eroded all the while it is being played. I simulated that in the orchestra with structures losing their treble frequencies more and more,” he says.

Impressive in scope as a freestanding work, TablesAre Turned also forms part of Lang’s Monadologie series, which he says takes the loops of Differenz/Wiederholung in a more mechanical direction. In addition to exploring concepts from Gilles Deleuze’s book Difference and Repetition, the Monadologies were inspired by Gottfried Leibniz’s 1714 text La Monadologie in which the mathematician put forward his theory of monads, summarised by Lang as “the image of the universe consisting of little cog-wheels, with God as the mechanic.”

“With the beginning of the Monadologie pieces I stepped away from hand-written textures towards computer generated textures,” he says. “All of these loops are being generated by a certain set-up of the machine. The Difference/Repetition series are more or less simulating a machine. Here I devised a machine which can eat scores. I can put in a score and another one comes out of it.”

Lang acknowledges the influence of John Cage upon this method of making music, which casts the composer less as someone guiding a piece from initial idea to completion, than as the person clever enough to ask the right questions at the start. He met Cage whilst the composer was in the middle of his Number Pieces, with an assistant charged with the job of making a computer generate the required data. “I really love this decision just to watch things evolve and work. The funny thing is that if you listen to the number pieces, they sound so organic, so open and free, and this is all being done by the machine. This must have been in the back of my mind, but I realised it later when I was doing the Monadologies.”

Unsurprisingly the Monadologies present a challenge even for musicians used to deciphering notated contemporary music: “The computer is very often a musically stupid person, so I have to make this stuff playable,” Lang admits. “Most of them are very fast and rhythmically extremely challenging. In the beginning, musicians will often curse at this. The other thing is that, due to the techniques I use, these things create meta-rhythms, so often you will hear something completely different to what you play. This pulls the carpet out from beneath you, as you really have to concentrate on what you’re playing and not on what you hear, which is unusual for music. So the musicians are parts of a machine while they are playing.”

Lang’s composition software is based upon Stephen Wolfram’s concept of cellular automata and John Conway’s Game of Life, systems derived from mathematical rules which show behaviour similar to simple organisms. “They all start with random seeds. I had this idea: why not use a musical seed? I made this discovery that when I put in a musical seed, suddenly the whole automaton starts behaving musically.” Monadologie XIVb uses the musical phrase “The Yankee feels that he’s in outer space” from Madame Butterfly as its seed. “It’s both a little bit funny and ironic, yet on the other hand, the thing is so rich that I managed to use one cell to evolve the next 15 minutes. Just a few bars of Puccini generated the whole piece.”

It is, he says, something like being a gardener. “It’s all about surprising myself, watching how these things grow. I really strive for this kind of surprise and wonder while I’m composing.”

Click here to buy tickets for TablesAreTurned with Philip Jeck and Alter Ego on Sunday 20 November, and for Nieuw Ensemble performing Monadologie XIVb: Puccini-Variation #2 on Tuesday 22 November

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