Georg Katzer

Les Paysages fleurissants collects seven electroacoustic works by Georg Katzer, from 1976 to 2010. Released by the Akademie der Künste in Berlin for the composer's 80th birthday, it reads like a documentary report on his long engagement with technology. The disc runs from early tape work to pieces generated by a computer program he developed himself.

Katzer was born in 1935 in Habelschwerdt in Silesia and died in Berlin in 2019. He became a member of the East German Akademie der Künste in 1978. In 1980 he founded the Academy's Studio for Electroacoustic Music, and he counted among the pioneers of electroacoustic music in the GDR. His electroacoustic catalogue, about a fifth of his output, holds some fifty works for electronics alone or with instruments. Among the latter are the Ballade vom zerbrochenen Klavier and the multimedia work L'homme machine, neither of which appears here. In 1984 in Stockholm he produced his first computer composition made entirely of synthetic sounds. At the time programming was laborious, and waiting for the resulting sounds wearing. He later developed his own program for a self-organising composition process that generates controlled aleatoric sequences.

Memory, history and politics often form his starting points. Bevor Ariadne kommt (Rondo, 1976), the earliest piece here, deals with the events around the Prague Spring of 1968. Mein 1989 (1989/90) is about the political changes in East Germany. Preußisch Blau. Tagtraum. Erinnerung (1979/2008) recalls the technology of a time long past. It evokes equipment filling a room, space-consuming tape loops and an endless battle with background noise.

Analogue and digital sounds, instrumental sources among them, are often mixed with noises and signals. Steinelied 1 (1984) and La Mécanique et les agents de l'érosion (1985) date from the mid-1980s, and the title work Les Paysages fleurissants from 2000. With Steinelied 2 (2010), the composer's work came to consist in choosing among recorded sounds and composing with them. Each piece lasts between six and twelve minutes, so the disc moves quickly through four decades.

CD, Wergo WER 7338 2, released in 2015.