Fritz Hauser

Schraffur for Gong Solo is a single uninterrupted performance of almost an hour by Swiss percussionist and composer Fritz Hauser, played on one small gong. The piece was born almost by accident: invited to share an evening with five other percussionists and expecting technical chaos, Hauser stopped striking the instrument and started to scrape it, damping it with his hands and drawing sticks across its surface. In his own words, he no longer hits, he scratches, and what fascinates him most is the passage from silence to sound.

The title means hatching, the fine parallel lines of a drawing, and that is how the music grows: stroke after stroke, a dense web of overtones rises in a long, slow crescendo and then slowly recedes. Within that single arc the ear catches sudden accelerations and slowdowns, and the gong moves from the dry, matte sound of metal being rubbed to something abstract and hypnotic. The booklet by Guillaume Belhomme compares the shape of the piece to the Niesen, the pyramid-shaped mountain above Lake Thun painted by Ferdinand Hodler.

First conceived as a work of about twenty minutes, Schraffur has since grown into many versions, for gong and symphony orchestra in Lucerne, for radio, and for gong and three hundred percussionists at the Theater Basel. This solo version was recorded at Casa delle Masche in Piedmont, Italy, on 28 April 2011, with voice recordings made at the same place in the summer of 2011, and was performed, recorded and mixed by Hauser himself.