Hauschka – stage name of avant-garde innovateur Volker Bertelmann – is talking to me about childhood memories. “They are very powerful. Whenever I play I relate back to my childhood. The musical research that I do on the piano is something I did as a kid in the field.” Such a comment can come across as mawkish, especially for a reputed enfant terrible of the Cageian prepared piano. Hauschka is well aware, and wary, of sentimental pitfalls: “When I was younger I would have said, ‘Oh that’s completely clichéd.’ I would have felt unable to mention it, because it sounds so Hollywood.”
This is an apt dualism for his music, consisting of mutable vignettes that shift over a wide variety of genres and disciplines, intimating an innovative electricity in the array of colours and textures he has at his disposal. Hauschka favours simpler melodies, infused with nostalgia that runs on the edge of preciousness, sometimes even twee- ness. It is a tricky balance, achieving at its best a haunting instability, as in Silfra, his most recent collaboration with violinist Hilary Hahn.
But Hauschka is speaking to me to promote his upcoming album, Abandoned City. Battling through an unpredictable phone connection and jetlag – he has just arrived back in Germany from touring the US – he attempts to explain his artistic vision. Like his music, the title is inspired by an internal and emotional background, not concrete ghost towns, but his own creative process. “It’s a weird state of mind. This kind of alienation is beautiful, but also incredibly lonely. Abandoned cities have a similar dichotomy. They are romantic, but also tragic, exuding a hint of human temporality.”
Everything in Hauschka’s world has a deeply personal link. Descriptions are built out of instinctive emotional terms, yielding rich visual metaphors. The process of composing is painting, “loading up with feelings and images.” Even the sonically dark strain that runs through Abandoned City is inseparable from Hauschka’s own history, “It is a link to my past. I used to work with darker electronic elements, and I needed a colour that brought back this darkness, not aggressiveness, but something that could transform quickly into anger. I wanted to create an undertone of fear.”
It is precisely from this emotional experimentation that Hauschka derives creative excitement. He often talks about the dangers of conforming to expectation, and dislikes being classified by any particular genre: he defines his various influences as a “collection bag, full of disparate things that somehow work together.” By transcending conventional boundaries, similarly varied responses from the audience are evoked, “Everyone who listens to me has a different imagination. During a live show, I can see something happening in their faces but I don’t know what – whether they hear the music of an abandoned city, or a dark zombie movie. I don’t want to take this away from them.”
Given his desire to innovate against the constrictions of any singular genre, how does Hauschka feel about being termed “indie-classical”? It has attracted a wide variety of responses, viewed alternately as an emblem of positive diversity, or of hipster exclusivity. He laughs, commenting wryly, “The problem is that people need to categorise and orientate. Once they link you to a genre you are all boxed and ready to go. But if someone calls me ‘indie-classical’, and someone else disputes that term, then at least there is a discussion being had.”
