Musico-Farmer An Interview with Tomáš Ondrůšek

Martin Smolka

Tomáš Ondrůšek is one of the leading Czech percussionists. He was born in 1964 in Ústí nad Labem, but grew up in Germany (1968-90). He studied percussion in Nuremberg and Stuttgart (Prof. Klaus Tresselt), and became a member of the Stuttgart Percussion Ensemble. In 1990 he won a Studienstiftung des Deutschen Volkes, and used the scholarship to go and study in Prague. Since then he has lived in Bohemia. In the same year he started to give solo performances in many European cities (Munich, St. Petersburg, Moscow, Prague, Nuremberg, Stuttgart, Frankfurt and elsewhere) and at international festivals (Avantgarda St. Petersburg, Zeitklänge Berlin, Warszawska jesień, Marathon Praha and others). His repertoire includes the whole range of key works for solo percussion. He teaches on various international performance courses in contemporary music and has himself founded the international courses for percussionists and composers in Trstěnice; he sits on the juries of international performance competitions. He collaborates with the pianist and composer Siegfried Weckenmann (percussion and piano duo) and is a regular percussionist in the Agon Ensemble. Tomáš Ondrůšek is a many-sided musician, who invents new instruments and has the knack of getting surprising music out of all kinds of other objects. In Prague he has presented the Czech premiere of Lachenmann‘s solo composition Interieur I and Xenakis‘s Psappha, and he has been the first Czech to perform Xenakis‘s Rebonds, Stockhausen‘s Zyklus and Feldman‘s King of Denmark. He has also inspired a number of pieces written specially for him. Since 2001 he has taught at the Music Faculty of the Academy of Performing Arts in Prague and heads the percussion class.

When I first arrived in Trstěnice and asked a local the way to Tomáš Ondrůšek‘s place, he pointed up the hill – “The German? Can’t you hear?” I set off in the direction of the muffled noise, which led me past sheep whose skin will be used for drums and whose meat will be eaten by the drummer, and then there I was, looking into a barn where a dog lay under a marimba and house martins were flying about under the roof. Stone and wood, a scent that I knew from hop-picking expeditions, and sounds from Darmstadt. Now you understand the term “musico-farmer”.

Why do you so insist on using the word “percussionist” when it’s a foreign word in Czech?

I think “percussionist” is already actually quite a common term in Czech parlance. Maybe it’s not so old as “bubeník“ [“drummer”] but it’s often used. A “bubeník-drummer” is just a drummer, or as people sometimes say a “bicista” [literally, a “hitter”] when they are talking about someone specialized in drum set. A percussionist is someone who plays on all imaginable percussion instruments, but the word shouldn’t be confused with “perkuse”, a lay Czech term for ethno-percussion.

When you were studying in Stuttgart, which approaches were taught there?

At that time there were only two progressive professors for anyone who was interested in more than just orchestral percussion, and they were Professor Wulff in Freiburg and Professor Tresselt in Stuttgart. Naturally I went around the other academies or professors, and I know most of them. Earlier, people used to study in Cologne, but that was already passé, or then with G. Sylvestre in Paris. Prof. Tresselt used to allow individuals their own specific programme, although officially it was orchestral play that was taught everywhere. He was very reliable, knew a lot, and had plenty of experience. He had played for a long time in a contemporary music ensemble, and was technically excellent – he had managed to systematise the whole thing. I wanted to learn everything possible from him, but I already knew what I wanted to do myself. And that was solo playing. For the first two or three years I wanted to be a marimba player, and spent a great deal of time on that, but as time went by I increasingly discovered the charm of multipercussion. During my studies I played chamber music and got to know composers, and multipercussion appealed to me with all the sound and technical possibilities it offered and the space it provided for imagination and creativity.

Sooner or later during studies, people often start to emancipate themselves from their teacher, or even to define themselves in opposition to their teacher. Did that happen to you? Did you have some alternative experience, something that you were doing apart from school?

Only in a fairly marginal way. I liked my teacher and he didn’t try to limit me, and so I had no reason to go against him. And he encouraged me to go on other courses and gather experience elsewhere. For example he sent me to Helmut Lachenmann, who taught composition at the same school. In the 1960s Lachenmann wrote a major work for percussion, called Interieur I. It’s probably one of the two most important pieces for percussion from this early period. It’s a great piece, which every percussionist knows, and everyone who wants to be a soloist has to have played it some time, just as pianists have to play a Rachmaninoff Concerto. Professor Tresselt let me study it directly with the composer and didn’t in any way interfere. Lachenmann surprised me by the amount of time he devoted to me, and the way he even adjusted to my rhythm, even though he was already famous, and second by how well and how fast he remembered the detailed problems of a piece that was already 20 years old. And it wasn’t as if it was something often played; it‘s only played by people who are interested, who play multipercussion and are willing to invest half a year to a year’s work just to have 15 minutes of music, and music not even specially spectacular for the public. Studies in Stuttgart were based on the principle of independence. Anyone who wanted to get the most from the school and do well knew that he had to work, but nobody would force him too. I registered for only the minimum of subjects, and went to the school only one day a week. The rest of the time I practiced in a rented farm outside the town or devoted myself to other activities. Professor Tresselt knew I was working, and even respected the fact when I had to be absent, sometimes for as much as a month. I was playing in several contemporary music ensembles. One ensemble, focused on improvisation, experimentation and the avant-garde, was led by young composers and the old Erhard Karkoschka. Another, known as the Studio Ensemble, was already professional; it did standard New Music and the people who played in it included such big names as Mike Svoboda, Yukiko Sugawara or Hans-Peter Jahn. I attended courses given by the outstanding marimba player Keiko Abe, courses in African music (back then in the 1980s this wasn‘t so usual as today), seminars for snare drum, vibraphone or improvisation. We even organised a workshop of African music with the Guinea Ballet soloist Famouda Konate at my farm. Naturally I went to Darmstadt, Donaueschingen, Witten and everywhere you can think of. I heard pretty well all the great solo percussionists play from the “founding fathers” to my contemporaries – even those I didn’t think were so great. All this experience naturally influenced the way I saw percussion instruments back then. But mainly I was at home, on the farm, and practicing hard.

Did you already have your own instruments?

Yes, in fact my first teacher Johannes Beer helped me to get them. Before Stuttgart I studied for two years as an external student at the music academy in Nuremberg, in parallel with my civilian service (instead of army service), and I bought my first drum with a whole month’s pay: a good Ludwig Snare Drum. Through Johannes I then got hold of a used but almost new marimba, and then kettledrums at a sale. I already had the vibraphone I had graduated from the music secondary school with. I still play on these instruments. Later on I had the chance to buy new instruments, for example a more space-saving marimba, and I thought about it, but in the end I couldn’t bear to part from my old instruments.

When did you start to study with Johannes Beer?

At German secondary schools they had a system of preparatory classes for university. In their last two years students chose two main subjects, and I chose music and Latin. But at that point it wasn’t possible to study percussion as part of the music course, and it turned out that my only option would be to go to Munich to the university and take an exam in front of a state-nominated committee – playing on the xylophone, drum and kettledrums. I mean it was possible to get an exemption and study an instrument that wasn’t on the list, but of course I had to have lessons. At that time I was playing on a drum set and I wanted to play jazz. I was going through the transition from traditional jazz through modern to free-jazz, and I used to go to concerts given by Braxton, Taylor, Mangelsdorff… A teacher had to be found for me. My father, a musician, remembered that a former pupil of his was studying percussion at university. That was how I got to Johannes. And one time when I went to a lesson with Johannes, at the music university in Würzburg, I had a musical experience that was really defining for me. The percussion practice room there was an enormous cellar full of instruments, and everyone there had his own corner, his little district. When we entered there were terribly strange sounds coming from the back – wonderful, mysterious. I saw two deeply absorbed musicians playing piano and percussion. I said to myself, “but that‘s like composed free-jazz”. It spoke to me, because it was what I loved, free-jazz, and at the same time what I was doing with Johannes – playing according to the notes and fulfilling tasks. The players were Jeff Beer, my teacher’s brother, and Jürgen Schmitt. Soon I went to a concert Jeff gave, where he played Stockhausen‘s Zyklus, some smaller pieces for marimba and small set, and one of his own pieces for a large multipercussion set. It all amazed me and appealed to me hugely.

When I asked about an alternative, I was thinking of your work with Siegfried Wekenmann, collecting metal objects and putting new instruments together. How and when and why did that start?

That was a little later, about two years after I finished my studies, I met Siegfried by chance in Stuttgart, at our old university. He also studied there, piano, and composition in Freiburg before that. He invited me over to his place, first he played me things of his on the video, and then he took me to the attic. There he had a huge arsenal of objects and all kinds of projects scattered about the place. Various bowls, huge and small objects, parts of aeroplane turbines… They could all be somehow chimed and played, and there were wooden frames everywhere holding them up. I was enthusiastic. I thought “this is what I’ve always been looking for”, I mean someone interested in something similar, in peculiar sounds and in exploring sound in general, which is what always fascinated me and attracted me about percussion.

Today you have a similar collection in the barn in Trstěnice. How did you acquire it? I mean the things that you can’t buy anywhere, the objects and home-made instruments. At your place I saw sets of metal discs, all kinds of pieces of metals, metal rods and tubes hung like gongs, or tubular bells, and glass and acoustic objects of all sorts. And also a huge collection of old drums and percussion instruments, evidently long ago thrown out by someone, as well as you have adapted or made from scratch.

I started even before I studied, while I was still at secondary high school. On “Spermiel” [scrap], I found a few things. At the time I was planning a concert with an organist friend – a “Stations of the Cross”, with improvised music. We were both doing improvisations, playing together, and we had other bands and a jazz trio as well. I had an old kettledrum from school, which had just been lying about there somewhere. I found a frame from a swing, heavy and sturdy, and I hung various bits of metal on it. I had already seen similar things at Jeff and Johannes Beer‘s place, at the premiere of Stockhausen‘s Samstag aus Licht, where there was a large percussion ensemble and everyone had something like it, or with Limpe Fuchs, who played in a duo with the pianist Friedrich Gulda and whose husband made the instruments. I took inspiration from various different sources. The twelve halts on the Way of the Cross – that was twelve little pieces-improvisations. Each had its own character, and we had already planned out beforehand roughly which instruments would be used when, and we knew the atmosphere, and had thought it out in programme fashion – for example the kettledrum created the storm and after they crucified Jesus I struck it with a hammer. But it wasn’t theatre. We enjoyed it terrifically, because creating something like that is more important for young musicians than just playing technical etudes all the time. We complemented each other; we both had ideas, and I drew on his organist’s experience and he on mine. That was a good thing, because when percussionists talk to each other they often just keep it on the level of “do you know how to do this or that?“ or “What kind of snare drum do you have?” They focus on technical performance and the instrument, not on the music.

ut you don’t just collect objects, you also make your own instruments, or adapt them...

To explain, I’ll have to go back to the past again. I came to the study of music from a different side than the usual. I didn’t play the piano, I didn’t know the classics – I learnt all that later. I came to music through a love of sound in all its variety, through delight in experimenting, through curiosity about the fantastic sound possibilities of free-jazz and “European free-jazz” – the composed kind, Neue Musik. I got hooked. I listened to it anywhere I could. I went to listen to Stockhausen and Boulez rehearsals with ensembles, and I learned a great deal there. It was amazing how they worked in such detail, how they were put together, these ensembles, how everything sounded and fitted well together. I went to lectures, read books, and took out a subscription to MusikTexte. That was all food for our souls, me and a few of my friends who were also hooked. It was through all this that I got to making instruments. I started to collect old instruments, which was also a matter of necessity since I couldn’t afford to buy new ones all the time, and I recreated damaged instruments. For example I would put wood on a drum instead of skin. When I liked the result, I tried to create a set of wooden tom-toms from material they cut for me somewhere in a Baumarkt. I didn’t have any crafts training, but I taught myself. Then I started to make sticks, and in the end did it as a business too, since at that time there was nowhere to buy good sticks. I made my own metal stands – I thought them up, drew a scheme, bought material and took it to the smith, who would cut it and weld it. At first I would watch him, but as soon as he knew how, he would finish the work himself. For me sticks are intimately related to technique. A stick isn’t just a tool or an aid, it’s an extension of the arm, a representative of my fingers or hand. The stick is joined to me, not to the instrument. And that’s why a player has to make his own sticks depending on what kind of sound he wants. I knew from my teacher how sticks are made, the basic principle. But when I started to think about it really seriously, a huge world of possibilities opened up to me. When you consider how many kinds of head there are, how many ways of treating them, all the possible weights, degrees of hardness, size, lengths, thicknesses of the different parts... I became completely engrossed in it. At the beginning I made them just for myself, but then I sold a few and saw it was a success, even with well-known soloists like Keiko Abe, Robyn Schulkowsky and so on. They would call me and describe exactly what they wanted. I understand what they were getting it, and I would transform it and send them a sample, saying that they could of course return it and I would redo it as they needed. I never had a single one returned. When I saw some interesting material somewhere, for example a metal ball with a suitable hole, I would immediately buy it and try something with it. When I got to the point of having a whole range, I would catalogue it and start selling. The first instrument I made was a djembe, carved out of spruce. I went to the saw-mill, had a block cut for me and a cross cut into it with a motor saw. Then I chiselled it our, with one semi-circular chisel and one smooth, drilled it through and cut it through, and did the same from the bottom. It took me about a week. Then I stretched the hide... that’s part of the process; just as an oboist makes his double reed, so a drummer who wants to play Africa has to know how to make his drum – drying the skin, binding and everything. Some things people had to show me, or advise me about, but I found out other things for myself. There was a barrel in the cellar of the house in Stuttgart where I lived. So I checked that nobody wanted it, went to the butcher for skin and made it into a bass drum. I found others in the area, because it was a wine-growing region and people sometimes throw out older barrels. The huge, three-metre one also comes from there. I made it there, and later did some more work on it in Trstěnice. In most cases the barrels had to be mended – new hoops put on, or metalled. When the ends were rotten I cut them off and replaced then with wood or other material.

Didn‘t such repairs spoil the sound?

Of course not. In the first place you can’t spoil the sound because you don’t even know what kind of sound it ought to have. Something always comes out of it. And it is always something pretty – like with people. Someone isn‘t spoiled just because he has a crooked nose, since he might have pretty eyes, for example. My drums are excellent, as you know – original. They are good because I install them in a place where they are good. Someone might say that they‘re hopeless, but in the pieces I use them for, and as I use them, they are unique and I couldn’t imagine any better. They have their own character. And if there’s a hole in the wood, for example, it can always be filled up. Even with disgusting plastic, or foam rubber. It’s not just about the whole barrel resonating and giving out woody sounds. Plastic can also sound great – it gives its own “plastic” sounds that are completely different. Sheet metal as well. I even have a drum made of paper. Or octobans made of waste pipes, with rims used on bongos. I bought these for a few crowns in a sale when Amati [Czech musical instruments manufacturer] closed down.

When and how did you get from Stuttgart to Bohemia?

Profesor Tresselt called me and said that the school was choosing candidates for the “Studienstiftung des Deutschen Volkes” scholarship and I had to play. I didn’t quite know what it was, except that it was very prestigious and that the only drummers who had yet won it were Johannes Beer and Christian Dierstein (today a member of the well-known Ensemble Recherche). They chose me, and only then did I discover that it was a matter of very careful choice of one or two people from the whole school to go forward to a national German competition. For the competition I went to Berlin to the Hochschule der Künste, and I played Lachenmann, the King of Denmark by Morton Feldman, a new piece by Matthias Schneider-Hollek Býčí bicí [Bull Percussion] and something Japanese for marimba. There was one other percussionist there, from Würzburg, but he was from a completely different ballpark, an orchestral player, and he played very well rehearsed, but boring pieces. And there were many other musicians. They awarded five scholarships for music, and five for the natural sciences and so on...You get a terrific amount for the prize, which is called the “Hochbegabtenförderung” – support for the highly gifted. It is financial support, a large stipend every month, plus the chance to study abroad in any country you choose – you get all travel and living expenses and a high personal grant. I played in front of a committee that included various musicians – the percussionist there was Professor Vogler, the solo timpanist of the Berlin Philharmonic, an old gentleman. He asked the first question, which was why I hadn’t played any Bach. That really wound me up, not in the sense that I became aggressive, but I launched into a debate in which I defended my position, my creative approach, my view that all these transcriptions were hangovers from times when there wasn’t yet a proper repertoire – it all ended in quite a sharp exchange of opinions. Although nobody said so, I’m convinced that the dispute, the fact that I showed independence, helped me more than my playing, which the members of the committee (a trumpet player, trombonist and so on) couldn’t have understood. So I was given the scholarship and I chose Bohemia. I used the time and money not just to study, but to repair a house I had immediately bought in the spring of 1990 in Trstěnice near Litomyšl. I was registered at the Prague Conservatory as a pupil of Amy Lynn Barber. I knew Vladimír Vlasák, who initially advised me to go to Brno to the Janáček Academy of Performing Arts, but then said that “Prague was Prague”, after all, and there was more cultural life there, especially for someone coming from Stuttgart. They had terrific respect for Stuttgart. At that time the Prague Conservatory was at a truly high level as far as drum set-players were concerned – that was what Prof. Veselý taught, but nobody there did my discipline - multipercussion. Even though I went back to Stuttgart to finish my studies, mainly to prepare and play my graduation concert (in the spring of 1991), I was already living here half of the time.

What did you have in your repertoire when you finished your studies?

Lachenmann, Feldman and part of Xenakis’s Rebonds, about ten smaller pieces for set, six or seven major marimba pieces, chamber pieces, such as Xenakis’s Persephassa, Palimpsest by Hespos for voice and percussion, Stockhausen, Luigi Nono, and young composers. Other things like Xenakis’s Psappha, Stockhausen’s Zyklus, and Fukushi’s Ground, I worked up when I was already here. And Lang, Volans and others, I didn’t take up until 1994 and later, after my pause. After my studies, you see, I essentially dropped playing for two years and didn‘t even practice. I was building my house. Everything I’ve done has always been something I’ve terrifically enjoyed. Not even dragging instruments around and assembling them has ever bothered me. When making sticks grabbed me I was completely grabbed, and when the house grabbed me I went all out for building. It was all hugely magical for me; earlier I hadn’t had anything and suddenly I had a house, in fact a large house, a farm. I had to start buying things, learn how to do all reconstruction, because at that time there still weren’t any firms to do it for you. The craftsmen had time on Saturdays, outside their regular work, but I had to do most of it myself, or at least help. Getting back to percussion after the two years was fantastic. It was a rest from building work, which was already getting on my nerves, and emotionally it was something completely new. I was afraid I had forgotten everything, but it all came back surprisingly fast. Things swum up out of passive and physical memory, and pieces that I thought would need two weeks practice came back in two days. My hands quickly remembered plenty of things, and it was enough just to practice. It helped me a lot that over the two years I had become physically stronger – I didn’t have to strain, and unlike before the playing felt light and easy.

Weren’t you afraid to drop it all completely, and risk the loss of contacts and the possibility that people would entirely forget about you?

No. The important thing is freedom of spirit. You have to put something aside completely. And when you get back to it, the freedom gives you so much energy and new inspiration and creative power! That makes up for plenty of things, joy will help you much more, even with performance technique, than joylessly practicing. It is the basis of every kind of creativity. As soon as you lack the internal constitution for something, it’s not longer creativity but practicing, and you can practice and practice but it still won’t bear fruit. I was brought back to percussion by an invitation that I couldn’t resist, even though it messed up my plans. It was to give a solo half-concert in the Gasteig in Munich, which is a huge, prestigious hall, and a workshop in the music academy there. Prof. Adel Shalaby had heard me at some festival and invited me because he had very much liked the fact that I play Lachenmann‘s Interieur I and – “I’m not kidding”, that I play it with love and believe in this music. The concert went off very well, despite the fact that I had got stuck in a traffic jam on the motorway which used up more than my whole time reserve, so I was only just finishing putting the instruments up as the first listeners were arriving. I played from memory, and I immediately won over the students at the workshop and I am still in contact with some of them today. The workshop was about the interpretation of Lachenmann. I have very happy memories of it. Soon I received more offers and gave similar performances and seminars at the school in Bonn, then at conservatories in St. Petersburg (with Siegfried Weckenmann) and Moscow and other places in Germany. I started to build up more repertoire and in 1996 to play with the Prague new-music ensemble Agon.

Didn’t you initially want to play your own music?

Yes, my own music, my improvised music, but also music by other composers, only in my own way, with my own instruments, whether the normal sort or my handmade creations. Today I play far more pieces by other people, but I always look for ways of expressing something original, something of my own in them, and of finding my own approach both in practical terms, as far as instruments are concerned, and musically. To find the key to a piece, a key that no one has yet used. When I’ve heard a piece played three times in the same way, I definitely wouldn’t play it in the same way. I would either do it in my own way, or not play it at all. For me what is always primary is how a score “speaks” to me. The score creates a picture, an inner image (an idea, a vision of the acoustic result) and it is from this that my interpretation and preliminary choice of instruments develops.

Could you give an example, and show us how this works in a specific piece?

The most recent piece I’ve worked on is by Michael Jarrell, the French Swiss composer. I liked it because it works with complex combinations of sounds. I realised that some pieces I had done just before were focused on rhythm, and I wanted to get back to something sound-orientated. The piece is called Assonance VI, and works with concurrent sounding and with combinations of sounds on different instruments. There are a great many different layers. For example, through damping a few notes crystallise out of the reverberation following a fast run on the vibraphone; then the cymbal plays, then something else, and then something is damped off and the remainder is audible, which again joins with the vibraphone. It is a refined piece, a kind of distillation of different sounds. But somehow I soon saw through it and suddenly it was boring, and lacked the charm I had thought was there. After a first play through I could hear that it never went beyond the limits of the initial idea, and was continually sweet and ingratiating, continually surrounded by aliquots... So, because of the title anyway, I decided to choose instruments that I hadn’t used for a long time. Instead of the tam-tam I found an instrument I had once made of metal plate which had a very specific sound, but was still a kind of tam-tam. It was the same with the other instruments I chose – they were all what you might call non-reverberating, non-(as)sonant instruments. They give the piece something completely different from just the same elegant long-drawn out resonance all the time, but when combined with the technique of the piece, with the way it was written, they have the potential to produce a fine (assonant) result. My concern was that the resulting sound should not be typical. When I read the score, I had always known it: now here the tam-tam comes back with this typical sound, then the cymbal, and everything will somehow reverberate for a long time. That was why I looked for other instruments, in order to avoid the commonplace and the predictable, and I looked in the collection of my home-made instruments. These instruments then dictate a lot of technical things. For example it’s difficult to play on them – they have a shorter reverberation than is prescribed, or when struck together one of the two is always stronger. This presented me with a series of extra tasks, but in the end produced a fine result. Percussion instruments are always unpredictable. You choose something that leads you into a certain atmosphere and a certain area of technical problems, and these then lead you somewhere else that you would otherwise never have reached. It resembles choreography. You put something up, for example, and it works wonderfully, but suddenly you reach a place in the piece where you have to move rapidly to another instrument that is standing a long way away. You want to move the other instrument, but then it wouldn’t work for other places in the piece. In one Xenakis piece I solved the problem by having the same instrument in two places. There are all kinds of difficult problems with percussion, but it’s great, it’s an adventure. With this piece the choice of instruments was the key. Through the choice I wanted to arrive at a sound idiom that would less straightforward than the one I had read from the score. A sound idiom that would be my interpretation of the piece.

And what about the key to Stockhausen?

Stockhausen‘s Zyklus is a piece that in itself makes the performer its co-creator. The special notation of the piece offers a series of elements that force the performer to choose: which elements, where to put them, what order to put them in and so forth. At the beginning I looked for the shortest path through the jungle of possibilities that Stockhausen proposes. And the most logical path. I searched in this relatively confusing range of possibilities and the principle on which I selected musical formations was that they should seem to me have some logic, but also that they should speak to me and appeal to me. For example, in one section what most spoke to me were glissandos, and so I increased their attack and put the section together in a glissando way, with the glissandos giving it unity. Analysis of a piece, whether my own or the composer’s analysis, is an important aid when looking for the key. In the Lachenmann there are seven parts, each with its own character, and one for example is called “secco” – the expression says a huge amount about the form of play, but also the choice of instruments and sticks, even though all this is not written out. In his analysis Stockhausen speaks of “strike cycles” of individual instruments, each of which has its “maximum”, which means the point where it sounds frequently and dominates. I foregrounded this principle still more, by deliberately choosing the sounds of the instrument that was supposed to dominate out of the free elements that were up to the performer, and so accentuating that instrument to the maximum.

What about David Lang‘s Anvil Chorus?

Once again the first step was the choice of instruments. The score only specifies woodblock and large drum, and then only materials – resonant metals, non-resonant metals and three resonant metals played with pedal. I already knew the piece from a Steven Schick concert, but when I started playing it for myself, I could no longer remember the details of his interpretation, I knew that he had used some kind of pipes and so I didn’t consider of pipes and decided on brake discs. They had an excellent sound, high and strong. Penetrating enough to get on the nerves, but that suited me. I built a special stand for them. For the non-resonant metals I used gongs, laid flat so as to be half damped. But during rehearsals it became clear that this didn’t work. At the end both sounds are supposed to connect and mix, but this didn’t happen because the discs sounded terribly high and didn’t merge with the sound of the gongs at all. I had to rethink it altogether, but the problem helped me to find the right approach and I realised what I needed. To get the two sorts of sound to unite at the end what was needed was a sort of gamelan in which two rhythms would mix, one circling in a shorter period and the other in a longer. Thus through the search for more suitable instruments I stumbled on a musical idea. In the end for the damped sound I used pots (little pans, stuffed with felt plasters), on two gongs laid sideways. The sounds are closer to each other, and differ mainly in the way they are struck and the choice of sticks. And at the end, thanks to the fast tempo, even the damped strokes connect into as it were uninterrupted sound. This was precisely what the brake discs couldn’t do, since at a fast tempo all that could be made out from their sound were high dry attacks, like on a xylophone. I also thoroughly analysed the piece. In the middle section I found a structure that made it much easier for me to get to grips with the piece. When you realise what the result is supposed to be, you don’t have to learn the piece note by note, but instead you can play patterns by ear. You know where the motif is drawn out longer – Lang works with the principle of addition, adding a note to a repeated pattern, or with augmentation inside a motif, or by shifting half of a pattern forwards. Immediately you realise this, it acquires logic, and you also find the shifts that later repeat in the piece. It was only after a year of playing that I discovered that in the final section, where the polyrhythms are already very complex and you are playing with both hands and feet, a large drum appears at regular intervals under the throng of irregularities. The drum is composed into the alternating metre (3/16, 4/16, 5/16 a 6/16) in such a way that it turns up, I think, every five crotchets: in the notes it doesn‘t look at all regular, and it was only my ears that gave it away to me.

The Munich percussionist Stefan Blum, who also plays this Lang piece, discretely suggested to me that from his point of view your interpretation is too free.

I don’t think it is. I keep very precisely to the text. Always, and not only in this case. As far as the score is concerned this piece is terribly traditional, and so you can’t do anything else. I just fully exploited the fact that the performer is left free in choice of instruments. On the contrary, I think that using cymbals as the resonant metals wouldn’t be right. Lang knows what he is doing, and would have written them in if he had wanted them. And he knows my recording, and sent me other pieces in exchange. I keep to the text, because I like doing it that way and I wouldn’t like playing it “my way” in the sense that graphic scores are sometimes played or, - as I hear from my friends on the improvisation scene – people play everything there “their own way”. That isn’t interpretation, but playing “á la”. I enjoy tackling complicated tasks, which is the greatest thing in all these pieces. You reach a place where you can’t get any further – plenty of pieces involve that – it’s true. You play something and a problem always turns up, something insoluble, sometimes unplayable, physically impossible – that’s the case in Lachenmann’s Interieur I, and Xenakis’s Psappha and Rebonds. Let’s say you have to play a roll with two hands on six instruments at once. Obviously you can’t do it with four sticks. Or one hand is supposed to roll and the other to tap out eight notes in a tempo that one hand can’t do alone. But I can see what the composer wanted, which is that something has to sound continuously here and at the same time the rhythm has to be brought out. And so I try different ways to achieve the same effect, as in the theatre when actors look for an approach to a role. And when I find the solution, then it can change or completely revolutionise the approach to the whole piece; it can be the key. For example in Rebonds by Xenakis. There you find sudden rolls written in the middle of pregnant rhythmic play, but I didn’t want to upset the rhythmic play and let in an element of rhythmic accident with the roll. My key consists in making even the rolls precisely subject to rhythm, subordinated to the rhythm of the surrounding beat. Having found this solution, I carried over the principle into the other similar places in the composition.

Apart from the Jarrel, what have you been rehearsing recently? Could you speak of an interpretational key there too?

Kevin Volans’ Asanga. Everything is given there and so the question of a key doesn’t arise. It’s simply a piece in Kevin Volans’ style, like She who sleeps with a small blanket, which I haven’t played. There the only issue for me is that it shouldn’t sound too drum-like, drum-set-like, banal. And so I chose instruments that I haven’t used for a long time and that sound like “gong-drums“. Volans prescribes the usual instruments like tom-toms and bass drum, but it is clear that he was just adjusting to the equipment most percussionists have. But I always choose instruments not just on the basis of the prescription on the score, but above all on the basis of the music that I read from the score. And here I realised that what he wanted here was simply a series of drums from the deep to the high. So I exploited the fact that I have a richer range of instruments and more possibilities than the ordinary percussionist, for whom he had adapted his instructions. I used a huge barrel drum, one-metre twenty high, and adjusted the choice of other drums to it: a Chinese tom-tom, and two tom-toms that I made out of metal barrels, and it all fits perfectly together in this context. The bass drum has to sound distinctive, and that again is clear from the way the piece is composed, and the others must be similar in type. Before that I worked on Aperghis‘s Graffiti, which I had done once before but differently and with different instruments. This is a piece in which you have to talk and the instruments and speech complement each other or go in synchrony. Here speech has a musical function, and the sound of the percussion mimics it. The sound of the speech and the drum do glissandos, and the notation is in curves. The composer prescribes two gongs, but I chose two metal barrels that have a sound like Javanese gongs. They sound the same as a gong lying on its side, but better, because they have a great many aliquots and in this piece they were absolutely outstanding. I keep talking about putting instruments together, but this is perhaps one of the most important elements in the whole performance. Before you get to the notated text, you need to “make yourself” an instrument. And this instrument then influences the music, and perception of the music. First of all I am someone who receive and takes in. I read the score and receive an abstract text, which creates in me an image of piece – mood, atmosphere, character, a purely subjective idea. And that is the basis on which I start to choose instruments and try it out. That “testing out” is my credo, as people say today. Using this method of experimenting I choose different variants and test it all out, so it’s not a question of thinking and immediately outlining a solution. At the beginning I don’t know the solution; all I have is my image. I take one road that may be lucky, but could be a blind alley. In that case I change the provisional set-up, put something somewhere else, or re-assemble the whole thing, or change something, add something, sometimes double something up. That means everything – the sticks as well, what kind I use or how many, and the technique of play… I try another road, a third, and in the end choose the best of the variants. This is the way I worked with the Aperghis piece too: I chose soft tom-toms, which have just one membrane and thanks to that a fast attack and an even tone. You couldn’t use them with Xenakis, for example, because they would sound somehow blurred, and they are instruments that I don’t like in other contexts. But these “sick” instruments were precisely what was right for the Aperghis. And then there was a glissando there that I played on the drum by pressing with my free hand on the centre of the membrane, but it didn’t come out right, and was hard work and didn‘t produce enough sound. Some non-percussionist, I forget who, asked me why I didn’t use a talking drum. I didn’t think much of the idea, but then I tried it and it was excellent. And so then again I had to rebuild the whole piece and subordinate it to that drum, which suddenly wasn’t standing in front of me, but hanging on me, under my arm.

And can you speak of an interpretational key here?

Probably not, except for the sound side of things. The score is clear and precise. Here the beautiful and complicated work was more a question of deciphering what the composer had put into it. The ordering of the small motifs, the choice of small motifs.... It took a lot of analytical work to read everything and calculate it - it is all hemidemisemiquavers (sixty-fourths) and even semihemidemisemiquavers (one-hundred-and-twenty-eighths). I classified and marked the little motifs in the score (a, a´, a´´, b and so on), so as to play musical formations, not just notes.

Where have you travelled to play in recent years, and what have you played there?

Probably what I liked best was my solo concert at the Warsaw Autumn Festival in 2002. In the same year I also played in Samara, in Russia, with an orchestra – the Milhaud concerto and a double concerto for percussion and marimba by the Czech composer Ivo Medek (with the marimba player Mutsuko Aizawa). Otherwise I travel regularly, twice or three times a year to St. Petersburg, where I created stage music for one theatre project and play it live on stage. It is based on Joyce’s Ulysses and I play on objects and adapted instruments, like the “percussion violin”. I also had a solo concert there, mainly on the marimba. This year I have played at a festival of contemporary music in Alma Ata, in Kazachstan. On such long-distance journeys I’m limited as far as repertoire is concerned because things like Stockhausen or Lachenmann can’t be played on borrowed instruments which always fail to work either technically or in terms of sound. When I took these pieces to St. Petersburg in 1993, I went by car, and two years later I tried the train and huge cases – I cut the stands in pieces so that they would fit into cases and took around 70 kilos. They had to pick me up at the station and I had a kettle-drum and eight tom-toms for Xenakis loaned from the Philharmonic. Apart from my own repertoire I also played Bartók’s Sonata (for two pianos and percussion) and in a theatre project that I toured with to Germany and then to Sochi. In 2001 I went to teach and play at the music university in Winterthur in Switzerland and in Zurich, and not long ago I had a whole evening solo concert in Regensburg. This year in the summer I was in Poland on a competition jury and I gave a solo recital at the “Crossdrumming” Festival in Warsaw. Then I was in Münster for a great music theatre even called “hörensagen”, and not long afterwards I went to Rome to play with Francoise Rivalland as part of a project by the composer Daniel Otte. The day before yesterday I got back from St. Petersburg. The Joyce was so successful that a kind of sequel has been produced, directed by Yuri Vasiliev again, and I play the marimba in it. But partly in a way that means it doesn’t sound like a marimba... There’s no point in listing all of it, though, because playing isn’t the main reason for more travels, and nor is teaching. I travel to learn something myself, to encounter other people and a different approach, a different perception of the world, and in places like Kazakhstan to meet traditional music in original form. I’m also interested in future co-operation, in the chance to invite people here and establish a friendship.

What do you do apart from playing?

I do courses with the Russian director Yuri Vassiliev. On the outside they are drama courses, but in reality they are about far more, about presentation on stage and the development of personality. About creativity and individuality in art. About the truth that each one of us has. I have taken over part of the training and developed training for musicians. I think it’s something that is terribly neglected among musicians. They are alienated from their bodies, and don’t know how to work with the body, and they are even sitting while playing. We teach them to engage themselves both physically and mentally like an actor in his role. Earlier I was there as an interpreter, but Yuri kept on at me to become involved actively, and so today I teach as well. It is one of my important projects that takes up four months of my year. We do it partly at my farmhouse, partly in Switzerland, Germany and Austria, and sometimes in Poland. My farm serves as a cultural farm. Together with the Janáček Academy in Brno and the Academy in Prague I organise courses for young percussionists and composers. They work in pairs and learn not just from the teachers but from each other, the percussionist from the composer and vice versa. Over one week the percussionist-composer pairs each create a piece that the percussionist presents at a concert on the final evening. And then there are lectures, concerts and discussions. Every summer I hold an international theatre-musical festival. Mainly theatre companies – fringe, avant-garde, improvised, and especially the kind that can be understood even without words; and music of the kind that is related to it or is what is known as “alternative”. When we started, some time in 1995, we invited a lot of Russians, because at that time they were little known here although their theatre culture is at a very high standard. Actors from world-famous theatres like the Alexandrinski Theatre or Maly dramaticheski Theatre were here, even if in small-scale productions. Back then I felt the need to present Russian culture here, because everyone was looking west at the time and it was forgotten. It worked too: the programme is a peculiar mixture of stars and amateurs, and it is usually full and with a brilliant atmosphere. We also invited some theatre people from Russia as a way to help them. They were good but they couldn’t travel and we had the chance to get money for their travelling expenses from the Soros Foundation. Sometimes I also rent out the farm. Now for example a German theatre group is going to rehearse there for a tour in India.

What about teaching?

Even when I was first invited to teach in Munich I felt an affinity, an understanding with many of the students. They were people who ought to have had all the prerequisites for a creative approach, but it was under-developed in them because up until then they had only been taught to play notes. I had a tremendously good feeling in that living dialogue with them. And I hugely enjoyed all the seminars I‘ve experienced since then at academy schools, I have come to realise lots of things through that work. It has been a learning experience for me too. In 2000 I received a letter from the Music Faculty of the Academy in Prague asking me if I would come up with a plan for establishing a percussion class. The situation there was such that I could offer a proposal for studies based on multipercussion, on solo play. That isn’t very often done in the world but here, just by chance, the situation was favourable – AMU as a whole is focused on solo and chamber playing and orchestral play on percussion is already taught at a lower level, in conservatories. The plan was accepted and I was appointed at AMU, and able to found an entire discipline on my concept. Apart from the main discipline we have a joint seminar where we study the history of percussion, listen to recordings, analyse and compare performances, often in the form of independent papers. I also teach improvisation – no boundless fantasising, but specific tasks, creative work with material, conscious development, and also that stage training I mentioned. Then I teach in what we call “sound studio”, the exploration of instruments and their possibilities, questions like “what is a tam-tam?” – getting away from the academic thinking in which every instrument had its stick and the place where it was struck. Liberation from all that. Another thing I emphasise is the “rhythm studio”. We look at rhythmic phenomena - various as it were mathematical charms and riddles, African rhythms and so on, but also purely at the art of playing together – precision, feeling the pulse, accelerating and slowing down together, engaging the body. Vladimír Vlasák leads the percussion ensemble, and students also play in the school orchestras. I’m now in my fourth year of working there. Teaching has become my hobby. For my students I try to maintain the joy and energy that I know and feel when I teach as a guest professor abroad. Sometimes after a whole day teaching I am so charged up that I completely bubble over with impressions and can’t get them out of my head. But that isn’t always the rule. The situation of different countries is different and I often compare them. I feel the importance of having an overview, of giving students the chance to look into the real world, - I mean in an international context – and of getting to know the work of my colleagues (Dierstein, Sylvestre, Skoczyński, Froleyks). Or else of taking them to festivals, going abroad with them and expanding their perceptions. If I compare the situation here in percussion issues with the European East and with the West I find the Czech environment a little passive and uneducated: the students don’t have that curiosity and yearning of East European students, who just devour you with questions, and they don’t have the knowledge of the Western students, with whom – if it’s their field – you can work on a higher level. Unfortunately, our students are still sometimes surprised that tin barrels, flower vases, brake discs and so on are part of the percussionist’s arsenal. They have simply never seen such things before. But unlike our Eastern colleagues, who compensate for ignorance with curiosity, Czechs try to compensate for the deficit with superiority and indifference. Sometimes I feel like some old wild “avant-gardist” who has to goad students into freedom, imagination, creativity, courage and experiments and give them power and energy, instead of them pulling me into their musical and sound world, their images, visions and ideas. Without curiosity there can be no creativity. I see my main task as that of developing the personalities and outlook of these students. Without personality they won’t become musicians, but only “music officials”.

It seems to be, although it may be an illusion....You are attracted by post-communist countries, you have built your house and instruments with your own hands from discarded and used things; the sounds that you like are the less sonant sounds, not the sounds that are attractive at first sight, but more the strange, unsmart, inelegant sounds; for friends and collaborators you often choose unusual, eccentric, highly individual people...doesn‘t all this have a common denominator? Your alternative attitude to this rational, disciplined, polite, but cold, polished Western civilisation?

Well, I’ve never actually thought about it like that. In my youth in Germany I felt myself to be alternative, that was my credo, and of course that was my direction. I love Russia, that mixture of cultures and striking individual. And the love is returned and gives us energy – the public is always highly charged there. And there is a magic in that. There’s no comparison with the public in the Czech Republic and absolutely none with the West. When you are alone on the stage in Russia, you feel everything that is coming from the auditorium, the atmosphere of the public and its energy. And in the sort of energy that I encounter there, every sound becomes an event. In Russia the public simply hasn’t lost its curiosity. And it is for a few minutes like that on the stage that we live... As far as instruments are concerned, you keep saying “less sonant”, and I don‘t agree with that. I like the less refined, the less ingratiating, yes, but I have plenty of sonant, very sonant instruments. And with instruments just as with people, I appreciate individual character. In percussion I have always rejected the kind of dandies who play in dinner jackets and play pieces by Siegried Fink, various arrangements alla academica, Haydn arranged for vibraphone and so forth. For me that was never appealing, more ridiculous actually... On the other hand arsenal as was the Jeff‘s, that endless jungle of peculiar sound objects charged with undreamed of possibilities...that fascinated me at first sight and fascinates me still.