Recorded live at the Martin-Gropius-Bau (Berlin) on the nights of April 4-7, 1985.
On the occasion of the exhibition “Idea, Process, Result” we have searched for the correlation between architecture and music. Throughout “Klangenthüllungen” (Sound Revelations), as we labeled the concerts, the participating musicians developed their performance in accordance with the spatial conditions. with its long reverberation, the glass-roofed court of the Gropiusbau is a subtle partner; delicate in its silence and powerfully surging when charged up rhythmically.
Fritz Hauser has, from my point of view, made the best use of its acoustical peculiarities in a most elemental way. The Sound Pictures of Fritz Hauser lead from the real, limited, architecture to the insubstantial, endless space of our imagination. The symbiosis of architecture and music, in times of unlimited acoustical-synthetical possibilities, is genuine. ~ Bernhard Strecker, Berlin July 1985
I’ve been listening to this music for over 20 years (on and off mind you) and it still fascinates. While the basic premise for the recording is blatant, the experience of listening to Fritz Hauzer shape space and time with drums, xylophone, temple blocks and maracas is transcendental (if you let yourself go). A true musical journey.
The building provides a seven-second delay, Fritz Hauser fills it with magic.
If, as John Ruskin said, architecture is frozen music, perhaps Solodrumming insinuates music as liquid architecture. The space in which these sounds originated influences their aural characteristics; clarity of articulation, gesture, exquisite resonance, delay, decay, ambiance, added to Hauser’s crisp technique, his formal concerns, his zen conception, create new definitions of those areas we occupy in mind and body. ~ Art Lange, August 1989
Solodrumming is available for download (FLAC) from Presto Classical.