In REMIX I did not actually want to attempt anything new. I only wanted to take elements that I had already tried out, and with which I had been able to gain experience, and place them in a different relationship:

- the ‘trembling unison’ from Nacht-Schatten;

- the bubbling runs with which in vain begins (which were also used in the music for the monologues of the aged Hölderlin in the opera Nacht, and which later appear in Bruchstück, the opera Melancholia, and elsewhere);

- the dense web from which large sections of the instrumental accompaniment are formed in the second part of the opera Melancholia;

- the formal principle of freely placing different elements in sequence one after the other, as I had used e.g. in natures mortes or in the second part of Bruchstück;

- the percussion interjections from natures mortes;

- the broken chords from the final section of Monodie;

etc.

The result is a very dense piece with a large number of notes, which makes high demands of the performers’ virtuosity. In the process musical meaning emerges not from the individual notes and sounds (nor from the events in the individual instrumental parts), but only from the total sonority – in the nineteenth century one would have referred to ‘harmony’ here.

In this density, this manic concentration on elements which are hastily flowing past (or falteringly and bumpily hastening past), I thus entered what was for me new territory after all – despite my original intention.

Microtonality (a term very often used in connection with me) is almost totally absent in REMIX.

REMIX was composed in response to a commission from the Remix-Ensemble of Porto.

Georg Friedrich Haas