TEMPO OF RECOLLECTION - Hosfeld Artist Management

TEMPO OF RECOLLECTION
Music of Erwin Schulhoff
Based upon the music of Erwin Schulhoff
Tempo of Recollection draws upon a range of work by Erwin Schulhoff, and incorporates
movement and theatrical design, to create a staged performance culminating in
Schulhoff’s 2 nd String Quartet, featuring the St. Helen’s String Quartet. The piece employs
an ensemble of musicians, actors, and dancers (approximately 10 altogether), integrated
with projection, sound, lighting and minimal scenery to create a performance
that provides historical, cultural and aesthetic contexts for Schulhoff’s work, and uses
these performative elements and multiple contexts to lead into and inform the St.
Helen’s performance of the Schulhoff 2 nd String Quartet.
Schulhoff was a fascinating and significant artistic presence in the Central Europe of the
1920s and 30s, as a concert pianist, jazz improviser and composer. He was born in Prague
in 1894 and discovered at the age of 7 by Antonin Dvorak. He subsequently studied
in Vienna, Leipzig, Paris (with Debussy) and Koln, before moving to Dresden following
World War I. He launched a successful career as a concert performer, becoming
friendly with many of the noted composers of his day, including Berg and Janacek, but
he is perhaps best known to us as one of the first composers to successfully integrate
jazz and neoclassical approaches. Following his death in a Nazi labor camp in 1942 (he
was a German-speaking Czech Jew and a Communist), his works largely disappeared
until the Glasnost period of the later 1980s, during which they were rediscovered and
championed by Gidon Kremer and James Conlon, among others, although the bulk of
his compositions still remain largely unknown to contemporary audiences.
Intellectually, this piece is deeply informed by an understanding of the tremendous,
generative cultural world of the 1920s & 30s Mitteleuropa, described by Milan Kundera
and others; a cultural world, of which Schulhoff was a part, and which was lost to us -
eliminated by the Nazi genocides, World War II and the period of the Cold War, which
only began to end with the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and other events. This was a
world that spanned the languages and cultures of Germany and the former Austro-
Hungarian Empire, as well as France. Among the most easily recognized cultural
movements from the period are Dada, Expressionism, late Jugenstil (Secession), but
more importantly it was a period of great experimentation, easily the equal of (or exceeding)
and the precursor to the ferment in Western arts since World War II. Schulhoff’s
works, encompassing sophisticated neoclassical approaches, jazz and popular
dance music, while also reflecting his affiliations with important visual artist movements,
especially Dada and Expressionism, embodies the artistic milieu of Central
Europe’s last great period of cultural flowering and destruction.
visit www.TempoOfRecollection.com
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