Hayden to Haydn Cologne, 16.06.2012 Dear Josef, This may strike you as a somewhat strange document, written over centuries by someone very distant to your times. Nevertheless I trust these words will find you well. I hail from a place not yet mapped by contemporaries of your time (a group of islands far away in the Southern oceans now called “New Zealand”) and I play an instrument not yet invented by your peers (a kind of curved metallic-bodied woodwind called a “saxophone”). It is surely comforting for you to know that your music is still performed with gusto and that your voice has spanned the centuries, outlasting the wickedest of wars and tribulations, both in worldly affairs and in our hallowed realm of sculptured sound. I was hesitant at first to approach your music, but the kind benefactors of Brühl convinced me. The music I have grown up with is improvised in its intrinsic nature. Perhaps the closest bridge between us here would be your days of serenading gassatim to maidens in the streets when you surely let your imagination and voice run wild. I had seldom played music from the ink and parchment. It was perhaps the striking similarity of our names (albeit your surname and my first name), which sparked off this project. Reluctant as I was, I lost all fears when I read your words: Die Kunst ist frei und soll durch keine Handwerksfesseln, beschränkt werden. Das Ohr, versteht sich ein gebildetes, muss entscheiden, und ich halte mich befugt wie irgendeiner, hierin Gesetze zu geben. With these words I was buoyed to sift through your legacy and pick out some gems that would lend themselves to reinterpretation with my humble saxophone and the pianoforte, which has retained its importance in the parts of the world where the hallowed octave is still divided into 12 even parts. As a man who tuned his own piano, there is no need for me to write of the difficulties and the joys to be found in the eternal search for the perfect tuning. In my time, this search continues. I decided to begin my journey through your musical world by interpreting some of your Flötenuhrmusik pieces. A strange and wonderful machine this must have been! I ask myself how it must have felt, having your music captured and frozen in time, only to be replayed at will. This has become a more common practice in my times and I too will probably be capturing my homage to you and allowing some machine to replay it at will (yes, the machines almost have wills of their own in my time) - perhaps our respective attitudes to this practice are not so far removed. The song Das Leben ist ein Traum first struck me as something enigmatic when I saw the title. After hearing the melody I knew we could do justice to this wonderful miniature. The brilliant Russian pianist on my side, Simon Nabatov, works with the melody in a style we call “stride”, in which the left hand makes large leaps over the keys to simulate a bass with upper harmonies whilst the right improvises melodies. It hails from the New World and like many a musical style, it has gradually seeped out into the rest of the globe, infusing our own playing with new colours. I have taken the huge liberty of using the Oboe Concerto melody as a base for playing over a small drone instrument from India called a Sruti Box (sruti being a Sanskrit word from ancient India translated as that which is heard). The piano soon enters and we reharmonise your beautiful theme before embarking on an improvisation over chords hinted at by your own ink. How astounded and delighted I was when I came across the palindromic Minuet and Trio theme of your 43rd Symphony! This was the moment when I understood how truly committed you were to creating your very own laws of sound. From our perspective today, this small gesture of exact reversal in the melody, harmony and dynamics would surely put you amongst the Avant-Garde (the culture and practice of naming things\u002Fstyles\u002Fmovements has become somewhat extreme). With this wonderful palindrome in mind (which we, in the spirit of our program, interpret rather freely), I took the great liberty of playing your Gott Erhalte Franz den Kaiser in its retrograde. The melody was special to you. I know you played it several times in your last days and it has grown in popularity, known the world over and sung as the hymn of modern Germania. And so we felt no remorse in reversing and reharmonising such a well-known theme - it is our humble way of teasing our eternal mistress called Time. Your melodies have inspired us indeed. We have taken them and used them as points of departure for our improvisations. In a piece like Ma, a Chi Parlo? from Arianna a Naxos, I play a new melodic line but adhere to the original harmonies. In my version of your Flute concerto, we change the rhythm base somewhat by using a meter from the southern part of the New World, now called Brasil - a sensual dominion of light where the drums of Africa meet the harmonies of Europe. Likewise with songs like Fidelity and Recollection we have retained your melody but changed the underlying rhythm to the point that for some, it may even be unrecognizable - and yet I would like to think that your spirit still sings out from within. My working of Chaos from The Creation may strike you as particularly foreign. With my Sruti Box providing the C tonality, I sing the first libretto fragments in a style hailing from a distant mountainous kingdom called Tibet. This style of singing is devotional and emphasizes the full spectrum of sound in the human voice. As I sing in this style the piano “quotes” fragments from your text, which I had cut up and rearranged on the paper. As we are dealing with the creator’s first impulse here in this work, the very seed of the world, I have tried to go back to the source of sound itself hidden within the human voice. Please excuse me if this strikes you as gewöhnungsbedurftig upon first hearing. Sometimes I felt like holding up a small magnifying glass to a bar of your work. Such was the case with the last bar of Flötenuhrmusik 1 when you wrote the deliciously sounding quintuplet - for me another truly avant-garde gesture that puts the rest of the piece in an entirely new context. I fell in love with this one tiny bar so much that I reversed it and repeated it-such is the nature of my particular musical magnifying glass. I often thought of your Farewell Symphony, even though we will not attempt it in our program. You hinted at the times ahead when you wrote these performing gestures into the parts for a specific purpose. If you can take a leap in thought and imagine this act of blowing out the candles as music in its own right, which I am quite sure you can, then you will be close to the spirit of our times- here where anything conceivable can find its place on stage. This exponential expansion of the boundaries of what is possible with sound has of course brought along with it a whole host of other problems. Surely we require some boundaries for creative work, n’est pas? Beyond this, everything has sped up - gesture, travel, communication, thought, movement- even time itself has sped up. Perhaps our Prestos are played faster than yours. This I can only speculate at. And so I have more to thank you for than I could possibly put in a short letter like this. If we, with our short and improvised interpretation of your works, were able to cast new light on the timeless quality of your musical vision, I would be happy indeed. Sincerely, Hayden Non nobis Domine, non nobis. Sed Nomini tuo, da Glorium.