Peter Michael Hamel - Organum (1986)

Hamel's contemporary interpretation of the medieval musical concept known as "organum" involved an intricate interplay of modal melodies. These four extended works on pipe organ culminate in acutely intense barrages of sound and sensation. This is a challenging album.

Peter Michael Hamel, born in 1947, ranks as one of the best-known and most successful German composers of his generation. He studied music, psychology, and sociology in Munich and Berlin with teachers such as G. Bialas and F. Buechtger, and continued his education abroad, spending three extensive periods in Asia. Hamel has entered into an intense engagement with musical culture from outside Europe, especially the music of India. He has drawn inspiration from Asian philosophies and religions and from his encounter with the works of Jean Gebser and C.G. Jung to present a music that seeks to make itself accessible to the listener through meditative experience and self-exploration. He says, "I often think of the listener, but what emerges is that which happens. The perceptual conditions cannot be pre-determined. I would like to convey archetypical conditions which lead the listener to an encounter with himself or herself."

In 1970, he founded Between, an international group of improvisational musicians with whom he made several records, and in 1978 he initiated the Freies Musikzentrum Muenchen, an institute for musical education and therapy. In 1976, his book, Through Music to the Self was published, obtaining wide circulation in Europe and the U.S. The book discusses the transformational effects of music through the ages and calls for a new approach to composition in twentieth-century Western music. Tonius Timmerman in Musiktexte explains Hamel's philosophy this way, "Hamel seeks to develop a musical language which is accessible not only to a specially educated minority. He understands music to be the occasion for communicating with other musicians and with the public with whom he wants to speak and to whom he has something to say."

One of his most interesting works, The Arrow of Time/The Cycle of Time, uses music to explore two of mankind's conceptions of time - that of time as an arrow pointing eternally toward the future and that of time as a circle, forever repeating itself. For some ten years now Peter Michael Hamel has turned to larger symphonic forms, but his oeuvre is diverse and encompasses chamber music, choral works, operas, and music for theatrical productions. Hamel has undertaken commissions for the Berlin Festwochen and the Salzburg Festival, and has performed interpretations of his own works for piano and organ in international concert tours.

Tracklist:

01. Part 1 25:32
02. Part 2 8:34
03. Part 3 17:16
04. Part 4 5:40