Micro Music Laboratories, Why

JOURNALIST: Why do you record your music in the Micro Music Laboratories with modern digital technologies, and not with a conventional orchestra?

PETER HUEBNER: Some years ago, a Russian conductor – at the time when the Soviet Union still existed – had rehearsed my Sun-Symphony. Although he was the musical director of a large opera house as well as in charge of a large philharmonic orchestra and choir, he had gathered the best musicians and singers for the performance of this symphony from both his orchestras and many parts of the country. There were also some prize-winners among the musicians.

They had all rehearsed the symphony for over 4 months, and I was prepared to travel to the Soviet Union with a team of technicians to record the work.
The date was fixed, the flights booked, everything was ready, but on the morning we were supposed to depart, the former president of the Soviet Union, Gorbatschow, was arrested during a coup d’etat, and following the advice of the Foreign Ministry, we decided, for security reasons, to cancel this trip for the time being.

After the political circumstances in the Soviet Union had calmed down again, Gorbatschow had been re-established into power, and “normal” conditions had resumed, I invited the orchestra, the choir and the conductor to visit us at the Micro Music Laboratories to record the symphony here. Fortunately, we have the premises for such an enterprise, and, of course, the necessary technology, and so everything appeared to be quite simple.

At the same time, I had invited the director of the large local music academy, who himself is an excellent organist, and his deputy director. Some musicians and members of the choir, who took part in the recording, were professors at the college.

It emerged that the musicians and conductor as well as the singers and the choir were not that easily able to play the Sun-Symphony in a harmonical way.

It was not that we were not dealing with outstanding musicians, instead it emerged that the recording of harmonically structured music requires a totally different kind of music and instrumental training to what we nowadays find all over the world in the field of classical music.

If, in the end, we did not carry out the recording of the Sun-Symphony with this, in a conventional sense, excellent orchestra, and the corresponding excellent choir, and the soloists who, in the usual sense, were outstanding – we all lived together under one roof, ate and drank together, had a swimming-pool, sauna and many other conveniences at our disposal – we did, during that time, become aware of the inadequacies, which the present classical music training inevitably involves, in quite a forceful way.

And we made the spontaneous decision to found an international institution which can educate the musician to play naturally structured music.

Thus, after approx 3 months of eager rehearsals and contemplations, the “International Philharmonic Orchestra for Natural Life” was founded, and we all joined as the first members – the director of the music academy as well as the professors and the musicians, the singers and the members of the Micro Music Laboratories.

During this time, all our guests had the opportunity to get to know the facilities in our Micro Music Laboratories, and to establish in how far the conventional mastery of an instrument lags behind the possibilities of this digital technology.