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Metamorphosen. Beat Furrer an der Hochschule für Musik Basel. Schriften, Gespräche, Dokumente. Edited by Michael Kunkel. Saar - brücken: Pfau, 2011. [298 p. ISBN 9783897274563. i30.] Music examples, facsimiles, photographs, works list, chronology, discography.
From October 2007 to June 2008, the composer and conductor Beat Furrer was resident in Basel as a visiting professor at the Hochschule für Musik Basel and the Musicological Institute at the University of Basel. The volume under review was prepared as a commemoration of the activities surrounding this year in residence (editor Michael Kunkel is the director of the research department at the Hochschule für Musik). One example of the book's direct relationship to the events of Furrer's year in Basel is the text printed here of a roundtable discussion by a group of musicologists at the Basel Music Academy on the subject "Does New Music Need Mediation?" (pp. 199-211; translations throughout this review are my own). The book, however, aspires to be more than a simple catalog of the events of Furrer's residence, a goal that is realized by the incorporation of useful reference information, essays and interviews from a range of years, and assorted documentary material. In addition, scholarly investigations by leading musicologists offer insight into specific topics relating to Furrer's music.
An excerpt from Ovid's Metamorphoses (the "house of rumor" passage that inspired Furrer's opera Fama) serves as a kind of extended epigraph for the volume (pp. 10-11). The passage's evocations of noises, echoes, voices, openness, and space provide a vivid introduction to Furrer's philosophical ideas and compositional materials. These ideas are explored in detail in the essay by Kunkel later in the book, both in reference to Fama and to other Furrer works such as the First String Quartet, the opera Narcissus, and the Aria for voice and ensemble (pp. 81-116). Kunkel's essay is the most comprehensive survey of Furrer's style in the book, and provides welcome concrete music examples...