Steffen Schleiermacher, Hildegard Wiedemann, Holger Falk - Hommage à August Stramm (2008)

This homage to German expressionist poet August Stramm, who was killed in World War I, is apparently a project of pianist Steffen Schleiermacher, who performs in most of the music and contributes a pair of original compositions. The composers involved span several generations, reaching back to Stramm's own time, and that's the chief attraction in this unusual collection of modern compositions. Stramm, who worked as a postal official, is partly responsible for the fact that you can mail a letter from one country to another without buying postage for each of the countries through which it passes. The booklet describes him as an expressionist poet, but there is a strong aspect of pure experimentalism to it. The texts used are given in the booklet in German only, but you can get something of an idea of what he was up to just by looking at them (and indeed many of them had a visual aspect). They're of the one-word-per-line school, and what's interesting is that their combination of minimalism, subjectivity ("Du und ich!/Ich und du!/Du?!"), and violence served the needs of such a variety of German composers, from Wladimir Vogel with his speech-song experiments of the 1920s up to contemporary virtuosos of the sampler and prepared piano. Even Milton Babbitt, the only non-German composer represented, set some of Stramm's texts; curiously, Hindemith, who turned Stramm's play Sancta Susanna into an opera, is not included. The disc is definitely only for those interested in atonal contemporary music, but it provides an intriguing historical perspective within that field.