"His masters groove" the musical background by Wolfgang Staribacher

THE IDEA…

…hit me the first time I heard Mozart’s 12th symphony, the 4th movement played by the Prague Chamber Orchestra with Charles McKerras. I will never forget that moment: midsummer in Italy, straw tent, a Walkman, about two dozen Mozart CDs around me. I found the way his early symphonies were sometimes grooving in a rock’n’roll-like fashion incredible.

I began to play some allegretto movements on my accordion. It worked surprisingly well. The Helicon bass on my accordion made it easy for me, after I had developed a new fingering technique, to make the steady eight-to-the bar bass lines swing. The musette in the treble section perfectly covers the violin range and provides a broad, orchestra-like sound.
I only listened to Mozart and slowly began to understand his music. Now I was ready to search for co-musicians. My ambitious goal was to play Mozart with respect for his musical language and tunes but with all the liberties of form, arrangement, groove, and sound that the original allows for or maybe even needs.

SETTING UP THE BAND

It was difficult to find the musicians for this kind of crossover project. Over the years, as the Mozartband slowly grew from a duo to a quintet to the final ten-piece ensemble, we worked together with over seventy instrumentalists and thirty male and female singers. The lineup has been final for three years now, consisting of fabulous cats: classical musicians who can also improvise in the desired style, rock musicians with a deep understanding of Mozart, all of them wanderers between the styles, influenced by jazz, folk, and ethno music.

CROSSOVER OR MOZART?

Mozart himself adapted many different elements and blended them to form his style.
However, we have hardly seen a successful fusion of classical music and other styles yet. With Uri Caine or Jacques Loussier, for instance, you always know exactly where classical music stops and jazz takes over; there is always a line of fraction at the transition from classical to jazz.

MUSICAL LANGUAGE AND WORLDS OF EMOTION

Any successful crossover project, as the Mozartband, too found out time and again, depends on an accurate understanding of the musical languages in question, particularly of their melodic and harmonic characteristics. The small overlap area then gives rise to something that cannot be pigeonholed, something of its own kind.
I was always fascinated with musicians who created their own musical language, and with the Alpinkatzen I succeeded in that for the first time. In the process, I noticed an interesting phenomenon: if two musical styles are merged well enough to be perceivable at the same time, the associations and moods inherent in the two styles are also perceivable simultaneously. If these are widely disparate, the listener will be left with a confusing mixture of seemingly contradictory emotions and images.

TO ANALYZE MOZART’S MUSICAL LANGUAGE…

…I tried to use the progression and pattern system of modern jazz. I had to turn it upside down, though, because Mozart’s roots are not the blues but Bach and Austrian folk music. Excitement is created not by tensions but appoggiature, the progressions move along the circle of fifths in the opposite direction, etc.
This jazz viewpoint, however, provides an open, easy approach to Mozart’s universe, or at least part of it, that provides a basis for improvisation as well.

IMPROVISATION AND NOTATION OF THE ORIGINAL

As a musician, I do not perceive the above mentioned emotional worlds of various musical styles and their contrasts as sharply when I work on the fusion myself. What does become obvious in a crossover of classical and modern musical styles is a certain amount of freedom and creativity. The accurate notation of the original allows for maximum musicality in a composition. Jazz and rock, however, leave more room for the creativity of the interpreting musician, for improvisation. This is a totally different playing experience associated with the right hemisphere of the brain (reading music is associated with the left).
If your subconscious has soaked up a melody and the associated chords to the point where the ear and fingers are ready to leave them at any time and return at any time, you have fascinating possibilities of controlled ecstasy. This is what jazz and any improvised music is all about while it has practically disappeared from classical music.
After all, Mozart himself was a divinely gifted improviser, calling “fantasizing” his “favorite occupation”!

To make room for the creativity of the musicians, Mozart’s complex music must be simplified. In many cases, it is Mozart’s roots in folk music that point the way to musically acceptable reduction.

INSTRUMENTATION,SOUND,REINFORCEMENT,
THE MOZARTBAND SOUND

The greatest difference between modern musical styles and Mozart’s compositions is the use of a rhythm section with drums and bass guitar. We wanted to use some of these rhythmic elements. So, we had to start by amplifying the quiet sounds of the classical instruments including the strings, bassoon, and accordion. Our vision was to preserve the characteristic natural sounds of these instruments while integrating the amplified sonic world of rock with its distorted sounds. We spent a lot of time tweaking the sound design, built our own devices or had them custom built for us, and found exotic components through the Internet.

Our string instruments (violin and viola) have an important rhythmical function within the Mozartband, too. We use piezo pickups as well as guitar amps and speakers to amplify the string instruments. This direct miking gives the bowed string a very percussive tone. With a slight amount of overdrive, though, the violin can sound like an electric guitar. In fact, nobody would believe that the solo on “Chi Mai” was played on a violin!

The bassoon was the greatest challenge because it is a very quiet instrument. Using a close-in microphone, sidechain-triggered feedback eliminator, and custom designed volume footswitches, the bassoon was finally loud enough, even for solos above a rock groove. The great agility of the bassoon in all its registers is now perfectly audible and its sound evokes associations with a baritone saxophone, even a cello or French horn.

The accordion, which I usually play in the three-voice musette registration, embeds the single violin and viola in a floating ensemble sound. Within the Mozartband, the accordion is an important mediator between classical and rock sounds.

I modified my Hammond organ such that it always sounds slightly distorted and dirty, a little like a heavy-metal rhythm guitar.

For the drums, however, we needed to find light, airy sounds and rhythmic patterns that would support rather than drown out the fast violin licks and subtle phrasing. Therefore, we often use brushes or soft sticks, and we have two drummers because two drummers together will swing more gently than one.

For original allegro grooves with no drums, we use a semi-acoustic bass instead of the electric. A ribbon on the bridge damps the strings, so the bass blends well with the violin and viola, making up for the lack of a cello. Where slow, sustained bass notes are needed, I play them on the Helicon bass on the accordion, through a bass amp.

THE CREATIVE APPROACH OF THE MOZARTBAND

On the one hand, we play original Mozart from the scores, swap and modify parts, improvise over the chords, and change the form. To create other songs, we use a single tune or motif, compose additional material, add maybe a bass riff, drum groove, bassoon line, or the like during a session. We do it rather like a rock production, but with more room for improvisation.
Rehearsals, a band-type “democratic” process, are a rather anarchical forum for discussions of musical taste. Interestingly, the background of the musicians (“serious” or “jazz”) does not matter any more. The many different musical standpoints and approaches have grown into a common idea of how this band should interpret Mozart.

RECORDING “SOUL”

One important step in this process was the production of our first CD, “Soul”. After almost two years of hard work and interesting experiences, we are all highly satisfied with the result. (We threw away the entire work of the first year.)
The question of how to produce the CD was completely undecided for a long time. We ended up recording almost everything simultaneously. To ensure adequate separation between tracks, we had to wire all ancillary rooms (at one point, there was music playing in nine rooms at the same time). Our band is not exactly small and used the console’s routing capability and peripheral equipment to the limit, soundchecks took ages, and then everybody had to focus simultaneously on Mozart’s music some of which is quite difficult to play.