Name: Markus Reuter
Occupation: Producer, composer, guitarist, educator
Nationality: German
Recent release: Markus Reuter teams up with Alexander Dowerk, Bernhard Wöstheinrich, and Asaf Sirkis for the new release Kosmonautik Pilgrimage, by their genre transcending progressive avant-garde doom-jazz post-metal group Anchor and Burden. The album is available via the band's bandcamp store.

[Read our Bernhard Wöstheinrich interview]

If you enjoyed these thoughts by Markus Reuter and would like to find out more about his work, visit his official homepage. To keep reading, we also recommend our earlier Markus Reuter interview.

For alternative perspectives, there is also a series of interviews with Markus about his AI-themed Kid Arrow project. Read the first three parts of that series here: Part 1. Part 2. Part 3.



For your music, what is it that you want to express?

For me, it was never about what I wanted to express. I think that's an old fashioned concept, a concept by people who don't understand what it means to be an artist in a way.

I want you, as a listener, to experience something, not to express myself. As a musician, you're both like a researcher and a creator. And like any researcher, you kind of create situations that lead to new insights, that lead to the creation of a new world. That's what I'm interested in - experiencing such new worlds. Observing what rules may exist within that world, how one can use certain rules to actually create those worlds.

If you look at things from this angle, it's a self sustaining, self creating and self generating concept. There's no real way out once you start. For me, it's a really good thing, because it keeps re-energising me to make musical discoveries. Or rather, these are not so much musical discoveries. They're not about the music itself. They're about experiential discoveries.

Where does creativity come from, then, if not from wanting to express something that's inside of you? Even if your goal is to create experiences, aren't these rooted in something internal, ultimately?

The way I see it is that everything's almost always there and available. You just have to create the form - or the stencil to make something visible. All of this is about the artistic choices that a composer makes. Which is really about restricting the field of possibility.

If you want to look for inspiring shapes, let's say, you have to, like I said, create some sort of rule that establishes a form. And within the form, you'll you'll find the experience.

When I start writing, I will sometimes have an idea for the style and the rhythm of what I'm going to write. And that guides guides the process of writing it. Is that comparable to when you're making music?

Yeah, exactly. The concept is very important. You're setting the parameters. Before there's any actual content, there's form. If we leave music for a second and turn towards writing, you could sit down and say my book is going to have seven chapters. The first chapter is going to be very short. The second chapter is going to be very long. And so on. This way, you can lay out the form, simply by making decisions that have nothing to do with the actual content. You're defining the form.

And this very principle applies to me when I'm composing. I could decide that I'm going to write for violin. Or I could say, let's compose something for timpani. Which is a big difference even though that's a purely formal, conceptual decision. It doesn't say anything really, about the music that will happen.

But then it does say a lot, because it sets up the space available for what kind of sounds you can create and what works technically. All of that is pretty limited once you create a form.

You've told me that you had an idea for a piece when you were around 15, I believe, and you couldn't implement it at the time. Later, it turned into your major work Todmorden 513. So what was the idea like? Was that, too, a “formal” concept?

No, it's more complex than that. What ends up being music or sounds is initially represented as an emotion. This emotion is the driver of creativity.



This doesn't mean that the emotion that I have in the beginning is an emotion that will later be present in the music or that it is an emotion that I want to elicit in other people. No, not at all. Rather, it's an urge - the drive to do something.

And that's also what happened with Todmorden 513. Already as a teenager I had the idea that there might be some sort of generative approach that would be inherently musical, rather than just being a numbers game. And it took many years, or decades, of study, in order to get there – on top of the necessary progress in terms of the technical resources needed to make it happen.

I also have a very particular way of thinking about music when it comes to pitches. I think about voice leading, so I'm kind of like hearing melodies, you could say, that interact and make a greater hole.

In my head, I'm playing these games, just very simple things like: “Okay, you have three notes sounding at the same time. What would happen to the structure if I move the upper voice up a half step? What happens to the structure if I move the upper note down a half step?” And then I'll go through all the permutations of manipulating individual voices.

And that can also apply to rhythms. Although, in a world of rhythm, it turns into something very different. With rhythms, I have come to the conclusion that I'm no longer interested in this idea of a fixed measure of a fixed length. But in my string quartet, heartland, for example, time is expanding and contracting all the time. And it does so not according to any in-the-moment decisions but according to, for lack of a better word, the algorithm.



You've played in many group constellations. Are you finding that this perspective on creativity is something shared by others as well?

That's a good question. I think it varies. There are some people who really have a very similar standpoint when they work with me, but then I also see them working with other people where they're clearly adopting a different mode of working.

I tend to not approach someone for a collaboration in terms of personal preferences. I mean, obviously, I like the people I'm working with. But ultimately it's about what we can bring to the table - even if what the other does can sometimes be limiting to me in terms of what I can do. But if it yields results, I see that as a good thing. Even though it may be frustrating, especially in improvisation, if you see that some people have a different definition of freedom.

But I try to take it as it comes. So what if I have only a slightly limited space to work with? Let's see what I can do with that. You have to make the best out of any situation.