23.01.2025 | Artist

Herbert Henck (1948-2025)

 

Herbert Henck (1948-2025)

Herbert Henck, brilliant pianist, dedicated interpreter of modern music, and an insightful writer on contemporary composition, has  died, aged 76. His eight ECM New Series albums constitute a unique body of work.  In his performances, as in his musicological studies, Henck liked to cast light on overlooked or hidden aspects of the music. This quality of revelation illuminates each of his recordings, whether exploring the Zen playfulness of John Cage’s piano music, the motoric drive of George Antheil and Conlon Nancarrow’s pieces, the aphoristic – and forgotten – 12-tone works of Johann Ludwig Trepulka, or the shimmering stasis of Hans Otte’s Das Buch der Klänge, which Jean-Luc Godard adopted as the soundtrack for his film De l’origine du XXIe siècle.

Born in 1948 in Treysa,  Henck studied in Mannheim, Stuttgart and Cologne, and from 1975 worked as a freelance musician.  In the 1980s he published five yearbooks under the heading Neuland, addressing “Approaches to Contemporary Music”.  Other books included a study of Stockhausen’s piano music, a book on experimental pianism, and a study of Transylvanian composer Norbert von Hannenheim.

As an interpretive musician his sympathies were often with the outsiders, the mavericks, and the “disadvantaged, defamed and oppressed” – as he put it in a note for his album with works of Russian avant-gardist Alexandr Mosolov – the composers who, one way or another, were by temperament ill-suited to adapt to commercial or political pressures.

The technical demands of some of modernism’s most eruptive pieces, such as Jean Barraqué’s fiery and intense Sonate, were challenges that Henck welcomed: “Its spectacular scope and unique complexity appealed to me.” But he was drawn, too, to the gentle poetry of Federico Mompou’s Música Callada, with its “mixtures of melting tone colour, vibrating and floating in a way that defies notation”, researching the composer’s biography for interpretive insights: “It was not difficult to connect the long fading conclusions or the marking legato metallico with Mompou’s love of the sound of bells he had got to know in his grandfather’s bell foundry when he was still a  child.”

Untypically for a musician of “classical” training, Herbert Henck was also highly interested in improvisation.  “This yearning for and delight in the unforeseen will originate spontaneously or not at all,” Henck maintained. “Like the writing of poetry, it cannot be forced, taught or studied, because it is not a matter of technical prowess routinely applied, but of expressive powers. Whether one considers the improvisational output beautiful, whether it pleases the listener or not, is secondary. What takes priority, I believe, is the creator’s joy in what has been created, the knowledge that music can express the movements of the soul. That sound is able to convey the message entrusted to it is, finally, all that matters.” Locations, a 2003 double album, combined Henck’s Festeburger Fantasien, a series of improvisations, with a sparkling account of John Cage’s Sonatas and Interludes for Prepared Piano.

Illness brought Henck’s pianistic activities to an abrupt, premature end in 2005.  He continued to work on texts for a few more years, until that, too, became impossible. But the music that he championed and recorded, and the words he wrote about it, will be studied for many years to come.