After Das Buch der Klänge (1979 – 82), Stundenbuch (1991 – 98) is Hans Otte’s first major piano work. The title alludes to the medieval Book of Hours, a collection of prayers and Biblical texts that are read at the canonical hours of the day.

Stundenbuch comes in four partitions, each holding twelve piano pieces. To go with the piano pieces there are a collection of calligraphic ink drawings and fifty-two aphoristic inscriptions. All these are present in the booklet.

It’s an act of meditation in its most pristine and serene state, to listen through this CD.

Some of the aphoristic inscriptions go:

I believe this music is about silence and about space; the silence in the space of yourself. Cage said that there is no silence, because even in an anechoic chamber you hear your blood wheezing through your blood vessels and your heart pounding, and you hear the static crackling of your nervous system – but the silence I’m referring to in connection with Stundenbuch is the hypothetical silence of sound; a state to be dreamt of, to be imagined, to be revered – in the space of your existence; even that theoretical, hypothetical, not really palpable or defined. That’s how Otte’s Stundenbuch is; a set of imagined silences described with sound, piano sound. It’s hard to get closer to silence by using sound than this, than Stundenbuch – and it has nothing to do with the volume of the piano sound, or how firm or light the keys are struck. No, it has to do with an atmosphere, or a state of mind, in which these short sounding silences – these hammered silences! – emerge like silver out of mist, like gazes out of eyes – that presence of something that isn’t you nor anything else, but just that which is – in a timeless moment, in heavy weightlessness, in motionless speed between the Here and the Now…

Anyways, with the rippling timbres falling out of space, I retort to a suspended attention; a restful concentration – much like the consciousness of a three-year-old child with a bucket f sand, spring wind in his hair; that absentminded focusing in the moment, in forgetfulness of circumstances, in utter ignorance of all that brought you here, all that will take you away… and I exist in this music like I exist in existence, without reservations, flowing with the flow, with time and galactic forces, a smile and a joke at the Restaurant at The End of The Universe, as the word goes – and… don’t panic!

The pieces – though all well dressed for this dance in the hall of absentmindedness – are, among themselves, quite different. While some may take you daydreaming into early 20th century Ignaz Friedman pianisms, others have more in common with the Etudes Australes by John Cage – while some may have you think about Pierre Boulez’s Sonates pour piano. Most are simply glittering reflections on rippled water, though; sun and wind through the leaves of birches in May Scandinavia, Anemone Hepaticas like deep blue reflections of the sky in the gray decay of yesteryear’s remains.

Hans Otte plays his own pieces, revealing himself as a master pianist amongst more renowned ones like Herbert Henck or Steffen Schleiermacher, to mention a few obvious one from the German realm.

This series of dreams is like fresh water out of the well for a thirsty traveler. I feel refreshed and cleansed after journeying though the forty-eight aphorisms, my body almost in phase with my spirit – and that ain’t bad!

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