Eckhard Unruh

Eckhard Unruh

Eckhard Rabindranath Unruh was a German-American composer, born in Calcutta, India on Nov. 10 1921, died in Berkeley, California, November 9 1996.

Born in India of German parents, Unruh received a brutally strict early training in classical music from the Bengali sarodist R. Thakura. Moved with his parents to London in 1933; as a teenager he studied composition with Sorabji and conducting with Sir Henry Wood. Served in Royal Army medical corps in WWII; first compositions were vocal and choral works dedicated to the soldiers he tended. After the war he was stationed in Darmstadt; became friendly with Berio and Bruno Maderna. Unruh was publicly praised by Boulez at this time; not, however, for his compositions but for his conducting. Private tapes reveal him as an unusually free and expressive conductor of Xenakis and Stockhausen; nevertheless after being demobbed he failed to find salaried musical work in Germany. Worked in a plant nursery in Kürten, composing only late at night. He would eventually compose over 200 works; owing in part to his diffidence, almost none of these would be professionally performed or published during his lifetime.

Career
Unruh, it could be said, had an instinct for making his work undesirable. In the early 1950’s his compositions were exuberant and lacked theoretical underpinnings. He could not or would not use mathematical or architectural metaphors to account for his polystylism, which was therefore seen as a Romantic throwback unsuitable for a sophisticated audience; in a rejection letter, one music publisher deemed his music "microtonal Liszt."

In the 1960s, especially following his first stroke in 1962, his work became increasingly sober and withdrawn, and was criticized by potential performers and impresarios as lacking the exuberance necessary to make an impression in that era. According to the Bengali musicologist Nibaran Chakravarti, “At the time I met him [1966, in California], he seemed to see music as the opposite of self-expression. Music was a private means of demonstrating to himself that he was not free.” By 1966 he had ceased all attempts at getting jobs in conducting, and moved to California in July of that year; there he would meet his wife Ulyssia Ludwig, a cousin of the mezzo Christa Ludwig. Unruh continued to compose prolifically, while making his living as a gardening assistant in a small Berkeley nursery.

In the 1970s, with Minimalism in vogue, he wrote works in which themes were rapidly introduced, developed, and folded into more themes, then still more, so that a single twenty-minute piano work like the delicate “Cecil Taylor’s Eyes” (1974) tosses off more ideas than some contemporary composers used during the whole decade. Unruh might have found an audience in the eventual atmosphere of backlash against Minimalism, had he tried to obtain a hearing for any of these pieces, but by this time he had withdrawn from any attempt at making a musical career.

He composed every evening from 10 PM till 1 in the morning, working out many of his ideas monophonically on a sarod, the resonating gourd of which he had filled with clay from his garden, so that it barely sounded. His music of this era, for all its tumbling thematic content, has nevertheless a kinship with the late-night raga, rarefied and inward. An obvious example is the orchestral "toneless poem" Recurrence (1974), in which the full orchestra seems to consist of eighty individuals, playing softly and separately their own private thoughts; it is in fact chamber music, with never more than three or four instruments audible at the same time. The piece is like a huge compositional notebook, filled with two hundred unrelated themes, and no sense that these themes will ever join to form a "work."

Final period
His wife’s death of breast cancer, in 1975 at age 39, was devastating to him. Near the end of her ordeal, he himself suffered a mild stroke. According to Chakravarti, "After Ulyssia’s death, he recovered the full use of his hands by playing Bach very slowly on the piano, making his own dirgelike transcriptions of the cantatas, for which he sang all the parts in his weird Anglo-Bengali German." This was his only musical activity for almost a year. He then suffered a more serious stroke, and during a very long convalesence began to compose his only well-known work, the oratorio How is This Going to Continue? This would be Unruh's final composition, a vocal collage on the subject of his wife’s death and of his own illness. Of this work Unruh wrote in a private letter, "It’s non-music. No original themes. Musical quotes, speeches, songs, poetry, a trash-heap, unlistenable if I can manage it, so thick it’s actually silent." This seems overstated, since original musical themes appear throughout. Furthermore, his extensive sampling of recordings by the English contralto Kathleen Ferrier (who, like his wife, died in mid-life of breast cancer) does give a structural focus to the first half of the work at least. Admittedly Unruh’s use of multilingual overlapping voices does frequently create overload in the listener. The rather notorious moment when the funeral march themes of all ten Mahler symphonies are playing simultaneously certainly achieves irredeemable thickness--Unruh arranges the dynamic balances of the ten source tapes so carefully that it is never possible to listen through the incredible roar to hear a single recognizable phrase of Mahler. The effect is a nightmarish vision of generic "classical music," the solace of art become a bombardment.

Unruh managed to complete this work bedridden, though it required his physical involvement in preparing the electronic and taped components. Two further strokes in 1978 forced his retirement from composition at age 56. Until his death eighteen years later he never again spoke with his friends about music. Nevertheless, he did continue to write topical references into the libretto of How Is This Going to Continue? making of it a sort of scrapbook in which he recorded the illnesses or deaths of Leonard Bernstein, Glenn Gould, and Alfred Schnittke, among others. He did no further work on the corresponding tape elements, however, and these had to be realized posthumously by his editor. Unruh died in 1996, at the age of 74, while working in his garden.

Several posthumous scores have now been published, all sponsored and edited by Dr. Nibaran Chakravarty, who was a friend of the Unruhs in California. First public performance of any Unruh work took place in San Francisco in December 1998, How is This Going to Continue? conducted by Chakravarty (who was himself mortally ill at this time, and would die within a month of the concert). Regrettably, the underrehearsed 1998 performance was a critical disaster, and this incident, combined with the early death of Unruh’s chief advocate, has rather eclipsed a reputation which was in any case never much more than a rumor; at present it appears that Unruh’s time may have passed before it ever arrived.