Dror Feiler
was born in Tel Aviv, 1951. After completing his studies at an agricultural
college (1965-1969) and serving his military service as a parachutist (1969-1972),
he settled in Sweden 1973.
In 1977-1978 he studied musicology at Stockholm University and in 1978-1983
he studied composition at the state college of Music in Stockholm with Gunnar
Bucht, S. D. Sandström and Brian Ferneyhough. Since the end of the 1970s,
he has composed more than 60 works for various combinations of instruments,
ranging from orchestral music to solo pieces, from electroacoustic music to
ballet music.
When speaking about his music he shows a will to work with music that deals
with the world. «I want always to deal with the grim problems in life:
Shrapnel (war); Beat the White the Red Wedge (Revolution); Schlafbrand (Second
World War); Let the Millionaires go Naked (Revenge of the poor); Intifada
(Israeli-Palestinian conflict). Aesthetics per se do not interest me. More
than that it is dangerous. When I compose or play I do not look for beauty,
but for truth.» He often depicts, fortissimo and at great length, a
violent struggle, but concerning Maavak (struggle) (1981) he says : «Maavak
does not describe the struggle Maavak is the struggle.»
Parallel to his activities as a composer he has since 1978 been playing the
saxophones, clarinets and electronics as a solo performer and in two music
groups, «Lokomotive Konkret» and «The Too Much Too Soon
Orchestra», of which he is the founder and artistic leader. He has taken
part in radio recordings and concerts as a soloist or with his groups in Europe,
Asia and U.S.A. Dror Feiler, with his ardent sense of vocation, must rank
as one of Sweden’s leading improvisation musicians and composers, and
he campaigns for equality of status between improvised and pre-structured
music.
Dror Feiler «Some words about my music»
The most immediately audible characteristic of my music is its noisiness.
Abrasive, loud, fast. The textures are never sweet or satisfying in the conventional
sense; one has only to hear the primal screams «Pig Iron» for
tenor saxophone & live electronics, the punk-free improvised trash of
«Tio Stupor» for alto saxophone & live electronics or «Schlafbrand»
for sopranino saxophone & tape, to realize that neither a pathetic classical
prettiness nor a pretentious romantic resolution has any place in those works
of music, except as an antagonism; nor do these works admit the conventions
of modern and contemporary chamber music without causing problems.
The intuitive molten metal brutality of the music drives the player into the
energy of intense improvisation. A new music is created, a new speed of thinking
and feeling where the intellect meets the manic raver. We experience an energy
born of rapid movement and expression. The music does something palpable to
its listeners, or at least incites them to a form of action, of awakening;
it activates the listener.
Noise, in the widest possible sense, is one of the central elements in my
music, but not like with its popular «musical cousin», Noise music.
The abrasive raucousness in the music is an attempt to alter how people hear.
Noise, as sound out of its familiar context, is confrontational, affective
and transformative. It has shock value, and defamiliarizes the listener who
expects from music an easy fluency, a secure familiarity, or any sort of mollification.
Noise politicizes the aural environment.
The music is difficult in the sense that Adorno finds Schoenberg's music difficult
- not because it is pretentious or obscure, but because it demands active
participation from the listener (as well as from the players, who are themselves
listeners). As organized sound, this music demands from the very beginning
active and concentrated listening, acute attention to simultaneous multiplicity,
renunciation of the customary crutches of a listening which always knows what
to expect, and intensive perception of the unique and the specific. The more
it gives to listeners, the less it offers them. It requires of the listener
to spontaneously compose its inner movement and demands of him not mere contemplation,
but praxis.
The origin of all music is the ritual, the conjuration. The «new modern
serious music» has lost almost all its blood and all its ritual suggestive
power. Rock, Noise, Trash & Techno music have preserved much of its ritual
suggestive powers but on the way lost most of its musicality. I want my music
to be emotional and to develop to a point where it seems to go beyond itself.
I want my music to have the suggestive power, the aggresivity and the volume
of Rock, Noise, Trash and Techno music and the refinement and skill of New
music.
We cannot help noticing how composing practice, with all its history, has
taken us back to the origins of all music: improvisation. Improvisation can
be interpreted as an instinctive act of trying to achieve emancipation in
a bureaucratic, technocratic society. A society creating a body of artists
which to a great extent is a body of fellow travellers and only in exceptional
cases a body of resistance fighters, resistance being the most essential material
for creating an art that is a self-defence, imperative in the present day
situation. My music springs from individual energy mobilized by a collective
idea.