Wilhelm Killmayer - Artist of the Air

"Silence liberates us. It helps us to listen to ourselves. Music can make us forget ourselves. It can also make us become aware of ourselves.".- Wilhelm Killmayer

It's a very zen comment, it expresses more than meets the eye.  Killmayer's music's clear, cogent, transparent. and incredibly beautiful.  It's radical because it's the complete opposite to the  way prescriptive, materialistic society.operates. .Wolfgang Rihm adores him.

Here is an article. "Wilhelm Killmayer, Artist of the Air" by Sandeep Bhagwati on what Killmayer showed him. "Muddles occur when people try and order the world - the world by itself is not muddled. So the opposite of muddle is to let sounds sort themselves out....."every sound is my friend" Killmayer once said. You respect friends, you are attentive to them, you listen and you let them breathe and have their own life"

The article is just a draft, but in many ways that's good, because Killmayer's music doesn't "teach" but stimulates the listener to open his or her own mind.  "So much white space on his manuscripts" someone once exclaimed, but they aren't blank. They're filled with feelings, possibilties, horizons opening out into unseen panoramas. I'm trying to write about some of Killmayer's most accessible works, Wilhelm Killmayer: Heine-Lieder but each song expands so much, I can't find the words. I'm caught in rapture, hardly daring to move, they're so magical..