Fallen out of time

Peter Benary (1931-2015) was clearly not what you would call a "simple person". In his seminars at Lucerne University of Applied Sciences and Arts, he sometimes made mocking and sarcastic remarks to his students. In this newly published anthology, long-time friend and conductor Peter Gülke speaks of a "difficult friendship". And then there are the reviews that Peter Benary wrote for the NZZ wrote. They were sometimes biting, because the commitment to the music could tip over into hurtfulness - especially when it was not his was music.

His All 17 authors in the volume agree that the music was not that of the avant-garde after 1950. The names of Benary's fixed stars Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Anton Bruckner and Paul Hindemith are mentioned. Michel Roth, composer and professor at the Basel University of Music, mentions Benary's essay The rejection of new musicwhere "a perverted understanding of technology" is criticized and Benary complains about a "loss of language in music", which is due to the fact that "technology" has taken the place of "content, linguistic meaning, expression" (p. 116).

Benary was moderately successful as a composer. His works were hardly ever performed at new music festivals; he himself once complained that he no longer wanted to compose "for the drawer". Nevertheless, he produced an extensive oeuvre with many choral works, three symphonies, four string quartets and a considerable amount of chamber music. (The anthology concludes with the list of works compiled by David Koch, p. 212 ff.) Benary was also productive as a music publicist, be it as a critic of the NZZ or as an author for the Swiss Music Newspaper and the Swiss music education journals. Many musicological essays testify to a broad horizon: fundamental aesthetic considerations stand alongside thoughts on interpretation and specific discussions of individual works and composers in music history.

After reading the book, which was published by Schwabe Verlag in Basel in 2024, the feeling remains that Benary has somehow fallen out of his time, despite his creative urge. His time as an essayist and program booklet author for the Lucerne Festival ended in 2007 because the author simply refused to write with a computer and insisted on the good old typewriter. Incidentally, the composer, musicologist, publicist and lecturer also wrote haikus, poetry and aphorisms. Including the cheerfully amusing motto: "A fly walks across the music paper to the fermata."

Peter Benary, composer, musicologist, publicist and lecturer, ed. by Niccolò Raselli and Hans Niklas Kuhn, 229 p., Fr. 46.00, Schwabe, Basel 2024, ISBN 978-3-7965-5109-3