Martin Kohlstedt Sits Down at the Piano and Disappears
Martin KohlstedtSits Down at the Piano
and Disappears
The German pianist and composer raised in Weimar on stripping everything back until only the essential remains.
Photo © J. Konrad Schmidt
Martin Kohlstedt is a pianist and composer who breaks boundaries between piano, orchestra, and electronic music. What is truly special about him, however, is his compositional and visual approach: shaped by the Bauhaus, a movement born in Weimar, his home city, whose centenary we mark this year. Concrete. Outright. Stripped of ornament. It makes Kohlstedt a remarkable talking point for this platform, combining visual thinking with music and the wider conversation around what art is actually for.
The story he tells about his first real encounter with music says more about him than any biography could. He was sixteen. A Friday night. New leather jacket, friend due to ring the doorbell, a weekend stretching ahead. He sat at the piano in the living room to kill a few minutes. He looked up and it was 4:30 in the morning. The friend never came. The leather jacket came off. He went to sleep.
What followed was the kind of musical adolescence that sounds chaotic from the outside: eight bands simultaneously, hip hop, funk, electronic music, an accumulation of sounds and collaborators and desires. Somehow, through all of it, a thread held. The need to strip things back. The suspicion of the decorative.
Growing up in Weimar will do that to you. This is the city of the Bauhaus, the movement that declared a century ago that form should follow function, that ornament was not a virtue but a distraction, that the most honest thing a maker could do was communicate concretely and outright. Kohlstedt absorbed this not as ideology but as instinct.
Form follows function
No ornament
Communicate directly
Kohlstedt's compositional approach is modular: pieces built from recurring themes, HAR and NAO among them, that recombine and develop differently depending on the space, the audience, the time of day. There is no fixed version. Each performance is a snapshot, and the development between snapshots is where the real work lives.
This is Bauhaus thinking applied to time. Not a finished object but a living process. Not a product but a practice. When HAR and NAO are let loose on one another, there is friction. HAR, with its youthful restlessness, will not succumb to NAO's attempt to calm or tame it. The things happening are completely intuitive.
On stage, Kohlstedt gives the audience as little visual input as possible. Classic lighting, darkness, haze, and he sits with his back to the room. It sounds like provocation until you understand the logic: he is not withdrawing from the audience. He is creating the conditions for something more interesting than eye contact. He is making space for the listener to disappear into the music the same way he did at sixteen, alone at a detuned piano while the night went somewhere without him.
What are your greatest inspirations and influences?
I was about 16 years old. It was 10 pm on a Friday night and I had just gotten ready to go out with a friend. I was especially excited about the new leather jacket I had got that day. I sat at the piano in the living room, waiting for the doorbell to ring, so I played and played, and suddenly it was 4:30 in the morning. To the present day I have no idea what exactly happened in the meantime.
The urge came from the inside. I found no other way than to misuse the detuned piano in the living room to pick apart my inner workings as a teenager. The reason was seldom of the normal inspirational nature but more a need to sit at the instrument, have a discussion with myself, and put my thoughts into order.
"Basically the same thing happens on stage, with the minor difference that people can look at me doing that."
In addition to playing the piano, I started playing in eight or so bands simultaneously, and converted all those amassed dreams and desires into hip hop riffs, funk tunes, and electronic sounds together with countless wonderful musicians.
What are the biggest challenges of the music industry today?
The ambivalence, which will no doubt always be part of my creations, of being the boss of your own music label: trying with all available forces, a team of friends, and a ton of gut feeling, to shield your art from the erratic bombardment of the international economy.
It is a very labour-intensive, controlled schizophrenia that more often than not threatens to crush the freedom in music-making.
Tell me more about your compositional style and the Bauhaus influence in your work.
For me, ultimately, it is about the never-ending process: a modular concept of composition that attempts to put emotional memories from my childhood and adolescence into new contexts. If I let HAR and NAO loose on one another there will be friction. HAR, with its youthful restlessness, will not succumb to the attempt of NAO to calm or tame it. The things happening there are completely intuitive. Depending on the space, audience, or time of day, the themes in my pieces will recombine and develop in a different manner every time.
The Bauhaus connection is more of an underlying mindset: to communicate things concretely and outright, to avoid little ornaments and embellishments in playing the piano, and to stay as true and direct as possible while alone with yourself.
How important are visuals for your performance?
When collaborations with visual artists took place I always thought of the result, and the mutual creative journey to get there, as an artistic exchange: a bit like scoring a film.
In my solo shows, on the other hand, I try to give as little visual input as possible. There will be classic stage lighting, a lot of darkness and haze, and on top of that I sit with my back towards the audience. That way everyone gets into a conversation with themselves, without the need for obvious or conscious communication.
How was it to collaborate with the Gewandhaus Choir?
Imagine that over many years you use the piano to cope with yourself and your life: poking a stick at your subconscious, alone and weak. The addition of electronic instruments created a sort of super-ego that amplifies all the sentiments expressed through music and forces you to give answers. And then, in the middle of your intuitive compositions, 70 voices join the endeavour and give you the feeling of marching into your own subconscious with the power of a whole armada.
"An experience that left me addicted and longing for more."
The big task now is to establish the intimacy needed between me and the choir to be able to fully improvise and enable the scores to function modularly. But the first concerts are already unforgettable and all the ideas that surface there are completely unique.
How is playing live different from playing in the studio?
A piece is always a work in progress. Recording the piece is like taking a snapshot of it at a certain point in time. No two recordings of a song will be the same, and the development between those snapshots is the interesting part, for me at least. Playing live, on stage, is therefore more vivid and sometimes even unpredictable. That is what keeps me going.
Twenty-three years of conversations with the people who live inside music.
