They had all rehearsed the
symphony for over 4 months, and I was prepared to travel to the Soviet Union
with a team of technicians to record the work.
The date was fixed, the flights booked, everything was ready, but on the
morning we were supposed to depart, the former president of the Soviet Union,
Gorbatschow, was arrested during a coup detat, and following the advice
of the Foreign Ministry, we decided, for security reasons, to cancel this
trip for the time being.
After the political circumstances in the Soviet Union had calmed down again,
Gorbatschow had been re-established into power, and normal conditions
had resumed, I invited the orchestra, the choir and the conductor to visit
us at the MicroMusic Laboratories to record the symphony here. Fortunately,
we have the premises for such an enterprise, and, of course, the necessary
technology, and so everything appeared to be quite simple.
At the same time, I had invited the director of the large local music academy,
who himself is an excellent organist, and his deputy director. Some musicians
and members of the choir, who took part in the recording, were professors
at the college.
It emerged that the musicians and conductor as well as the singers and the
choir were not that easily able to play the Sun-Symphony in a harmonical
way.
It was not that we were not dealing with outstanding musicians, instead
it emerged that the recording of harmonically structured music requires
a totally different kind of music and instrumental training to what we nowadays
find all over the world in the field of classical music.
If, in the end, we did not carry out the recording of the Sun-Symphony with
this, in a conventional sense, excellent orchestra, and the corresponding
excellent choir, and the soloists who, in the usual sense, were outstanding
we all lived together under one roof, ate and drank together, had
a swimming-pool, sauna and many other conveniences at our disposal
we did, during that time, become aware of the inadequacies, which the present
classical music training inevitably involves, in quite a forceful way.
And we made the spontaneous decision to found an international institution
which can educate the musician to play naturally structured music.
Thus, after approx 3 months of eager rehearsals and contemplations, the
International philharmonic orchestra for natural life was founded,
and we all joined as the first members the director of the music
academy as well as the professors and the musicians, the singers and the
members of the Micro Music Laboratories.
During this time, all our guests had the opportunity to get to know the
facilities in our MicroMusicLaboratories, and to establish in how far the
conventional mastery of an instrument lags behind the possibilities of this
digital technology.
Peter Hübner