condition (record/cover): M / M Insert included. | One of the most improbable and moving documents in the history of postwar German music education. Air Maul - An Arnold Schönberg, 5860 Canyon-Cove, Hollywood, CA is a double LP of new music performed entirely by the Arbeitsgemeinschaft Neue Musik am Leininger-Gymnasium Grünstadt - a school ensemble of teenagers from a small town in the Rhineland-Palatinate, conducted by Manfred Peters. The title addresses itself to Schoenberg at his exile address in Hollywood, a gesture that sets the tone for the whole project: provincial German youth reaching across history and geography toward the radical tradition that their grandparents' generation had expelled.

Peters founded the AG Neue Musik in 1970 and over the following decades turned a high school extracurricular activity into one of the most remarkable laboratories for experimental music performance in the Federal Republic. The composers on this compilation did not write down to their young performers - these are full-strength works demanding commitment, concentration and a willingness to rethink what music-making means. The recordings, made at the studios of SDR Stuttgart, WDR Köln and SWF Baden-Baden between the late 1970s and mid-1980s, have a directness and intensity that professional ensembles rarely achieve.

The first side opens with Hans-Joachim Hespos's Nykayé for mixed choir of at least 30 speakers - one of Hespos's characteristic works in which voices are pushed beyond singing into a territory of breath, noise, and corporeal sound. Howard Skempton's A Humming Song for voice and piano, performed by Uwe Kany and Christiane Cochrane, is a moment of English stillness amid the German turbulence - a tiny, exquisite piece from the Cardew/Parsons orbit. Two works by Kurt Schwitters follow: Niess Scherzo (Sneezing Scherzo) and Husten Scherzo (Coughing Scherzo), Dada sound poetry from the 1920s and 1930s brought back to life by a chorus under Gerd Hauser - the body as instrument, music as contagion.

Dieter Schnebel's Gesums-Geknarrt for spatial voices occupies the entire second side. Schnebel, who maintained a long and close working relationship with the Grünstadt ensemble, here explores the physicality of vocal production - humming, creaking, buzzing, the pre-linguistic sounds of the human apparatus deployed across space. It is a piece that demands total commitment from its performers and rewards it with an experience closer to ritual than concert.

Side C is given over to Christian Wolff's Prose Collection - five pieces performed by the ensemble on strings and percussion. Wolff's verbal scores, with their open-ended instructions and democratic demands on performers, are ideally suited to a group whose strength lies in collective listening and mutual responsiveness rather than virtuosity. Double Song for JRN & CMAW, Looking North, Crazy Mad Love, You Blew It and For Jil together form a suite of quiet, attentive music-making.

The final side pairs Michael Rumpf's Die Zähmung des Geräuschs (The Taming of the Noise), a Hörstück that blurs the line between composition and radio art, with Hespos's Bima, a second work for mixed choir of at least 30 speakers that bookends the set - returning to the massed vocal forces of the opening, now transformed.

2LP in gatefold sleeve with booklet. Released on Murawski-Zimmermann Verlag, 1988. Recorded at SDR Stuttgart Studio Karlsruhe, WDR Köln and SWF Baden-Baden.