Skip to content
Harry Pepl * 1945  † 2005
Contact Sign in

Instant Composing: composing from improvisation

Real-time Composing

Real-time Composing or Instant Composing was Harry Pepl's name for his method of turning freely improvised voices, recorded one on top of another, into finished works. It produced string quartets for the internationally renowned Kronos Quartet and the Artis-Quartett as well as the recordings of the Lonely Single Swinger Band.

Pepl's concept

For Harry Pepl, composition and improvisation were „an sich zwei getrennte Bereiche musikalischen Schaffens“ [“in themselves two separate areas of musical creation”]. In his method, which he called „instant composing“ or „real-time composing“, the two underwent a „seltene, paradoxe Verschmelzung“ [“rare, paradoxical fusion”].1 He improvised one voice, responded to it with a second and a third, and the result counted as a work. What mattered to him was that nothing was corrected afterwards: „Was in dem Augenblick des Schaffens passiert, bleibt unangetastet.“ [“What happens in the moment of creation remains untouched.”]2 In 2000 he summed it up briefly in a programme text: „Totale Improvisation im Sog der Geschwindigkeit des Augenblicks.“ [“Total improvisation, caught in the pull of the speed of the moment.”]3

The term itself was not new in jazz. Jim Hall spoke of “instant composition” in liner notes as early as 1958, and Misha Mengelberg and the Instant Composers Pool later used it.4 What set Pepl apart was his process: he composed by multitracking, with the help of the technology that became available in the mid-1980s.

The tool: MIDI guitar and computer

The starting point was the guitar. With a Roland guitar synthesiser, a pickup on the guitar and a sound module in the rack, Pepl could trigger piano, flute, trumpet, string or drum sounds from the fretboard.5 This allowed him, as he wrote, „obwohl ich nur Gitarre spiele, in die Klangfarbe jedes nur erdenklichen Instruments schlüpfen“ [“although I only play the guitar, to slip into the timbre of any instrument imaginable”].6 He considered himself „so ziemlich der erste“ [“pretty much the first”] in Austria to use a guitar synthesiser.7 The MIDI data ran on an Atari 1040ST with the Notator program, which could typeset notation from it; later he recorded to ADAT and hard disk.8 The estate holds Atari sequencer files dating from as early as February 1986.9

For Pepl, sound was not mere packaging: „Der Sound macht es ganz einfach aus, wozu man inspiriert wird zu spielen.“ [“The sound quite simply determines what you are inspired to play.”] A flute sound made him play differently from a guitar sound.10 An early step was the ECM (the renowned European jazz label) album “Cracked Mirrors” (recorded 1987, released 1988), on which the MIDI guitar plays a defining role and Jon Christensen's drums were added afterwards in Oslo.11 On “Schönberg Improvations” (recorded 1989) Pepl used the MIDI guitar to control a Bösendorfer (Vienna piano maker) 290 SE computer grand piano, first the left hand, then the right.12

How a piece came about

Pepl recorded the first track more or less freely. He improvised the others over headphones to the first, each with a different sound. Sometimes he used the second voice to ask a question, which a third answered.13 For the string quartet for the internationally renowned Kronos Quartet he invented one voice and improvised the other three in response to it.14 A computer generated a score from the MIDI data. Because the machine translated every tiny fluctuation into note values, with very small values and odd time signatures, colleagues edited the notation for the performers: the violinist Andreas Schreiber and the guitarist Helmut Weinhandel the pieces for the Kronos Quartet, Georg Pepl the quartet for the Artis-Quartett.15

Afterwards, the notation itself hardly interested him any more: „Mit MIDI wird das aufgeschrieben, aber das Problem ist, dass mich das dann absolut nicht mehr interessiert, sobald ich es gespielt habe.“ [“With MIDI it gets written down, but the problem is that it no longer interests me at all once I have played it.”]16 Nikolaus Kohler concludes that for Pepl the score is not the precondition of the work at all: the only requirement is the recording.17

Two phases

Stefan Heckel distinguishes two phases.18 From about 1989 to 1994 Pepl wrote commissioned works that were notated and performed: for Ensemble Wien and Ensemble Kontrapunkte at the Musikverein (historic concert hall of the Society of Friends of Music) in Vienna, for the internationally renowned Kronos Quartet (premiered in Graz on 3 December 1991), for STUDIO PERCUSSION graz and for the Artis-Quartett (premiered on 6 May 1993). From the mid-1990s Pepl worked in his home studio in Hernstein, Lower Austria, almost exclusively for the recording itself. This period produced the pieces of the Lonely Single Swinger Band, in which he layered drums, guitars, bass samples, piano and vocals all by himself. Nothing was notated any more; each piece was given a title straight away.19 A large part of these recordings remains unreleased (archive).

Instant Composing in research

Heckel's dissertation “Instant Composing. Das Spätwerk des Jazzgitarristen und Komponisten Harry Pepl” (University of Music and Performing Arts Vienna, 2024) is the most detailed study of the method to date. It asks how improvised music can be fixed and defined as composition, and how Pepl made his Instant Compositions accessible to soloists and ensembles.20 Heckel renders the term as „Komponieren im Ohrenblick“ [“composing in the blink of an ear”].21 He describes how the music changes on its way from the improvised moment through digitisation, quantisation, printed notation, editing and rehearsal to performance and radio broadcast.22 Pepl himself had suggested exactly this comparison: „Interessant wäre bei diesen Sachen der Vergleich zwischen meinem Original, der Notation, und der Version der Interpreten.“ [“With these things, it would be interesting to compare my original, the notation and the performers' version.”]23

Two of Heckel's findings matter in practice. Conventional notation captures Pepl's wave-like phrasing over a steady pulse only inadequately; Heckel therefore proposes listening reports, verbal scores, time-event tables and waveform displays as supplements.24 And performances succeeded above all when the performers had experience of improvisation or knew Pepl's musical language, as Dave Liebman or Wolfgang Puschnig did; where only the written score was passed on, they proved more difficult.25 The literature on Pepl is listed in the literature archive.

Significance for teaching and today's ensembles

The method can be taught, even without the technology of the 1980s: improvise and record one voice, add a second as a response to it, a third with a different sound, and neither cut nor correct the result. With two fellow musicians, Heckel reinterpreted the piece “Dedicated to Michele Noiret's Stockhausen” (2004) from a verbal score, thereby describing a model of how ensembles can work with unnotated music.26 Suggestions for the classroom can be found under For teaching.

Since 2018 Clemens Salesny, Martin Bayer, Andi Schreiber and Valentin Duit have been bringing Pepl's original tracks from the home studio to the stage in multichannel sound and improvising with them. Heckel sees this as proof that music created in the moment can be brought back „in die Echtzeit“ [“into real time”].27 The project is described on the Projects page; anyone who would like to work with Pepl's music themselves will find guidance under For ensembles. The notated works are listed in the catalogue of works.

Notes and sources (27)
  1. Harry Pepl, text on the commission for the internationally renowned Kronos Quartet, former website harrypepl.com and undated information sheet in the estate (p. 4); quoted as the manuscript “Instant Composing. Info-Text für Veranstalter” (1989) in Heckel 2024, pp. 12, 20 and 61. ↩
  2. Ibid. ↩
  3. Programme text for “Zeitraffer” (2000), quoted in Heckel 2024, p. 61. ↩
  4. Heckel 2024, p. 21 f. ↩
  5. Heckel 2024, pp. 54 and 77 to 79. For 1989 Heckel names an Ibanez guitar with the Roland GK-2 pickup and the GR-50 guitar synthesiser. ↩
  6. Manuscript “Instant Composing” (1989), quoted in Heckel 2024, p. 54. ↩
  7. Kohler 2006, p. 121. ↩
  8. Heckel 2024, pp. 62 and 78 to 80. ↩
  9. Eight sequencer files dated 6 February 1986 in the digital holdings of the estate. The sources date the beginning of the MIDI work differently: Kohler 2006 (p. 142) to the mid-1980s, Heckel 2024 (pp. 15 and 83) to 1988 or the transition period 1988/89. ↩
  10. Kohler 2006, p. 121. ↩
  11. Heckel 2024, pp. 83 and 91 f.; Kohler 2006, p. 113 f. ↩
  12. Kohler 2006, p. 115; Heckel 2024, pp. 103 to 113. ↩
  13. Heckel 2024, pp. 11, 62 f. and 116. ↩
  14. Harry Pepl, text on the commission for the internationally renowned Kronos Quartet (as in note 1). ↩
  15. Heckel 2024, pp. 80 to 82 and 123 to 126. ↩
  16. Kohler 2006, p. 121. ↩
  17. Kohler 2006, p. 142. ↩
  18. Heckel 2024, pp. 16 and 84 f. ↩
  19. Heckel 2024, pp. 154 and 158 f.; Kohler 2006, pp. 133 to 135. ↩
  20. Heckel 2024, p. 15. ↩
  21. Heckel 2024, pp. 19 and 51. ↩
  22. Heckel 2024, pp. 123 to 125 and 136. ↩
  23. Kohler 2006, p. 122. ↩
  24. Heckel 2024, pp. 99, 159 to 162 and 172. ↩
  25. Heckel 2024, pp. 174 to 176. ↩
  26. Heckel 2024, pp. 272 to 282. ↩
  27. Heckel 2024, pp. 163 to 170. ↩

Last updated: 16 Oct 2026