Premiered in 1967 by the St. Louis Symphony orchestra, Eleazar DeCarvalho conducting, Quintet for Groups emerged an imperfect and highly controversial work whose compositional basis, related to but distinctly different from Stockhausen’s Gruppen ( which at that time I had never heard nor seen) was using a large group (the entire orchestra) as the interaction between smaller groups. In my work the groups interact in bringing together a great variety of ways of making new sounds, integrated by a systematic pitch usage integrated by just tuning based on triads precisely tuned as they occur in the overtone series. Both dissonance and consonance are enhanced by this means.
Until Armin Koehler of Sudwestrundfunk decided to include Quintet for Groups in the orchestra program of the 2008 Donaueschingen Festival, the work had fallen into a limbo out of which it had to be rescued through the joint efforts of Walter Zimmermann and Marc Sabat of the east Berlin school of the Arts working with my publisher Sylvia Smith. It was a very complex and difficult effort, but it succeeded. Koehler asked me if I could be available for rehearsals and a broader participation in Festival events. Because of the handicap my osteo-arthritis constitutes, my son Ross Johnston accompanied me on this trip assisting in many necessary ways. Marc Sabat was equally indispensable in helping me meet the needs of this trip.
Basically our flght to Germany was a round trip from Chicago (O’Hare) to Frankfurt on United Airlines, connecting with a Lufthansa flight to Berlin. While there I rented a car so that I could avoid walking in Donaueschingen where a wheel chair was made available to me. Eric drove us from Berlin to Donaueschingen, via Frankfurt, affording the most beautiful approach to the festival, and after it was over, back to Berlin by a more easterly route. My talk on the orchestra piece and on the events of the festival took place the morning after our second Autobahn journey.