Helbig Poetzsch

Chasing Heisenberg Helbig Poetzsch

As a child in Dresden, Germany, the German pianist Clemens Christian Poetzsch received his first piano lessons from his opera singer grandfather and was soon immersed in Bach, Schubert, and Clementi. But aged ten, a sheet music book of Frank Sinatra standards gifted to him by his father opened his ears to broader musical possibilities, and he was soon playing sing-along classics in the bar next door to his house. It was at that establishment, sitting at a piano which stood next to the kitchen, that Poetzsch first started improvising and messing around with song structures. Now, Poetzsch releases "Chasing Heisenberg", the third and final album of this trilogy, and a full embrace of the random sparks of beauty that inspire him. The album title, "Chasing Heisenberg", is an ode to the German physicist and Nobel laureate Werner Heisenberg, who in 1927 uncovered and formulated the uncertainty principle. The principle would state the impossibility of knowing both the location and velocity of an electron simultaneously and would become a fundamental quantum physics formula. Beyond it's implications in the scientific realm, however, the uncertainty principle also touches on something far more existential - it mathematically proves that some things are simply beyond our reach - or unknowable. This incognito is, according to Poetzsch, at the heart of any artistic pursuit, not least his own. In "Chasing Heisenberg", it seems as if the composer has stopped trying to solve the unsolvable; instead, he's finally coming to terms with it's mystery. While some degree of randomness and improvisation can be observed in all of Poetzsch's work so far, Chasing Heisenberg is the composer's most fluid expression of the themes. He turns to music where words fail, giving sound to the ineffable and unexplainable nature of his inspiration.