First carried out final yr, Heiner Goebbels’s “phonographic assortment from my imaginary pocket book” is his first main orchestral work for the reason that suite Surrogate Cities in 1994. He describes it as a cycle of invocations, prayers, poems and songs for a big orchestra, however, as at all times with Goebbels, it’s not as easy as that. The title comes from a line in James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake; in early Nineteenth-century England, a “home of name” was a public area during which itinerant artisans may put their expertise up for rent, and the 100-minute rating creates an area during which recorded voices that Goebbels has sourced from wax cylinders, information stories and ethnographic sources could be given a political or historic context and a musical response.
Among the many voices and texts referenced listed here are Samuel Beckett and Heiner Müller, the Persian Sufi poet Rumi and the Armenian composer and folk-song collector Komitas; there are subject recordings from Amazonia and Namibia and from Georgian prisoners through the first world conflict, and the music is equally various. The 15 actions of A Home of Name, grouped into 4 components, embrace moments of pounding jazz-rock (maybe a look again to the Eighties, when Goebbels was a member of the group Cassiber), by edgy rhythmic dislocations straight out of Stravinsky to disintegrating textures on the sides of music. However there are moments of extraordinary delicacy too, when only a solo instrument underpins a chant or a distant choir, as within the second half, Grain de la Voix (a title borrowed from Roland Barthes), constructed round recordings from the Caucasus.
A quote from Beckett, “When phrases gone”, gives the title of the ultimate part, which is constructed round spells and incantations. Goebbels’ use of the orchestra, which incorporates electrical guitar, accordion and dulcimer, is at its most imaginative right here; the ending, for chanting voices alone, is mesmerising. Though a number of the refined interaction between the recorded voices and the dwell devices is inevitably misplaced on disc (a live performance efficiency of A Home of Name is scheduled for London subsequent spring) it's nonetheless an enchanting, strikingly lovely work.
This week’s different choose
In 2013, whereas he was creative director of the Ruhrtriennale, Goebbels directed the primary ever European staging of Harry Partch’s music-theatre piece Delusion of the Fury, with the ensemble MusikFabrik. It was dropped at the Edinburgh worldwide pageant the next yr. A set of particular devices needed to be made to play Partch’s microtonal rating, which the members of MusikFabrik needed to grasp, and now a recording of their efficiency has appeared on Wergo. Dramatically the piece is a fusion of a Japanese Noh play with a west African legend, delivered as half incantation, half declamation, with a percussive rating of glinting, pulsing rhythms and eruptive toccatas. It might not be as beguiling on disc because it was within the theatre, however it's nonetheless an totally unique expertise.
Post a Comment