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Music Review The mesmerising innovations of Heiner Goebbels

SIMON DUFF introduces the German avant-garde composer

Heiner Goebbels
A House of Call
(ECM)

 

 

HEINER GOEBBELS is a contemporary German theatre director and avant-garde composer. One of his most noted productions is Stifter’s Dinge (Founder’s Things) — a multimedia poetic technology performance piece, first performed in 2007, inspired by the nature writing of the 19th-century Austrian romantic writer Adalbert Stifter.

An extraordianry 80-minute work produced by the Swiss theatre company Theatre Vidy-Lausanne in association with Artangel in London for a 2008 production. It featured a multitude of invented instruments and cutting edge audio production with the score released by ECM.

In 2013, as artistic director of the Ruhrtriennale Theatre Festival in Germany, he directed the first-ever European staging of US left field composer Harry Partch’s theatre piece Delusion of the Fury, with the ensemble MusikFabrik.

The work a fusion of a Japanese Noh play with a West African legend performed at the Edinburgh international festival in 2014. A set of special instruments had to be made to play Partch’s microtonal score.

His new ECM album is a self-styled imaginary notebook incorporating archival recordings from the composer’s own extensive audio collection including prayers, songs, speech and composition for full orchestra, recorded in 2021.

Other sources, on the 100 minute work set over two CDs, includes wax cylinders, news reports and ethnographic sources given a political or historical context and a musical response.

“The music is a direct response to the complexity and roughness of the voices,” says Goebbels in the sleeve notes. Beckett, Rumi and first world war prisoners are all referenced in the score that incorporates chanting, jazz-rock, rhythmic dislocations and delicate solos.

The album’s title comes from a line in James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake, in early 19th-century England, a house of call was a public space in which itinerant artisans could put their skills up for hire.

Across four thematic assemblages, the Ensemble Modern Orchestra, under the direction of Vimbayi Kaziboni, draws the picture. Part I, Stein Schere Papier (Stone Scissors Paper), opens the album. Slow, brooding saxophone and jazz brass opens giving way to orchestral tuning and melodic hints of Pierre Boulez’s orchestral tones. Then fuzz electric guitar enters referencing Goebbels’s art rock band Cassiber from the the early 1980s.

The monumental scale of the work is finely balanced, for a highly complex mix, including towards the end of the piece, street noise of a Berlin building site recorded in 2017, is surrounded by light percussion and melodic brass.

Part II, Grain de la voix (Grain of the Voice), is based on quick fire held string sections and woodwind, utilising text from the Roland Barthes essay of the same name, in which the French philosopher describes the power of language over death.

The tempo slows giving way to Gamelan atmospheres and distant human cries winding round cello and bass dynamics then trumpet and violin.

Part III, Wax and Violence refers to the wax cylinders weaponised by pseudoscientific ideologues. The evocation of Komitas and Armenian soprano Zabelle Panosian included. A recording of school children in the Namibian village of Berseba is deeply haunting.

Part IV, When Words Gone, includes recordings of Amazon rituals conducted in lost languages mixed into lines from one of Samuel Beckett’s last texts Worstward Ho from 1983 amid digital whispers winding round electric guitar, accordion and dulcimer.

The calm ending, using chanting voices, piano and bass, is mesmerising. Goebbels continues to break boundaries with inspirational concepts and at times enchanting beauty.

A concert performance of A House of Call is scheduled for March 25 2023 at 7.30pm at Royal Festival Hall, London. Further details and tickets: 020 3879 9555, southbankcentre.co.uk

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