The Book for Voices by Heiner Goebbels

As part of the Autumn Festival and in connection with the release of the book of writings by Heiner Goebbels entitled Against the total work of art published by the Philharmonie de Paris, A House of call – My Imaginary Notebook by Heiner Goebbels brings to the stage of the Salle Pierre Boulez the Ensemble Modern Orchestra with which the German composer has collaborated for more than 25 years.

The work written in 2021 calls on the large orchestra to which Goebbels associates recorded voices that he himself collected during his travels and meetings or which come from the Phonogramm-Archiv in Berlin where he went to do his research: “ a phonographic collection taken from my imaginary notebook,” he says, suggesting things that are sometimes completely new and cannot always be precisely identified. They constitute “a cycle of calls” (A House of calls) which pass through the speakers (the sound projection is provided by Norbert Ommer) and which the orchestra supports and accompanies, “as in a secular response”, the composer further specifies. The voices are often distant, with their share of parasites, sometimes recorded on wax cylinders by anthropologists. It is all that they convey of history, of forgotten messages, of memory (each recording is accompanied by its descriptive sheet) at the crossroads of song and words, that Heiner Goebbels wanted to awaken through the symphony orchestra amplified which reverberates its aura.

The orchestra with winds in threes occupies the entire space of the stage, positioned towards the conductor Vimbayi Kaziboni who conducts at heart, a click in the ear to be in synchrony with the support of the fixed sounds. Four sets of percussion are deployed at the back of the stage, the German phalanx of Frankfurt welcoming within its music stands a harp, a piano, two guitars (acoustic and electric), a santur and an accordion, so many colors which will be featured . Over the course of the recordings – a mosaic of fifteen titles divided into four chapters – the orchestral formation modifies, freeing for a time the mass of the high strings to keep on stage only the strength of the big band and its rhythmic impact.

The concert begins without warning (Entrance : A Response to Repons), putting Pierre Boulez at the head of the bill, the orchestra roaring in an astonishing abundance of sound until a clear break, like a flash of lightning: it is the composer himself, supported by Hendrik Borowski, who provides the highlighting a work which is also intended to be a spectacle for the eyes. The first part, Rock paper scissors (“Peter Scissors Sheet”) carries an essentially heterogeneous material, giving voice to theater voices fragmented by the orchestra (Always the same stone) or those of the Berlin site (Under Construction) and its noises that integrate the orchestral writing. We better understand the composer's intentions in Grain of voicesecond chapter, where the sometimes tenuous recording of the sound archive (the voices of prisoners of Nu Stiri) gives rise to instrumental alloys as unexpected as they are original. The responses are muscular and the rhythmic dominant in Wax and Violence (Wax and violence) whose four numbers highlight the springs of very active percussion. When Words Gone (“when words have disappeared”) quotes Beckett and constitutes a final chapter of a greater economy of means, looking towards ritual action (They are in the middle). The entire orchestra participates, the instrumentalists themselves giving voice, on a single string of recitation: a sort of mantra combining gesture and words which is reminiscent of the style of Stockhausen.

Photographic credit: © Ondine Bertrand/Cheeese

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