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In recent years, composer and theatermaker Heiner Goebbels has regularly collected recordings of voices during his travels, chance encounters, projects, and research. Unique, peculiar voices that have touched, disturbed, excited, alienated him. These are voices from very different contexts, soundscapes, musical traditions, and languages, folk material, rituals, literature, recorded in the course of the last hundred years or so. This phonographic collection in an imaginary notebook has now become two things:
A House of Call as a full-evening concert for the Ensemble Modern Orchestra, in which these voices will often be heard on a concert stage for the first time and set the tone: cries, calls, invocations, incantations, prayers, speech acts, poems, songs. The orchestra presents, supports, accompanies them, responds to or contradicts them - like a secular "responsory."
A House of Call. Material Counter as a book that uses numerous documents, texts, images, and sources to try to trace what distinguishes these voices. About half of these voices were recorded on wax cylinders with historical phonographs, and their origins are often ambivalent. Many reasons may have led to the recordings: ethnomusicological or music and linguistic research, sociological or anthropological interests.
Heiner Goebbels' music is a direct answer to the complexity and grain of the voices, their vibrancy and the history of these recordings. The book discusses the heterogeneous contexts of how they were created and explores the question, for example, of whether these voices were recorded at concerts or under questionable, for example colonial, circumstances and what makes them unique.
About the author
Heiner Goebbels is a composer and theatermaker living in Frankfurt am Main. He completed his studies in sociology and music. He has composed radio plays, staged concerts, compositions for ensemble and large orchestra, music theater works, and has received numerous awards for his work. He has published the anthologies
Komposition als Inszenierung (Composition as Staging, 2002) and
Ästhetik der Abwesenheit (2012;
Aesthetics of Absence, 2015). From 1999 to 2018, Goebbels was professor at the Institute of Applied Theatre Studies at Justus-Liebig-Universität Gießen, from 2012-2014 artistic director of the Ruhrtriennale - International Festival of the Arts. Since 2018 he has been the first holder of the Georg Büchner Professorship at JLU.
www.heinergoebbels.com
