Opening Mouth Booklet 08 - Buywell

More documents

Recommendations

Info

opening OF THE mouth Richard Barrett / ELISION The constituent sections of Opening of the Mouth often overlap, alternate or run simultaneously, and so the relationship between the CD tracks and the structure of the work is shown here diagrammatically. abglanzbeladen/ auseinandergeschrieben Largo SOPRANO, KOTO, CELLO Zungenentwurzeln ELECTRONICS Engführung (II) SOPRANO, MEZZO-SOPRANO, ENSEMBLE, PERCUSSION SOLO Engführung (I) SOPRANO, MEZZO-SOPRANO, ENSEMBLE, LIVE ELECTRONICS CHARON BASS CLARINET “Ich bins, ich ...” “Zum Aug geh, zum feuchten –” Schneebett SOPRANO, MEZZO-SOPRANO, ENSEMBLE containing inward FLUTE, PERCUSSION Tenebrae LIVE ELECTRONICS “Orkane. Orkane...” MEZZO-SOPRANO, ELECTRIC GUITAR, PERCUSSION, SAMPLING KEYBOARD containing fragmented versions of: knospend-gespaltener CLARINET IN C air VIOLIN von hinter dem Schmerz CELLO CELLO SOLO WITH METAL MUTE, SOPRANO, MEZZO-SOPRANO “In der Eulenflucht ...” TUTTI “-- taggrau, der Grundwasserspuren –” “Verbracht ins Gelände ...” 1 6’02” 2 5’05” 3 5’50” 4 5’41” 5 7’04” 6 5’33” 7 4’31” 8 19’20” 9 4’07” 0 1’38” 11 7’21” Ensemble in 2: mandolin, twelve-string guitar, ten-string guitar, jushichigen (seventeen-string bass koto) Ensemble in 3: alto flute, percussion, viola Ensemble in 5: bass recorder, hardanger fiddle (Norwegian folk fiddle) Ensemble in 8: multiple ensembles, alternating and/or simultaneous: • clarinet in C (knospend-gespaltener), mandola, ten-string guitar, jushichigen • soprano solo • Tenebrae ensemble continued Total time 72’16” • cello (von hinter dem Schmerz) and piccolo • violin solo (air) Ensemble in 0: soprano, mezzo-soprano, flute, bass clarinet, percussion, twelve-string guitar, ten-string guitar, koto, viola, cello, sampling keyboard Ensemble in 11 : cello solo, soprano, mezzo-soprano, contrabass clarinet, percussion, seven pre-recorded (and transposed) bass clarinets 2 3
Opening of the Mouth Midland Railway Workshop March 1997 The taxi driver who threaded his way there through the outer suburbs of Perth said he knew the place: said they made shells there during the war and had lathes and machinery big enough to make entire locomotives. Then it was closed and seven thousand people, he said, lost their jobs overnight. The vast abandoned machinery waits to attend the bidding of invaders who have neither use nor sympathy for its laboured clanging rituals. Now, consecrated by neglect and the slow decay of hard steel, things human are symbolised only by their absence: the absent sweaty flesh which was once callused, bruised and burnt by the unforgiving steel and by the scarcely patient wills which herded and drove it. This was the mythology of the place: whether true, I know not. Now the Midland Railway Workshop in the outer suburbs of Perth in Western Australia was to undergo another consecration which, in one sense, was so absurdly ambitious that its imminent failure might even seem calculated as an exonerating alibi (as though to take vindication from Shakespeare’s words, “Sons of the earth may fail, when heaven’s sun faileth.”). In some senses it is the alibi itself which is the essential wider metaphor in Barrett’s work: a metaphor for the continuing striving to produce utterances of integrity (of “truth value”, as Adorno might have put it) in the face of human barbarism. All Barrett’s work, he writes, “attempts to concretise an elusive expressive energy by a constant and convulsive questioning of itself.” For Opening of the Mouth, like the poetry of Paul Celan which provides the sung text and to some extent the structure, attempts nothing less than the resurrection and cleansing of the language of artistic utterance after, specifically in Celan’s case, the atrocities of the Nazi death camps, and more generally the many atrocities of our age. ‘Opening of the Mouth’ is also an ancient Egyptian rite of purification performed before entombment. Its aim was to restore the senses to the body in preparation for the afterlife: specifically it was a process to restore the power of speech so that subjects could plead their case to the gods of having led a virtuous life, so as to be fit to live with the immortals. But if, as Adorno claimed, poetry after Auschwitz is impossible, can all of this be achieved in a disused railway workshop in the outer suburbs of a former colonial town? Language implies shared symbols, shared tools, concepts and values. What symbols and values are left, what language can we fashion amid the dust and rust of discarded implements of a budding military/industrial nation which has followed more powerful oppressors in seeking more subtle instruments of tyranny? In fact the specific styling of concrete symbols was left to Barrett’s collaborator, the installation artist Richard Crow. We are led beside one shed from which light and sound escape, the way marked out with burning kerosene flares on the ground extending in parallel lines into the night like a track into the netherworld. The sounds have a strange energy: not agonised groans or harbingers of catastrophe (though that might be one’s initial impression) but something much more focussed, intensely organised, busy: in fact something more positive, as though what one originally took for the sounds of hell are in fact a process of purification: a purging from which something marvellous might emerge. These were the sounds of Landschaft mit Urnenwesen, an electronic work (not on this CD) which forms something of a welcome station, a point of arrival before we actually enter the temple of purification and putrefaction. The air inside the shed was filled with incensebearing smoke, though, as Dante might have discovered, it was an acridity which was probably something of a concession to the sensibilities of the more faint-hearted festival patrons, for it covered the rotting of food and flesh, and one’s organising senses fought to reconcile the competing symbols of intense, almost pedantic order and decay. Small candles lit up thousands of objects littered around the space: stones in the dust were carefully numbered, rotting fruit and vegetables were neatly arranged, smelly rags and clothing were hung out as though for further use in cruel parody of the factory’s closure, while huge vats were scattered with the offering of tiny shelled almonds and filled with dead fish, amid burning logs, strange machines built for now-superfluous tasks, and worn and dusty workbenches, the scene of spent and needless toil. In the small alcoves and supervisors’ offices, Crow had created shrines of precious objects: a glove, a bottle half-filled with some liquid too dark for wine, and most haunting (or most crass perhaps), a disused washroom with white dresses neatly hung, projections of raw meat and neatly organised gas cylinders. From other spaces which one could not enter, there simply issued forth the continuous sounds of frenetic purgation. “How is art to respond,” writes Barrett, “without resorting to the anecdotal or the histrionic: the former is the material of history, while the latter usually fails to conceal its superficiality behind a barrage of lament.” Like Celan, Barrett responds with coolness and distance, more coolness than the site which, under Crow’s ministrations, has now been enervated by an almost theatrical sense of decay. Two projected images pervade the performance. The first appears to be an endless water journey down a constructed cave, like a primordial oesophagus of the afterlife (opening the mouth, it appears, was only the beginning). When one reads later, in the programme, that it is in fact an endoscopic journey through the sewers of Melbourne it is hard to know whether the metaphoric power of the image is enriched or dissipated. The other consists of projections which constantly mutate as though breathing: a technique achieved by projecting superimposed layers of images and then 4 5
Page 1: 476 3174 opening OF THE mouth RICHA
Page 5 and 6: Richard Barrett and ELISION I first
Page 7 and 8: Kam, kam. Kam ein Wort, kam, kam du
Page 9 and 10: sichtbar, aufs neue: die Rillen, di
Page 11 and 12: Poems by Paul Celan: ‘Engführung

Opening Mouth Booklet 08 - Buywell

Create successful ePaper yourself

Delete template?

Save as template?