Nora Gomringer in conversation with Iris ter Schiphorst about voices and more
at the time of her residency at Villa Concordia (2015-16)
You have written a lot for the voice, including a children's opera - 'Die Gänsemagd' - which was programmed at the Zurich Opera for two seasons in a row due to its great public success. What fascinates you about the voice?
I've always loved singing myself. Singing was something quite normal at home, for example when we travelled by car to our grandparents in Holland once a year, we would belt out all the songs we could on the long journey there. And in several voices!
But there is also something very intimate about writing for voices. Every voice sounds different, every singer brings their own 'body' into play. You can always hear the body. Just think of the great singers from so-called pop music - they all have an unmistakable voice, something unique in their voice, something that simply cannot be imitated. Bob Dylan comes to mind, or Tom Waits...or Blixa Bargeld from Neubauten, or Björk. I'm very fascinated by this uniqueness in a voice. I find it 'touching'. That's why I prefer to write for voices that I know, for their very individual potential, for their very specific sound.
You once raised the question in an interview as to whether it could be considered almost negligent to leave the need to sing, the need for songs, for melody entirely to the so-called entertainment industry...
Yes, you know that the word 'melody' in so-called 'new music' was for a long time an irritant that immediately provoked resistance from many composers. This has to do with the fact that from a certain historical point in 'European art music', the aspects of melodic writing tended to be excluded in favour of equal rights for all parameters. But that is changing again. I believe that today there is a new open-mindedness towards the phenomenon of 'melody' - and I think not only in the sense of a backward movement.
In my children's opera, which I mentioned above, songs are actually sung and I composed them in such a way that children understand them as songs and may even be able to remember one or two passages and sing them themselves. But this children's opera is of course a very special case.
Your more recent works also contain a striking number of works for voices...
Yes, that's true. What always appeals to me about working for singers is precisely this particular aspect of physicality that I mentioned earlier. I always find hearing a person sing something very special. Something intimate that is somehow theatrical at the same time.
What do you mean by theatrical?
The singer on stage is on display. We don't just hear what he sings, but how he sings, we observe very closely how he stands, how he moves, how he contorts his face, etc., etc. All of this flows into our listening. All of this flows into our hearing, whether we like it or not. I find it extremely appealing to consider some of these aspects and integrate them into the composition.
I have done this in very different ways. Even in my very first work for mixed choir, the singers had to sing in different postures, bent or upright, walking or suddenly frozen, with their heads bowed or raised and so on. I have taken up these ideas again in different facets in various pieces.
The score for Vergiss Salome for a singer in motion and tapes, a work commissioned by the NDR for Sarah Maria Sun, contains a notation system for the voice as well as one for steps (the singer has to walk forwards and backwards according to a certain time model on a line that she has to draw in the room beforehand).The singer has to walk forwards and backwards on a line that she has to draw in the room beforehand, sometimes balancing on tiptoe), as well as her own notation system for 'undressing' - she has to undress gradually according to a certain rhythm (Salome's 'veil dance' sends its regards). Her steps forwards and backwards are coordinated in such a way that she moves more and more towards a microphone hanging from the ceiling, so high that her singing is only amplified when she stands on tiptoe and only when she is right underneath it.There is also a tape on which sounds and alienated multiphonics from clarinets can be heard, as well as a very intimate spoken text by Karin Spielhofer, which Almut Zilcher recorded for me in her wonderful voice.
So the piece works with several layers - and its entire setting is conceived as 'theatrical'. That's why the singer has to perform the piece from memory, using the text for temporal orientation, i.e. certain parts of the text or words form markers for the singer, an orientation as to where she is in time.
In your piano concerto Dislocations - not actually a work for singers, but a completely different genre - there is also a - yes: singing voice at the end, that of the pianist Christoph Grund.
Yes, for some years now I've also let musicians perform with their voices, provided they are willing and can imagine it. In the piano concerto DISLOKATIONS, which you just mentioned, Christoph Grund sings a short phrase at the very end of the piece, it's a mixture of singing and shouting, set quite high, performed with his chest voice. I find this moment in the concert very moving. Suddenly a very personal dimension is added that goes beyond the virtuoso piano playing. It really is Christoph Grund's very own voice, in the literal sense, that sounds there...
In my new small orchestral piece SOMETIMES, the pianist Alexandra Dariescu speaks a dialogue with a male voice from the tape. So she doesn't just play the piano, she also has to speak, lend her voice to a text. I find this very exciting, because it is precisely at this moment, when she speaks for the first time, that the whole piece changes and we suddenly find ourselves not just in a 'piano concerto' but 'somewhere else'... This overwriting of a familiar situation, this form of expansion of space interests me very much.
There were moments like this in our joint work 'On the Beaches of Tranquillity'. Can you perhaps tellus something moreabout that ?
The first part was based on your wonderful poem "How do I explain?" and the second part on the fiery appeal made to the EU in 2012 by the mayor of Lampedusa, Giuseppina Maria Nicolini, "How big does the cemetery on my island have to get?". "Since I knew that you would read your poem in its entirety in the performance before our actual play, I wanted to compose a chorus of 'those who do not want to know', as your poem says, in the play itself. Voices that say 'no' to everything, that reject everything or make fun of it, that wouldn't be able to empathise with anything (as we know, this tendency is on the rise again in our society...).
I wrote these voices into the score for the orchestral musicians. They have to speak chorally, hiss, chant, almost like an 'ancient' choir commenting on the action. And as in an ancient choir, the musicians all wear the same masks, so that they visually become a faceless mass. This impression is reinforced by the fact that their head movements are also composed. So in a way, I have composed an 'evil' choir.
Do you believe that art, that music has to be 'socially topical'?
I don't know, I think a lot about contemporaneity.....what is contemporary? A few years ago, I composed a chamber opera about Aung Sun SUU, the politician who was kept under house arrest for more than 15 years by Maynmar's military government. After the composition was finished, her house arrest was unexpectedly lifted by the military dictatorship, which was very strange...Not that I'm mystical or anything....
The Dresdner Nachrichten also talked about an uncanny topicality, I'm talking about the première of the play 'An den Stränden der Ruhe, dort, wo die Sonne untergeht...' now in October at the Gewandhaus Leipzig.
Yes, that's true. When the play was in progress and I decided to work with your poem and quotes from the open letter from the mayor of Lampedusa, a fiery indictment in which she speaks of the dead refugees who have left the sea.When I was working on your poem and quotes from the open letter by the mayor of Lampedusa, a fiery indictment in which she speaks of the dead refugees that the sea washes up on her shore every day, it was impossible to foresee the sudden escalation of the refugee crisis. This sudden dimension of topicality also had something frightening about it....
And I feel a little bit the same way about 'meine-keine-lieder', which is based on two poems by Inge Müller and texts by Hanna Ahrendt..... Inge Müller's poems are cruel and brutally dissecting - Hanna Arendt, on the other hand, tries to understand the 'German', and especially the Nazi Eichmann, as an observer of the Nuremberg Trials. I wrote the play in summer 2014 and the Pegida demonstrations began in autumn 2014. When I look at the shift to the right in Germany and Europe since then, I feel very uneasy and wonder whether this country, whether Europe, has learnt anything from its past.
But back to your question: some of my latest pieces are subtitled 'Die Aufgabe von Musik' (The task of music) and also 'meine-keine-Lieder' (my-no-songs). Of course, this means two things: the abandonment of music and its abandonment... What is and should music be today? What can music be today?
Meine Keine Lieder was premiered last March in Stuttgart at the festival 'Sind noch Lieder zu singen'. Gerhard Koch wrote in the FAZ about your piece that it was one of the most suggestive pieces at the festival, ...with a 'disturbing strangeness' that he obviously found very strong.
Yes, I was very pleased about that. Especially for the singer Salome Kammer, because in this piece she has to sing, speak, perform, change locations...
meine-keine-Lieder' is a 'staged non-song', in a way I refuse to sing. For me personally, German is as good as unsingable, almost impossible to set to music due to its diction. In the art songs of the Romantics, this language still worked wonderfully, even in some Eisler songs, some of which I like very much, but beyond that? Of course there is still wonderful contemporary German poetry, but 'composing' it? Forcing them into a song? Most of the attempts that have been made to do this in recent decades speak against it for me.
In this respect, this work is more a kind of academic-artistic examination of the 'intellectual climate' in Germany in the first half of the 20th century than a song setting, which is what it was actually supposed to be by commission. The great writers Hannah Arendt (1906 - 1975) and Inge Müller (1925-1966) lived in this period, and both have their say in my composition - in very different ways. Hannah Arendt as an observer of the Nuremberg Trials, among other things, and Inge Müller as a relentless chronicler of the war and post-war period in some of her poems.
'Meine-keine-lieder' has a very strict formal structure. This affects several levels. For example, the singer divides the stage into two halves at the beginning by drawing a clear line from front to back. She performs in one half, the musicians in the other. Only at the very end does the singer, as the character Inge Müller, stand right in the centre, namely when she quotes her own husband Heiner Müller, who said to her: Strict forms help against pain... The sound material is also very self-contained, I use a single mode here that runs through almost the entire piece ...
You actually wanted to be a dancer as a child, you once said, and I read somewhere that the combination of movement and music is what interests you the most.
Yes, that's true, movement and music or movement to music still fascinates me. Maybe that's why I have a special relationship with rhythm. I sometimes talk about a physical polyrhythm in this context. As with complex percussion parts, my singers, for example, have to combine different rhythmic movements with singing, i.e. there are different rhythmic layers that all tug at this performing body at the same time. Keeping it under tension. Almost overtaxing it.
Like in 'Vergiss Salome', which I've already mentioned, where the singer has to walk back and forth in a certain rhythm, undress in a different rhythm at the same time, but has to sing in a further rhythm and so on. I like this 'more' that this creates....