von Eckhard Weber
Iris ter Schiphorst: Eden cinema
zur Aufführung beim Ultraschall-Festival, Berlin
Eden cinema for prepared piano and sampler (1995) by Eckhard Weber
Iris ter Schiphorst's mother was a pianist and piano music characterised the composer's childhood. Like her father's Dutch language and her mother's German, the composer imprinted music in her mind like a third mother tongue. Iris ter Schiphorst once explained this in the magazine Positionen: "I learnt it 'en passant', just as one learns languages that one hears every day, quite naturally by ear, through mimesis - on the piano (...) partly in altered form, in other keys, with differently composed parts."
This initial approach - without the diversions of notation - has also characterised her composing. Not least for this reason, Iris ter Schiphorst also worked with electronic sound generators such as tape and samplers: "Since these media - in contrast to writing - are able to record the actual sound, the 'real' of the music and not just a code that has to be retranslated into sound by some musicians," says the composer. It is therefore not surprising that Iris ter Schiphorst, who travelled to many countries as a young person, has been working with techniques of non-written, i.e. oral cultures since the 1990s. This is evidenced, for example, by the use of repetitive elements and ostinati in her scores according to certain strategies.
Her piece Eden cinema for prepared piano and sampler was inspired by the work and biography of the French writer Marguerite Duras, who also worked with repetition on various levels in her novels and plays - from recurring plot motifs and characters to repeated linguistic phrases and key words. Like many of her works, Duras' 1977 theatre play L'Éden cinéma (a condensed stage version of the 1950 novel Un Barrage contre le Pacifique, translated as "Hot Coast" in the German edition) deals with memories from her childhood and youth. Memories from her childhood and youth in French Indochina: Duras' mother, a widowed teacher, invested her savings in a 200-hectare rice plantation by the sea in what is now Cambodia, which she hoped would bring her wealth, but which led her to ruin. The fields were flooded several times, the harvest destroyed and attempts to build dams failed miserably. Duras repeatedly exaggerated and condensed these and other traumatic autobiographical experiences in her literary work. There are parallels between fiction and biography: both the apathetic mother in L'Éden cinéma, who has fallen into madness, and Marguerite Duras' mother worked as a cinema pianist before the financial fiasco. This is where Iris ter Schiphorst's piano piece comes in, as she explains in an interview for Ultraschall Berlin: "In Marguerite Duras' remarks about her childhood in Indochina, you can read again and again how much this circumstance shaped her, more precisely: listening to her mother accompany films on the piano as a little girl in the dark Eden cinema. These memories are of course always nostalgically coloured (and evoke a corresponding sound of the piano in a reader like me...). In my biography, too, there is a piano-playing mother who was always 'abroad' and to whom I often listened secretly in the evenings as a little girl when she played the piano. The piano therefore also represents - if you like - the voice of the mother in certain aspects."
The voice of Marguerite Duras shines through twice via samplers in the piano piece Eden cinema, at the beginning and towards the end. The piano part is characterised by insistent repetitions of notes, ostinato figures, motif repetitions and also varied continuations. There are also quotations, literal ones, such as a flash from Beethoven's "Hammerklavier" Sonata op. 106, as well as vague echoes of pieces with dance rhythms, "commonplace music" as used in silent film cinemas. The preparation of the piano strings - metal parts on the high ones, rubber pieces on the low ones - creates a clearly perceptible tonal patina and favours the impression of the past - in connection with Duras also readable as traumas sedimented in the subconscious, whose indistinct traces obsessively push their way to the surface.
Eden cinema was premiered in Berlin in 1995 using a standard Akai hardware sampler. Two years later, the first software samplers appeared, computer programmes that could emulate a sampler. This variant has prevailed in later interpretations of the piece.