iris ter schiphorst

DER SPIEGEL

"In passages, Schadt's film seems like a Berlin chronicle of the year accelerated to full speed: New Year's Eve, Six-Day Race, Carnival of Cultures, Love Parade."

Lydia Jeschke:Music of the city

The urban orchestra by Helmut Oehring and Iris ter Schiphorst

Confusion of the senses and structures: a hustle and bustle suddenly appears as tense expectation. A joyful tumult leads to emptiness. An empty square becomes hectic. A concrete moment expands into something almost timeless, and the music of Helmut Oehring and Iris ter Schiphorst, with its static, prolonged sounds, its sudden pauses, the whirls of sound rushing away or grooving repetition loops, often contradicts Thomas Schadt's pictures with rhythmic tension. It seems as if she is objecting to the one, carefully selected, skilfully captured and seemingly self-evident perspective, in other words: to the view of the city, which is always limited by the camera's eye as well as the human field of vision. And indeed: however eloquent the individual scenes, however diverse the associations triggered by the montage, however impressive the variations in image speed - for the viewer of the film, the viewer of the images, it remains a visual succession, a sequence of individual impressions. The expertise of the eye lies in focussed viewing, in temporally ordered and spatially clearly structured perception.

Sense of hearing
In contrast, the ear's expertise lies in its lack of direction. Where the eye decides in favour of perspectives, the ear is open in all directions. It can hear simultaneously, process different information from right and left, front, back, above or below, combine sounds from the most diverse sources into simultaneous events or differentiate between the movements of different tempos, different directions - simultaneity and multi-layeredness are the keywords. As a logical consequence, composers of the 20th and early 21st century also speak of the multiverse, which - instead of the old universe - is to be discovered by listening.At the level of human coexistence, the city forms such a multiverse of overlapping and perspectival diversity. The ear appears to be predestined to absorb and comprehend this.

Abstraction
The power of music lies in abstraction. Where the film shows concrete things, it can generalise, place them in larger contexts, invent emotionalities, create distance or closeness, interpret, question and exaggerate. The music - especially that which manages without texts, quotations laden with meaning or clearly semantic sounds - aims beyond the individual, the particular, its mode of expression shapes structures, gestures, movements - the individual, concrete clarity of the images thus begins to vibrate.This potential of film music (used in narrative cinema at an exposed point in the plot) is used throughout the music for the documentary silent film "Berlin - Symphony of a Metropolis" in an exemplary manner. Here are just a few examples: The music composed to counter the visual fireworks effects at the beginning of the film, with little movement and long sustained sounds, leaves the viewer and listener in doubt: Is it really a cheerful, festive fireworks display? Or is it rather a tense anticipation of what is to come? Does the music know more than the eye can see? The fact that the music and the images do not say the same thing here allows for reflection, and possibly also the viewer's own mood, which may be at odds with the visible one (exuberantly celebrating people). It is as if the black and white images were given a sound colouring instead of a visual one; elsewhere, repetitions in the music combine images of industrial production with shots of tourists at Alexanderplatz. The connection created in this way could mean: "both of these things happen at the same time" - or also: "both activities (industrial work and sightseeing) follow the same principles". The images are interpreted musically - in that the sounds reveal visual differences to be related. What the film already prepares through the order and rhythm of the sequences is manifested here through the music. There are also formal analogies in the music that relate the ball flying back and forth in a tennis tournament to a political speech in the Bundestag, thus interpreting the political speech as a sporting match. In contrast to this musical parallelisation of different scenes, individual images are isolated and accentuated using musical means: In the moment of a kiss captured on film, the movement in the music suddenly stops. A general acoustic pause removes this moment from the "normal" course of time and thus from everyday events.

Gestures
Abstraction and multiverse - these two cornerstones of musical listening and creation are combined with special procedures by composers Helmut Oehring and Iris ter Schiphorst. "For me, seeing is more important than hearing," says Helmut Oehring, who grew up as the son of deaf parents: "For me, seeing is linked to language, to communication, to communication. I think and dream in sign language." The translation from the visual to the acoustic, from visible to audible language, is therefore a fundamental and existential theme in Oehring's thinking. As is the search for commonalities, equivalents and structural conditions of languages. "My starting point is to translate the various movements that have to do with grammar, sign language, the simultaneity of physical and mimic movements, which are components of this language system, into music. The simultaneity and diversity of an eyebrow movement and at the same time of several arm movements that make up a word that is being formed in space, and its temporal progression - that is what interests me compositionally. "Perhaps this is the basis for the emphasised gestures in Oehring's music, in which the gesture transformed into music and thus abstracted is the connecting extract of visible and audible communication. Oehring and ter Schiphorst's most recent joint composition, for example, considers a single gesture from a vocal, gestural and musical perspective: "rumgammeln + warten", which also gave this composition its title.The simultaneous multi-layeredness that interests Oehring in communication in sign language and which at the same time characterises the special competence of the sense of hearing corresponds to a multi-layered emergence of the music on the level of production when Oehring and Iris ter Schiphorst compose together. Together: that means in initial rough consultation, then at separate desks, finally in dialogue. The "amazement that things can still be expressed, and even more so together", which the composers have repeatedly stated, is extended in the creation process of "Berlin - Symphony of a Metropolis" by the exchange with the director Thomas Schadt, who works in parallel. The "symphony" - that is, the coming together and resonance of different things - is created on several levels.

Orchestral work
The symphony orchestra, whose polyphony has to be structured by the composers in the same way that the multi-layered acoustics of the city demand it from the ear of the passer-by, appears as a logical mediator of the artistic reflection on Berlin. Oehring/ter Schiphorst, by drawing predominantly on his traditional instrumentarium, which they expand only by a few instruments of a rock band, utilise not only the acoustic richness of perspective that the orchestra offers, but also its possibilities for abstraction: not urban everyday sounds are the basis of the film music, but artificial sounds.The distance created by the orchestral score to the real sounds (which the film as a silent film also completely conceals), the abstraction and transfer of the urban soundscape into orchestral gestures, gains a striking clarity precisely in those rare moments when the authors break through it: At one point, a man playing an "air guitar" - that is, performing movements that more or less match the sound - comes into the picture to the sound of a guitar at the edge of a square. As if in a hint of the otherwise avoided simple doubling, image and sound meet here, only to immediately separate again - into the multiform, multi-layered and abstract - just as Oehring's and ter Schiphorst's music also translates visual impressions and gestures, the film borrows from musical structures: as in classical symphonic music, it works with themes, sequences, repetition and variation; and perhaps its most important creative element is the musical rhythm of the images.Music and film illustrate the different competences of the eye and ear, but also show the possible connections between the two forms of perception, their interplay and their mutual influence - in a joint search for the symphony of the city. "The structures of a symphony are too complex for the purely visual possibilities of a film," Helmut Oehring concedes. Symphonic music in general, on the other hand, is all too often and still driven by the desire to keep the urban world out of the concert hall - a desire that fails to recognise the great parallelism of the structures. A recently published music didactic children's book tells the story of a man who can't stand living in the big city: In the noisy confusion, all the music disappears from his head. So the man buys a large, lonely house in the country and rents out all the flats and rooms to musicians, who soon fill the house with music. But once again the negative effect sets in: even in the musical chaos, the man is left with nothing but an unhappy, droning head. Only when everyone finally comes together to form an orchestra and the man has become a conductor does music emerge, but the children's book does not tell us whether and how the music returns to the town. Helmut Oehring and Iris ter Schiphorst's "Symphony of a Big City" shows that it has actually always been there.