WAS WIRD HIER EIGENTLICH GESPIELT?!?! (What is actually being played here?!?!) (2022/2023)
Double biography of the 21st century
for singer-performer, voice, ensemble (all amplified), 2 thunderbolts/electronics and samples
Text: Felicitas Hoppe
Duration: 45 min.
Composition commissioned by Klangverein Stuttgart, funded by the Ernst von Siemens Music Foundation
WP: 21.10.2023, Donaueschinger Musiktage, Donauhallen, Mozart-Saal; Motto: CooperationFelicitas Hoppe / Salome Kammer / Ensemble Ascolta, conducted by Catherine Larsen-Maguiere
Performance material available from Boosey & Hawkes
exact line-up:
female singer-performer, female reader, trpt, trbn, vlc, e-gtr, pft/kbd, 2 perc
commentary
Once upon a time a child was wilful and did not do what his mother wanted. Therefore the good God was not pleased with him and let him fall ill, and no doctor could help him, and in a short time he lay on his deathbed. When she was put into the grave and the earth was covered over her, her little arm suddenly came out again and reached up, and when they put her in and put fresh earth over it, it did not help, and her little arm kept coming out again. Then the mother had to go to the grave herself and beat the little arm with the rod, and as she did so, it drew itself in, and the child was now at rest under the earth. (Brothers Grimm)
What is a life, what is a work? How do you set dreams, memories and wishes to music? Why does this annoying little arm always come up? How does it read, how does it sound? And: How do you escape the autobiographical myth and the prison of your own seemingly familiar means? The answer is simple: by looking at your counterpart.
This is exactly what Iris ter Schiphorst and Felicitas Hoppe have done. 'Finally playing instead of writing', the writer wishes, and the composer replies: 'Only when you write does it become light! In the echo chamber between literature and music, they have spent years telling each other about their lives in letters, on walks and on the phone, questioning the possibilities and limits of self-determination between text and sound, and have come across the provocative and illuminating story of the stubborn child.The story of the obstinate child is as provocative as it is illuminating, and surprisingly reflects the constraints of a present that holds life and work equally liable.
In the artistic realisation, this has become a serious and self-deprecating assessment of the situation, a self-understanding between typewriter and baton that not only brings Eurydice back from the underworld but, with Orpheus, is a vote for the perilous turn to the here and now: 'Sing - so that I can read you better! Write so that I can hear you!
The result proves just how much of a struggle this was: a piece in which text and music alternately fight for their places between resistance and surrender, only to find each other in a joint plea at the end, in the 'shroud of revolution': It can be done!
But what is actually being played here, when a work is staged with pomp and trombone, between musical virtuosos and art policemen, which places the homo ludens in the foreground with the songs of childhood and, staged performatively by Salome Kammer, plays the arena of a seemingly ephemeral art that only briefly goes down in a firework display, only to rise again like a phoenix from the ashes in the end through humour and resistance.
Iris ter Schiphorst/Felicitas Hoppe
Reviews
FAZ, 25.10.2023, Max Nyffeler
"...Once again, the combination of words and music proved to be particularly stimulating. ... Iris ter Schiphorst transformed the text, written in collaboration with Felicitas Hoppe, into a resonant essay full of barbs. Artistic self-reflection and criticism of the male-dominated music business are mixed with fundamental aesthetic questions: What can the word, what can music communicate to us? What is stronger, singing or speaking? As "the doubly stubborn child who bangs on the drum of the present", the composer pulls out all the stops, letting her polystylistic fantasies loose with the Ensemble Ascolta and Salome Kammer as a crazy performer bursting into cries of protest. A tangled ball of problems and ideas, entertaining, thought-provoking ... Self-irony offers itself as an emergency exit from the maze of paradoxes..."
VAN Magazine, 25 October 2023, Eleonore Büning
"... It's half melodrama, half period opera. Only concertante, without costumes. Iris ter Schiphorst composed it for two voices, for the Ascolta Ensemble and electronics. Felicitas Hoppe wrote the text for her, in constant dialogue. They negotiate which of the two came first, which is more important: hen or egg? Language or music? Poet or composer? Prima la musica, poi le parole? Of course, the story has autobiographical traits. It is teeming with quotations and self-quotations. In order to blur the traces back to Richard Strauss or Antonio Salieri, the two composers did not call their work Capriccio : What is actually being played here?- A double biography of the 21st century.
Hoppe speaks her part herself, with irony, but also deeper meaning. She even sings from time to time. Ter Schiphorst has the unsurpassable Salome Kammer, who can also screech and whisper, dance and march, stand in for her when speaking and singing. With this dream team, it is clear that there is never a dull moment. It begins with Grimm's fairy tale of the wilful child and continues with saraband nostalgia and garage band sounds as well as alienated children's games against historical oblivion ("Don't turn round!") to Beethoven's joyful ode, which everyone horribly sings along to, louder and louder, until Beethoven turns into a never-ending hail of bombs, for which earplugs should have been specially issued. General pause. Emptiness. The war has arrived in the Donauhalle. As the actors and authors don't really know how to deal with it, they don't stop there. They add a coda. And if they weren't so clever in what they do, that wouldn't work either. But it does..."
Süd-Kurier, 23 October 2023, Elisabeth Schwind
"...Simply brilliant"
BR-Klassik, Leporello programme, 23/10/2023, Kristin Amme
"A piece in which a lot of everything comes together is the agitational work Was wird hier eigentlich gespielt? by composer Iris ter Schiphorst and writer Felicitas Hoppe. "Will it be brighter when the sounds turn into words?" asks one of the two voices, accompanied by the Ensembel Ascolta and Catherine Larsen-Maguiere - and thus hints at something that applies to many of the pieces in this festival year: the spoken or sung word, the song, the message is important. "If you don't sing now, you'll fade away", proclaims a voice in Was wird hier eigentlich gespielt? In this play, which will hopefully find its way onto the repertoire."
Stuttgarter Zeitung, 24 October 2023, p. 27 / Culture | Donaueschingen city edition
Will it be brighter when sounds turn into words? Asks the author Felicitas Hoppe on stage left. On the right is singer Salome Kammer, behind her is the Ascolta ensemble. The play they are performing bears the reason for its creation in its title. "What is actually being played here?" is the title of the world premiere, in which the composer Iris ter Schiphorst and the reciting Büchner prizewinner ironically circle themselves as well as the new (sound) art. In a constant back and forth between text and sound, the piece deals with disobedience, restrictive education and the difficulty of freeing the art of the present from all the burdens of the past, always with reference to the cruel Grimm fairy tale "The Stubborn Child".
...
"Don't turn round!" With good reason, ter Schiphorst and Hoppe confront the artist Orpheus with the new music morality police in a reminiscence of the pop singer Falco. Afterwards, Beethoven's "Ode to Joy" is sung standing up, accompanied by the fireworks of New Year's Eve. Or are those gun salvos after all? "What is actually being played here?" remains on the fence between irony and deeper meaning. And touches on almost all the topics and trends that were discussed in Donaueschingen last weekend.
Reutlinger General-Anzeiger, 24.10.2023
"...It becomes a crazy spectacle full of pop and cultural references when a linguistic ironist like Felicitas Hoppe meets a sound ironist like Iris ter Schiphorst. The audience is bombarded with pop hits and nonsense theatre, Monteverdi arias and nursery rhymes ("Three Chinese ..."), and time and again set pieces from a macabre Grimm fairy tale. Hoppe's recitation is as laconic as Salome Kammer's dialogue partner is theatrical and witty. Marvellous!"
Südwest Presse, 24.10.2023
Iris ter Schiphorst and Felicitas Hoppe present a poetry-music revue with humour and subtlety - between self-irony, Orpheus myth and double biography - under the title "Was wird hier eigentlich gespielt?". It juggles with stylistic levels in an amusing and quirky way: The Police ("Every breath you take") meets Beethoven's Ninth and "Three Chinese with the double bass".
Badische Zeitung, 23.10.2023
The exorcists: "...That leaves Iris ter Schiphorst and Felicitas Hoppe's "Was wird hier eigentlich gespielt?" as a beacon that could point the way to an interdisciplinary collaboration. Hoppe's texts on the dualism of words and music, of Orpheus and Eurydice, of the divine and the human have wit, humour and irony. "How do you lament against the gods of the Donaueschingen underworld?" asks the writer Hoppe as a performer - and receives the typical avant-garde cacophony as an answer from Ensemble Ascolta. In the end, the sounds burn and whip - despite Beethoven's divine spark."
Pizzicato - online magazine, 26/10/2023
https://www.pizzicato.lu/welthauptstadt-der-neuen-musik-donaueschingen-2023-ein-wunder-in-der-tiefsten-provinz/
"...The Dutch-German composer Iris ter Schiphorst and the German writer Felicitas Hoppe (both Berlin) demonstrated that new music does not necessarily have to sink into seriousness, but can also develop into a highly lively and artistic performance... In fact, 'Was wird hier eigentlich gespielt?' is a wonderful discourse between the two authors on the question of whether the key question of this year's Musiktage - whether there is an equal collaboration between sound creator, word creator and sound creator - can be answered positively (answered with 'Yes, of course!'); a cheerful walk through cultural history from Eurydice and Augustine's 'Alles ist hin' to the 'Drei Chinesen mit dem Kontrabass', which suddenly turned into a rock performance of 'Every breath you take' by Police (1983)."