Perfomance as Composition

3HUIRUPDQFHDV&RPSRVLWLRQHeiner Goebbels, Stathis Gourgouris

PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art, PAJ 78 (Volume 26, Number3), September 2004, pp. 1-16 (Article)

Published by The MIT Press

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2004 Stathis Gourgouris PAJ 78 (2004), pp. 116. 1

PERFORMANCE AS COMPOSITION

Heiner GoebbelsInterviewed by Stathis Gourgouris

For more than two decades the German composer Heiner Goebbels haswritten music for theatre, ballet, opera, radio, TV, and concert hall as well astape compositions and sound installations. He has created music for manytheatre productions, such as Dantons Death, directed by Ruth Berghaus, and RichardIII, directed by Claus Peyman. In recent years New York audiences have beenintroduced to his work with performances of Hashirigaki at the BAM Next WaveFestival and Eislermaterial and Black on White with the Ensemble Modern at theLincoln Center Festival. Goebbels had worked frequently with the texts of HeinerMller, including The Liberation of Prometheus, Shadow/Landscape with Argonauts,Wolokolamsk Highway, and The Man in the Elevator, seen in New York at TheKitchen within days of the fall of the Berlin Wall. It featured Mller himself readinghis text, accompanied by the musicians Don Cherry, Arto Lindsay, George Lewis,and Ned Rothenberg. Other authors whose writings have been used in musicalsettings are Gertrude Stein, Poe, Thoreau, Robbe-Grillet, and Kierkegaard. PaulAusters In the Country of Lost Things was featured in Surrogate Cities. HeinerGoebbels music is performed frequently in festivals on several continents(www.heinergoebbels.com). In 2003, Sir Simon Rattle conducted his orchestrapiece, From a Diary, in its Berlin Philharmonic premiere. This interview wasconducted in New York, March 19, 2003.

Welcome to the United States! I extend the greeting in the fashion that Frank Zappa doesin his piece with the Ensemble Modern, but with the present moment in mind. I wantedto ask the art-in-relation-to-politics question last, and I feel I have to ask it at the outsetbecause the historical occasion demands it. So, I would like you to consider the problemthat ones art can never entirely control the context of its performance. The New Yorkperformance of your piece Hashirigaki happens to coincide with the initiation of thebombing campaign in Iraq. If nothing else, this is what the audience brings to thetheatre; its thought and affect is weighed down by this occasion, whether acknowledged ornot.

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I doubt that an artist has much of an inuence on the political relevance of hisartistic work. If art is too much on purpose, if its destination is too obvious, it losescertain qualities as artwork. As Heiner Mller points out: It is like harnessing ahorse to a car. The car doesnt run well and the horse doesnt survive it either. So Ithink its good that the artist does not completely control the political context of aperformance. Especially if you are a political artist and you want the work to beopen to the world, to whatever occurs out there, I think one day or another you willface such a coincidence. It is much better than to pretend that your work isimminently actualized. Im very skeptical about direct political relation betweenartistic statement and the message to the audience. Once youre working in an open-minded way, I trust that sooner or later the work will come to breathe in thesituation around it. Im not sure how this will come to be with Hashirigaki, whichis rather colorful and playful and perhaps light, except to say that the piece alreadystands in a strong controversial position toward my other work, which is rather darkand concrete.

I just nished an opera in Geneva, called Landscape with Distant Relatives, where Ialso used texts by Gertrude Stein, from Wars I Have Seen, which she wrote duringthe Second World War in the south of France. Texts she wrote sixty or seventy yearsago nowadays seem as if they were written yesterday. Its much better this way: todiscover, almost by an accident, the political importance in the material than topretend there is such importance in advance. This pertains as well to Eislermaterial.I dont deny the historical difference between this piece now and Hanns Eislerssituation. In fact, I do the opposite. I rather enlarge the differences by putting theoriginal musical material in a sound-frame which is quite old-sounding (with theharmonium, the big bass drum and the particular way of singing), precisely in orderto allow the audience to discover how close a connection it can feel to this sound, orhow touched it can be by this nostalgic material. I prefer that the audience discoversthis on its own than insisting on how important and actual his work is nowadays.

In fact, I had Eisler in mind as well. I asked the previous question in the way one wouldask it of Hanns Eisler in the 1940s. During the war and in exile Eisler similarly did nothave control over the context of his performances compared to the way he did, let us say,during the time of performing Die Mtter around Germany, in 1932.

Actually, I just saw a Berliner Ensemble performance of Die Mtter. Its veryinteresting how these words fall now on completely different ground than even tenyears ago. I mean, in the 80s everybody would be so provoked by their strangeness;they sounded so far away. While nowunfortunately, I have to saythe oor isready again for such words.

The story between you and Eisler is a very long story, as you have acknowledged. But alsoits evident in the recordings, the history of your recordings. Im very interested in yourvarious glosses on Eisler and Ive gone back recently even to your earlier work. Youobviously revisit Eislers work, as if drawing from an unending pool. The record you didwith Alfred Harth in 1976 ( Vier Fuste fr Hanns Eisler) is a bit of a deconstruction

GOEBBELS / Performance as Composition 3

Eislermaterial, a stage concert with Ensemble Modern and actor Joseph Bierbichler.Photo: Courtesy Lincoln Center Festival.

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of specic Eisler tunes or even his tonalities in general; the word deconstruction isoverused, but I cant think of a better one here. While Eislermaterial is not quite adeconstruction; its a sort of distillation, a contemplation of the core material of Eisler.And there is lots of work in between. Im not sure how Id categorize the Duck and Coverperformance (1985) in this respect. And certainly, the brass group you founded in the late70s, Sogenanntes Linksradikales Blasorchester, had a distinctive Eislerian feel, though itwas also very loose structurally. How is all this connected for you, both musically but alsopolitically?

I think all this started in the mid-70s. Listening to Eisler changed my life. His workconveyed to me that there is a way in which music and politics can be linked, not byforming one layer upon another but by incorporating the political within themusical material. Thats what I learned from him, and thats what made my decisionto study music after sociology. So, I owe him a lot. And, as you said, I performed alot of his work before I discovered different modes of working, like literary texts, etc.But when I got this commission for his 100th anniversary, in 1998, I discovered thateven when I had sort of forgotten him Eisler was always there. Even during myclose collaboration with an author who is considered a grandchild of BertoltBrechtyou know, when I was working with Heiner MllerI never thought ofEisler, perhaps because of a different mode of working. With Mller, I worked withliterary texts that rest on a notion of landscape or on texts and music where the twoelements are competitive with each other, whereas Eisler worked differently withtexts; he composed songs. But, of course, this way of accepting literary texts as anauthority for the music is ultimately very closely related to the work of Eisler andBrecht. And its nice to discover after twenty years of working in different areas thatan undercurrent relation was always there.

Weve been talking about Eisler but your work as a whole belongs not just to Eisler but toBrecht as well in a direct sense. And again, not merely to the Brecht/Eisler duo ascomposer and lyricist but to both of them as dramatic and performative artists. Brecht asa dramaturg, I believe, is crucial to your performative understanding and it is in thissense that I see your association with Heiner Mller. All of this constellation belongs to thegreat tradition of Musik Drama in German art, but explicitly politicized. (I wouldinclude Adornos reading of Wagner in this as well.) How do you situate yourself in thistradition? In what sense is music a dramatic performance for you?

I always considered music to be boring without an external frame of reference.Music was most interesting to me when it had a reference to the non-musical world.If this reference wasnt there then music was just a private thing for me even in theearlier days. So, I started to do a lot of lm scores and compose with words andrarely did autonomous musical work until the late-80s or early-90s. Thats why Ithink I discovered, with the help of Eisler of course, that there must be a gesture inmusic. Music which chatters away does not interest me. I can see the circumstancesof my musical biography as quite logical actually. In my development I came toinclude more and more media, but I didnt start that way and didnt use them all at


once but moved from one into another and so on. But the basic assumptionmusicreacting or referring to other art forms or other forms of perceptionhas been withme since the beginning. I like Bach and thats where I come from, not Chopin, forexample, where the pianistic virtuosity will always be celebrated.

Its funny, I had in my notes here a sort of off-beat question, which I might as well asknow. What does Eisler owe to Bach?

The effect is quite direct. Actually, there have been certain musicological studies inGermany which have pointed to passages in Eisler exemplifying direct quotes fromBach, like in the beginning of the Die Mtter cantata, where it is quite evident. Heloved the functionality of Baroque music. There are also direct quotes fromSchubert, by the way.

I remembered thinking this when I rst heard some of Eislers cantatas. I had gotten myrst recordings in East Berlin around 1980. Nowadays, much of this has been transferredto CDs, including the great historic recordings of the pre-Nazi years with Ernst Buschsinging. The arrangements are quite remarkable.

So, you would have heard the recordings where Eisler sings himself. For me this washugely important. Hearing Eisler singing the Ballade von der haltbaren Graugans(Ballad of the Grey Goose) made me think of using the saxophone instead of goingdirectly to the words, because the singing sounded so instrumental, the way he usedhis voice, amazing.

Yes, there is a whole way of singing in this, lets say, epic theatre tradition thats quitecompelling. Its a whole new sense of musical performativity and Eisler was entirely self-conscious of its importance. But I want to come back to the question about Musik Dramaand Heiner Mller particularly. How did you become so extensively involved with hiswork? What is the importance of his work for you musically and dramatically? I meannot just the poetry itself (which is singular and barely evaluated as poetry outsideGermany), but his whole conceptualization or perhaps his method. Is it a matter ofmethod?

I think that, generally speaking, the kinds of texts I like to work with are always byauthors who strongly consider the matter of literary form and structure as importantas the content, the semantics. Hence the few authors that reach this level for me:Gertrude Stein and Heiner Mllerwho have a lot in common, by the wayandKafka, and Edgar Allan Poe in a way, because he was able to instrumentalize his styletoward the intention of his text; he could slip into different paths of writing. This isthe basic view I have on literary texts, which is not only on what they tell but on howthey tell. And if this question of how has a musical dimension, like the rhythm inGertrude Stein or the substantial reduction to single words in Heiner Mller, thenI can work, then I have something to do, because I can make this syntax transparent.I can try to enlarge the view on the architecture of the text, to read the text with a

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magnifying glass. My interest is to share my observations with the reader or with thelistener or, looking behind the authors way of writing, to show some of their writingstrategies, to be able to understand more levels than just the overall semantic one.

So, you are in a sense, as a musician and a composer, acting as a reader of literature,making the reading of literature the primary mode of making music. Thats a fascinatingway to go about it.

Thats right. Reading as a form of composition.

You know, I remember your performance of Heiner Mllers The Liberation ofPrometheus, which I saw at Delphi, in the ancient stadium in 1995, and remains stillone of the most memorable theatrical experiences of my life. It was the closest I ever cameto having some sort of understanding of what Aeschylean theatre might have looked like,which had always been a mysterythe idea of the one actor, particularly.

Its interesting you say that because you have experienced so much Greek theatre.

Well, I was astonished. And I came there knowing the Mller text very well. The onescene that really got through to me was the one where Hercules is circling around the rockbecause the stench from the encrusted feces is so intolerable, and he is circling around therock for three thousand years, as the text says, and then another three thousand years, andso on, trying to nd the proper angle for ascent. And the way you did this, with ErnstSttzner going way out to the end of the stadium, which from the audiences point of viewon the front end, where the performance space is set up, is pitch black, with only theshadows of the tips of the trees from the surrounding woods showing over the Delphi gorgeand the starry sky overhead, so that you lose all sense of proportion, just like in the text.But the sheer feel of the experience was profoundly theatrical, though the essence of theperformance was musical, strictly speaking. The drama came through the musicalperformance, not through the acting in the conventional sense, though Sttzner is abrilliant actor, no doubt. The point is that the whole thing was extraordinarily theatricalwithout any traditional theatrical elements.

But the key for this scene, you see, is in the sentence itself. The complexity of thesentence is performing exactly the difculty of Hercules to reach Prometheusbecause the sentence doesnt reach the point without a lot of grammatical obstacles.The circling and circling creates obstacles and you cant understand nally, you cantreach the point of resolution of meaning, lets say. Especially not with the rstreading.

Lets extend this way of looking at things to the Schliemann piece you did. First of all,what is the connection between the theatrical piece, Schliemann Scaffolding (1997)and the earlier musical piece, Schliemanns Radio (1992)?

I did a piece in Frankfurt in 1990, collaborating with a set designer, Michael Simon.We called it Newtons Casino, but it was in fact a piece about Schliemanns


excavations and his diaries. And he did this amazing setit was exactly somehowwhat I just described about the sentence of Heiner Mller. He emptied out thewhole theatrethe audience was only sitting in the balconyand he put in there agiant mobile machine with a set of buildings which he reconstructed fromSchliemanns plan of the wall of Troy. So, in a very customary way, he put togetherthe sketch of the ruins of Troy in a three-dimensional constantly moving machine-like thing. It was a wonderful work, in which we included the texts of the diary. Butwhen we performed it we took all the texts outwe thought it was better withouttextso it was like a big installation of sound and music, voices, etc. For the radioversion, I brought back the diary text.

Its interesting because in my sense of the radio piece it seems as if Schliemann, in hisobservations, might be making a eld recording, which is obviously a form of music aswell as history. There is a real sense of almost ethnographic space inscribed in the music.

Yes, in fact when I did the recording in the studio I cleared out an area on the oorwhere the performer would walk around in front of the wall of inscriptions. In thetheatrical performance we subsequently did in Greece, I enriched the writtenmaterial, and wrote a part for the folk singer, which was performed by LydiaKoniordou.1 It was real fun working there. It premiered in Olos.

Yes, I remember. I wasnt in Greece then, but my friends, who knew of my interest in yourwork, sent me lots of press clippings. It was quite exciting. And seeing the video later I wasimpressed with the way you used Greek music. Which brings me to another set of notes Ihave here, concerning your ability to weave together lots of, let us say, non-Europeanmusical material with your own. The work you did with the African musical material inOu bien le dbarquement dsastreux (1993) was particularly impressivethesepassages with the kora, the electric guitar, and the trombone, all woven in a contrapuntalrelation to each other. What concerns me is the question of how we can avoid, whenintertwining all sorts of musical and cultural elements, a sort of postmodern bricolage, akind of mixing of commodities? Might we speak of a certain dramatic ethos perhaps, ora musical ethos, all of which is also a specic politics? How do we avoid this trap?

Well, I try to be very aware of this trap, and I try to construct a lot of criteria towhich I then submit my choice of material. In the case of both pieces youmentioned, in the process of one or two years in advance, I created a system ofoutlines, which I probably install in my body because Im not able to be totallyconscious of all this, that serve as a system of criteria. I then pour through thissystem my musical material, and whatever falls through it I throw out. And onlywhat remains along with these criteria I then use. For example, the sound choice inOu bien le dbarquement dsastreux was completely faithful to whatever has to dowith wood, because the forest was somehow one of the elements that patchedtogether this choice of texts of Heiner Mller, Francis Ponge, and Joseph Conrad.Behind this theme of conquest and estrangement, there was a whole metaphoricsubstratum built on the different ideas of forest. So I only chose sound material thatt into that. Im quite superstitious concerning material. In the Schliemann work, I

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was very aware that all the materials must have their roots around some center,which I tried to keep open of course, but they were all related to this center beforeI chose them.

A thing that remains consistently fascinating in your music is the entwinement ofcomposition and improvisation. Can you speak a little bit about how you understand thisentwinement? How improvisation might in fact be composition in itself? Or, how itmight be linked to performance?

I think improvisation is the last step in what I describe as building a system ofcriteria; its the last step in using musical material, not the rst step. In this wholelong process of composition, I always allow myself to improvise as well, but I do sobecause I think that the paths which are already in place are so limited, so denedby what I may have been doing in the period of contextualizing the material, thatwhatever I may be improvising will necessarily be within the path of composition.So yes, I do allow myself to improvise in the composition process, but in the veryend everything is completely precise. Though music will not always be writtendown, it will be completely precise in the way it is appointed. For instance, in TheLiberation of Prometheus there is not one note written down, but every show is likeevery other. You see, there is a lot of freedom in creating a very precise window ofmusic to which all the musicians agree.

Since were talking directly about making music, let me ask you: do you still play thesaxophone?

No. I havent played for probably . . . I dont even remember . . . fteen years maybe.

Do you miss it?

No, I only learned it in three months to be able to found this brass band. It was byvirtue of a certain musical-political perspective, in many ways already prescribed bymy university research on Hanns Eisler, with which I completed my sociologystudies. And Im sure there were a couple of biographical strong impressions whichhelped me to think this up: a lot of free jazz concerts in the early 70s, as well as someother experimental brass groups, like De Volharding, around Louis Andriessen inAmsterdam. The nice thing with this band was that it balanced out all kinds ofdifferent origins of musicianship. There were professional musicians and composers,like my teacher Rolf Riehm, or other colleagues from the music conservatory, andalso jazz players, like Alfred Harth and Christoph Anders. And there were alsopolitically interested musical dilettantes. And so we came nicely together and wereable to balance our interests in a very open and frank ensemble sort of way.

It is here that I also learned about collective judgment in relation to variouscommitments, to decisions about where to perform, or what to perform, how tolearn a piece, how to compose it, etc.you know, collective judgment in musicalterms in the widest sensewhich was very helpful and constructive. I never


Black on White,music theatre withEnsemble Modernat Lincoln CenterFestival. Photo:Wonge Bergmann,courtesy LincolnCenter.

Black on White, music theatre with Ensemble Modern at Lincoln Center Festival.Photo: Robert Douglas, courtesy Lincoln Center.

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considered these decisions to get in the way of my aesthetic point of view. I foundit a very helpful experience to accept that, as a composer, you dont have to be alonein your room. It was very important for me.

Well, you have always worked collectively and collaboratively. This is self-evident in theentire range of your work over the years.

Yes, thats why the collaboration with the Ensemble Modern was so workable. Yousee, the political challenge begins for me with the ways of production. As theGerman lm critic Georg Seesslen recently pointed out, an artwork with manyparticipants and collaborators, like in lm or theatre, has to reect the internalrelationships. As an experienced spectator you can easily see if the director uses theactors and musicians in a hysterical repressive authoritarian way, or if he is able tocreate with them in a fruitful atmosphere. You can see by the performance if thedirector is an asshole.

I try an open process, in which every light technician or wardrobe assistant can easilymake suggestions and everyone in the crew always has a fair chance to make the bestout of his eld (light, sound, stage, costume, musicians, performers etc.). It ends upbeing very precise, of course, because the combination of all these media can onlywork properly with precision. Black on White wouldnt have been possible withoutthe strong inspiration and creativity not only by the staff, but also all the musiciansincluded. They proposed to bring instruments; they developed characters, atmo-spheres, gestures, etc. Also, the fact that the music seems to have diverse culturalbackgrounds, the fact that three different languages are spoken (and in the latestopera six!) is not a postmodern invention, but only the outcome of the internation-ality of the Ensemble: with American, Australian, French, South American, British,Japanese, Swiss, Indian and, of course, German players. You can hear it in the piece.This piece is musically designed to be a portrait of a collective, not based on specialsolo protagonists. I hope that an audience is able to conceive this respectful,decentralized perspective as a political quality, a gesture that liberates the senses.

And with Eislermaterial especially, I tried to build three or four different ways of howthe musicians can incorporate the material instead of just playing the parts. Because,you know, the Ensemble Modern play some hundred concerts a year; they performworks from all sorts of different composers. But, thinking entirely in terms of Eisler,I wanted them to incorporate, to embody, the material: rst of all, by not givingthem a conductor, which means that each player must know exactly what everybodyelse plays; second, by having them participate in the process of arranging thematerial (who plays what); third, asking them to improvise on the material, whichdemands that everyone must be very aware of what they are riding on; fourth, bychoosing a stage construction that, as youve seen in the video, is three sides of asquare on an empty stage. This means to amplify and make public the necessarycommunication of them performing without a conductor, indeed by including theaudience as an important fourth part, fourth side.


It becomes sort of a Lehrstck in a way, because the musicians have to go throughthis experience learning the material. When theyre playing a very intimate stringtrio, for example, the violin, viola, and cello are in entirely different sides of the set,having the biggest distance between them, fteen meters or so. And when they haveto communicate on this intimate passage even the last row of the audience will noteit because it is so public.

Thats fascinating. You know, Frank Zappas work with the Ensemble Modern strikes meas very similar in this way, although not the splitting up of musicians. But he also spenta long time teaching them to improvise with a certain attitude, a non-musical,performative tonality, if I may say it that way. But they are, of course, extraordinarymusicians.

Thats not the main point. Of course, they are incredible virtuosi, extraordinarymusicians. But the real difference is that they are a self-organized ensemble, and thismakes their motivation so much higher than in the case of an orchestra where anartistic director tells them tomorrow you play Eisler and the day after whateverelse, and then we get a break. Thats the difference. They decide whether they wantto work with me, where to perform, what to do next, etc. As musicians, they decidecollectively on all aspects of the ensemble, musical and non-musical aspects.

The way we are talking is leading me to ask about rock music. I dont know why. Maybebecause we are talking about the group process. I wouldnt identify you as a rock musicianbut the presence of rock music is all over your work. So, what is the importance of rockmusic for you? How have you found yourself inhabiting this domain over the years, ormaybe, if not inhabiting it, going in and out of it at different times, traversing it? Is ita matter of a certain kind of sound, a certain ethos, a matter of technology, ofperformance?

I grew up with classical music in my parents house and with pop music. There wasno experience of contemporary music otherwise. I was very interested in visual arts,contemporary visual arts. But pop music was my most important inuence afterclassical music. And my rst way of liberating myself from teachers who taught methe classical repertoire was to play songs that I heard on the radio, songs of theBeatles, the Beach Boys. Later on, I had a band and we played Eric Burden, JimiHendrix pieces, whatever. But this is how I learned a certain freedom, primarily inthe way of performance, non-conducted performance, and denitely the freedom increating music together as a group, which is really the most important thing aboutrock music. I mean, what is Paul McCartney without John Lennon? Even if JohnLennon didnt write as much, even if they didnt actually write everything togetheror equally every part, etc., it is by the very discussions they had about the material,by the encounter itself, that the great pieces happened. The encounter was thecreative instance. No one was ever, truly, working alone. And the thing about rockmusic is also the belief in the structure. The point is not so much to worry about theharmonies, not so much to worry about the solos or the lyrics. Its really to pay

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attention to the structure, the rhythm breaks, the orchestration, the soundthatswhat rock music is all about.

Would you consider Cassiber a rock group?

I guess we were considered an art-rock group or something. No, I wouldnt considerus a rock group; we were too weird in a way. But when we tried to improvise, we allagreed not to improvise as jazz musicians. We improvised shapes, we improvisedsong forms. The early Cassiber albums Man or Monkey (1982) or The Beauty and theBeast (1984), though they seemed like collections of songs, were entirely improvised.Chris Cutler and I were improvising forms and the other members were improvisingsounds. In this way, we created together a form of instant composition. We createdsongs spontaneously, without rehearsing them. All these song forms were unre-hearsed, just played straight. And later on, when we would meet for recording, wewould recall these as shapes and improvised them as shapes. There were never anywritten parts; there wasnt even an agreement to play a certain theme in a certainway, four bars here or four bars there. That was the magical moment of playing withChris Cutler, for example: to be able to communicate in terms of shapes withoutdiscussing it in advance. Chris has real understanding, a great sense of symmetry, ofmusic as shaping. After thirty two bars we could come back to an initial eldwithout countingthis worked magically between us.

Its very interesting that you mention the notion of the song as a form which Chrishimself uses a lot and has written about, particularly in terms of the Brecht/Eislerrelation. I mean, for me, the Art Bears fantastic performance of the song On Suicide . . .

. . . Its a masterpiece.

It is a masterpiece. First of all, as a song, as an Eisler/Brecht composition, but also, as yousay, this particular performance. For me, this was a denitive moment in understandingthis notion of the song as a form. And my interest in rock music itselfor certainaspects of rock songwritingis fueled by this notion and by this experience. A verysimilar instance is your own song composition on Hlderlins poem Hlfte des Lebens.But I brought us into the topic of rock music for another reason too: to discuss theconnection between rock music and the piece being performed today, Hashirigaki. Imean, I can sort of picture how Gertrude Stein works in it and certainly how Japanesemusic might be integrated in such a piece, but Im very curious about the Beach Boysmaterial.

As I told you, in the 60s I was playing pop music on the piano just by listening totunes on the radio. And I remember there were one or two Beach Boys songs whichI had heard only once or twice on the radio, and I could recall them but I couldntcatch them, I couldnt play them on the piano, because the harmonies weresomehow weird. Thats the one thing. Then, in 1998, The Pet Sounds Sessions wasreleased, where they published the backing tracks, the rhythm tracks, vocalharmonies, etc. And it was on that occasion that I heard the complete Pet Sounds


album again after so many years, and those couple of songslike Caroline No andDont Talkreminded me of my failure. So I discovered this material again, reallyfresh four years ago and, of course, I understood immediately why it had been sodifcult for me to catch. They have harmonies which just oat, they never satisfy thebass register that brings them back to the ground; they keep on going, never reallycoming to a resolution. Thats the secret of this wonderful composition. Its not onlybecause of the melancholy quality of these songs that this music is so formidable formeI mean, its such a classic but also because of this strange oating quality, asif everything is being lifted from the air. Its just not grounded; its never grounded.

So, somehow this connected in my mind with The Making of Americans, withGertrude Stein, because she does a similar thing with words. She keeps words goingconstantly by changing some elements in the repetitive language. If we attend to theletter in her process of observation, of thinking, of writing, we might get a bettersenseits very hardof what she means about love, about sadness, aboutrelationships, about men and women, because she is just evoking associations in aprocess of reecting toward the reader, at the reader. But she is fading this sense andit is also hard to catch, you seeso this is the connection that brings this piecetogether. And then there is another thing: She starts The Making of Americans as afamily history, but she immediately goes off on a digression toward an overallhuman statement, which also makes it ungrounded. She starts off on the ground,with the family, the brother, the sister, the mother, marriagebut then immediatelyshe tries to nd an overview from outside, about other families, about America,about the whole world, about humankindbefore coming back to her subject fromten pages earlier with the words as I was saying. And this strange, elevatedexpression works very well, I think, in the performance, particularly when we do thelast song I Just Wasnt Made For These Times which is itself an important phrase,coming, of course, from Brian Wilson, but it could very well have come fromGertrude Stein. She certainly felt untimely.

Youve also talked elsewhere about how you are drawn to the melancholy song. Its evidentin most of the Eisler songs you choose to performnot all obviously, you also take on themore playful, ironic ones. But still, there is specic attention to melancholy songs. Why isthat?

Well, probably because they are the truest ones. Thats the great thing about Eisler.He doesnt exclude feelings. He includes doubts and aggressions, hopes and fearshe includes everything. Thats why I think these songs allow most of the truth tocome through. Because they dont pretend just to be powerful, to have no doubtstheyre full of everything.

Perhaps your insistence on this totality of contrary feelings in music might be linked toyour preference for a certain tragic mode in your selection of texts or in the way you frameor stage your musical composition. I feel that in your particular conception (and in thetradition of Music Drama I spoke of earlierBrecht, Eisler, Mllerancient tragedy isgiven a remarkable actualization in modern terms. Does tragedyand I mean this in a

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Hashirigaki, a music theatre piece based on texts by Gertrude Stein, presented at the BrooklynAcademy of Music New Wave Festival 2003. Photos: Courtesy Richard Termine.


particular way: as the entwinement of drama and mythhave meaning nowadayswhere the polis is so dispersed? How do you confront this politics or aesthetics ofdispersion? How is myth important nowadays, not as an archaic thing but as somethingvery contemporary?

Probably tragic myth is the presenceand representationof powers greater thanwhat we control. Because what you see in the traditional humanist drama is moreand more conict being brought down to the level of personal relations or conictbrought down to psychological relations, which is something I really hate incontemporary staging. Actually, the movies are better. The lm industry hasunderstood that people need more than just love stories. Of course, they continue toproduce lots of love-story sorts of lms, but there have been many lms in the lastfty years that try to represent other forces that we deal with in life, stronger forces.The science ction genre exemplies this, of course. But the point is that certainlms show an awareness that not everything can be discussed and resolved in thecontext of a personal relationship. Yet, modern theatre always seems to do just that;even with the most political subtext, even when dealing with tragic mythologiesthemselves, it often seems to try to reduce things to some sort of domestic drama,and I think thats horrible. Im just not interested in this sort of thing. As I haveexperienced the world always as a political world, I think we face daily so manyrelationships of power which are much stronger and cannot be so easily reduced topersonal dimensions. So Im always looking for references or representations of thatin literature or music or theatre. And, of course, I dont use mythological gures(Prometheus or Hercules, etc.) as heroic types. I use them as way of reading politics,because I think the way the world is being controlled, moved, shiftedor how livesare nished and startedis sometimes done without mercy, without any possibilityof being a individual story.

So, as a last question in this light, what is the difference between being a political artistin the 70s and nowadays? Is it simply a generational difference? Or is there somethingelse, some other sense of timeliness at hand?

Well, in the 70s I was very involved in the movement. It was a very lively, outgoingsort of movement, with people like Joschka Fischer, Daniel Cohn-BenditI lived inthe same building with Joschka, now he is ying rst class . . . For us then,everything was so immediate: what do we do next? what do we do next Saturday?when is the next political meeting or demonstration?that sort of thing. But thishas changed. The context where everything is so immediate, so precise, and whereyour work is but a trial, a commitment to all that, doesnt exist. But my relation towhat it means to translate a political experience into an artistic one hasnt changedmuch at all. When I compare my work with Sogenanntes Linksradikales Blasorchesterand my work on Eislermaterial with the Ensemble Modern, for example, I nd thatits not all that different. Its more elaborate now, of course. Ive got more possibilitiesand resources, I can work with lights, costumes, sound engineers, and virtuosiplayers, but the way we talk to each other, the way we deal with each other, the waywe try to solve aesthetic and political problems is not so different. When I look back

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through all those different steps, which you have also followed here today, there isnothing that I regret, nothing where I would say lets cut this out or dont look atthat. This is something that makes me very happy because there is a lot ofcontinuation and development in these steps, and theres nothing to be embarrassedabout or, in the opposite way, to long for the good days of the past. I never had sucha feeling.

Then, I have to add one more dimension to that question: What does it mean to be aGerman artist today?as opposed to the 70s, working within the situation of a dividedGermany, which seems to have been important for you and the politics involved in yourmusic. I mean, it was important to the leftist movement in the West. Does this matter atall? Is this something you think about? I understand that you are a global artist, of course,but I wonder whether you think at all about your position in German culture.

Well, this is something I owe specically to Chris Cutler, this way of working at aninternational level. He was an important gure in this movement because he was therst to open up the space for an international collaboration of musicians and waysof playing. Since that time, I think Eislermaterial is the only piece thats entirelyGerman. I work consistently in an international context. But I never ignored myGerman roots. I started very strongly with developing my German point of viewthe music I grew up with and was educated in. I remember the matter of playing jazzthen. Other jazz musicians would complain: Hes got no swing. Hes much tooGerman. But I was proud of the way I was improvising. And in fact, when I saw theSun Ra Arkestra performing for the rst timeand it really changed my way oflooking at thingsI remember being astonished at how these people could do it all,both swing and improvise in the wildest ways. And be theatrical too. For a lot ofstraight jazz musicians, even in Europe, Sun Ra was too much. But its precisely thiscollective way of making music, of bringing various elds together, which appeals tome.

NOTE

1. Lydia Koniordou is Greeces foremost actress in classical tragedy, with exemplaryperformances in Euripides plays, particularly Electra. The way she is used in this play, as afolk singer, is itself a defamiliarizing gesture.

STATHIS GOURGOURIS teaches comparative literature at ColumbiaUniversity. He has also taught at Princeton, Yale, and the University ofMichigan. He is the author of Dream Nation: Enlightenment, Colonization,and the Institution of Modern Greece and Does Literature Think? Literature asTheory for an Antimythical Era as well as essays on political theory,psychoanalysis, lm. He is currently working on a volume of essays onmusic, performance, and the politics of sound, titled On TransgressiveListening.

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Perfomance as Composition