This piece was full of the works of William Lawes.
The conductor would stand still in dark obscurity while the viol consort filled the silence.
Does this sounds like your life too?
HEINER GOEBBELS, SONGS OF WARS I HAVE SEEN, New York premiere, London Sinfonetta; Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment; Anu Tali, conductor; (Also Suite from Surrogate Cities)
Much has changed for me since I first heard his Surrogate Cities at La Fenice six years ago (a text from Paul Auster's Manhattan apocalyptic sci-fi, about visual planes and rhythms of the subways and the Grand Canal). Nine months of recovering from a very severe attack of acute neurinits and chronic vertigo have made ambient sounds very distinct for me: it's all real music now. The world really does sound like this, and everyday life is just as emotionally charged and dissonant as Heiner Goebbels' musical imagination.
La Fenice
But then the boundaries of the subject (self) are just as precarious or tenuous as for the protagnonist of Eraritjaritjaka (2006 Rose Theatre). And the memories of what is human are just as transitory as the earliest recorded music of Oceanic aboriginals of Stifters Dinge (2010 Park Avenue Armory). These are all dramatic poetries of our lives that “normal” ignores!
Stifter's Dinge
It is uncanny that this work, Songs, four years after its London premiere—four years worse on—should premiere in our city on the very eve of Obama (today) proudly boasting of our “third war” in America's simultaneous, permanent, illegal wars.
Here in Songs the texts excerpted, Gertrude Stein's Wars I Have Seen (1945), still ring true:
"History doesn't teach ...Theorbo soliloquy"What countries say, is …"No one believes the lies broadcast by government radios, they'd rather believe village rumours they know are lies ...”
But now
something is very different :
there will never again be an "after-war" as Stein's narrating women here imagined.
Never and forever.
These are among the vilest, most insulting program notes I have ever been handed:
"His egalitarian approach to these diverse sonic elements has yielded music that is eclectic and unpredictable in the best postmodern way."... Political themes remain an important creative concern, but their expression has grown generally more subtle and complex over the years."... But the music these movements embody is a far cry from the neo-Baroque pastiches of Stravinsky's Pulcinella or Ravel's Le Tombeau de Couperin."...the Air has a gentle lyricism that Handel brought to movements bearing that title."... The work concludes with a rhapsodic trumpet solo played against an irridescent texture of electronic drones and chime tones, these last created by the orchestra members playing antique cymbals. The effect is unearthly and almost heartbreakingly melancholy."
All of these statements are conspicuously false: layer upon layer.
These notes, like American television, or the New York Times, make the mandatory demand:
LET US “CONTEXTUALIZE” THIS FOR YOU!
YOU ARE SAFER IF WE THINK FOR YOU!
YOU ARE SAFER IF WE THINK FOR YOU!
