Chapter 4

‘It’s all part of one concern’: A ‘Keynote’ to Composition as Staging

Heiner Goebbels

Keynotes suggest that you have the key to something. And all the questions which have been raised in the editors’ proposal for this publication are indeed questions at the centre of what I am doing as a director and a composer. But the unconscious truly rules at the centre of an artistic work, so one does not really know exactly what one is doing and that’s fine – sometimes. And especially when it is fine, you no longer need to ask for an explanation. Hence my problems when defining the mostly unconscious relationship between composing and directing.

Composing as a director

In the past I used to answer the question about the relationship between composing and directing by taking advantage of both professions in order to get a creative distance towards the other medium: composing as a director, directing as a composer.

In the first case I compare my process of composition with what I have experienced to be a director’s work (in collaborations with such directors as Ruth Berghaus or Matthias Langhoff or Hans Neuenfels or Claus Peymann). A good director discovers the personalities, talents and creativity of the performers and organises the process in a way which relates to the drama. For my process as a composer it means: not having the score ready, but working with musicians from a very early stage, to invite them for improvisations, being attentive to the options they propose as musicians; ready to discover what else they can offer, which are the unique qualities of the individual musicians or of an orchestra or an ensemble.

I collect those experiences, biographies, characters, options and bring them together in a compositional process, which will be a very precise score in the end – my works are never improvised finally – but as a method of research on material an experimental improvisation is the best possible tool.

Songs of Wars I Have Seen, for example, a composition which was performed in April 2009 in London by the London Sinfonietta and the Orchestra in the Age of Enlightenment, was very much dedicated to the personalities of the musicians; not only, because in this composition the (female) musicians were asked to speak texts by Gertrude Stein during the performance of the music, but also because of the way they were able to treat their instruments.

In an ideal process I try to compose like a director, who is able to discover and develop (and not to oppress) the qualities and the options, which come up with the individual performers he works with. I never start with a complete musical vision or score.

Directing as a composer

On the other side, I direct like a composer: I work very formally and consider theatre as a very musical process. I firmly believe in the musical space of an aesthetic experience and rather think about the rhythm of scenes, the harmonic or contrapuntal relationship of the theatrical elements and the different levels between a ‘visual’ and an ‘acoustic’ stage. Once I have chosen the text I reflect the sound of a language– the sound in different languages, the rhythm, the melody of a spoken text.

Just recently I saw an early film by Rainer Werner Fassbinder on television: Die Bitteren Tränen der Petra von Kant (The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant). I was stunned by the musicality of the speech of Hanna Schygulla, just spoken speech without any music or any other sound. If it had not been midnight and I had not already been in bed, I would have tried to notate the pitch of the language. It was so purely and beautifully musical. She pitched her speech like singing.

That is how I listen to language, especially to languages I do not understand, while working with French actors, with Greek, African, Japanese or English musicians. It enables me to discover the musical quality of a spoken text.

I also work on the polyphony of the media, their contrapuntal function and look for the rhythm of a performance, the chords of the colours – since colours also have a very strong acoustic resonance when they come to life.

The best way to define a musical approach on theatre is to be conscious about form, to undertake research on forms. It doesn’t mean it is formal – forms always mean something, forms always have a very strong impact on our perception, more perhaps than the perspective reduced to semantics and topics. The idea of a ‘form’ can be very rich and open and does not have to not be reduced to ‘symmetry’, ‘repetition’ or ‘rhythm’. In particular, the German theatre in the second half of the twentieth century has ignored the ‘formal’ approach and the institutions for the education of actors, as far as I know them, do not provide much training in form for the young students either. They speak about topics, characters, psychology, figures, and ‘Einfühlung’ [empathy] instead. Through this ignorance of form, I think we are very much in danger of being constantly and unconsciously influenced by the quasi ‘natural’ form, which consists of the professional conventions. There are so many conventional habits in body language, in expressive gestures, in speech training, in ‘that’s, how we do it’. But in order to avoid being a victim of the conventional, ‘natural’ idea of theatre any form is helpful: we know this from the work of directors like Einar Schleef, Bob Wilson, Michael Thalheimer and others. And most of these ‘forms’ come either from the visual arts or from music. In the last thirty years, theatre has been influenced most by composers or by painters or by choreographers – not as much by theatre directors in the centre of this discipline.

Bob Wilson: ‘It’s all part of one concern’

Bob Wilson is a set designer, a lighting designer, a painter and visual artist, a sound designer, a playwright, a performer, a director of operas and theatre; he is even a furniture designer, an architect, a collector of arts, a video artist and also a designer of exhibitions. He was once asked what these different disciplines mean to him. And – as the reader may know he is a man of few words – he said: “It’s all part of one concern.”

He did not explain what that means, but you may find clarity in his aesthetic approach of reduction, of clarity, of minimalism, of creating a space for the imagination in all those disciplines. At the same time it is evident that he never mixes these different elements. He insists on a total separation of elements and separates each element from all the others. He separates the movements from the language – because his performers do not do what they speak about, or if they do they do not do it in a naturalistic but in a very formal or aesthetic way. He separates the language from the bodies – because the performer’s voices are never heard in a direct way, they’re picked up with little microphones and amplified by speakers, and consequently the sound never reaches the spectators in a direct communication. He separates the bodies from each other – by creating different light zones on stage, with which he can create a distance even between people who are standing next to each other. He even fragments the different parts of the performer’s body – by focussing the light so precisely that an isolated hand or head or shoe of a performer can start to tell the story.

It is indeed surprising for somebody who says ‘it’s all part of one concern’ to separate all those individual disciplines and create such a space in between – which is so fundamental and so essential for our imagination.

Romeo Castellucci: ‘I don’t make a difference’

Romeo Castellucci is an Italian director, for example he directed the Dante trilogy at the Avignon Festival 2008 –a trilogy which is so rich in sound, in images, so powerful in its performance, in the experience for the audience especially because there is hardly a word of Dante to be heard. All topics and motifs have been translated into other media: into sound, video, light, images, and the use of space, dogs and children. In an interview with Theater der Zeit he said:

I don’t notice these different art forms so much as different or distinctive languages. Of course they are different disciplines in which I work […], but I don’t make a difference for example with regard to the visual arts; for me there is no contradiction between theatre and visual arts.

(Castellucci 2008: 17)

And with respect to music he added:

Sounds are truly carrying a form already; they don’t accompany a form; they are a form themselves and in this way and this mode they are directly dramatic.

When you do not exclude the visual imagination of sounds, they create spaces, they create colours, but you have to be careful not to put everything on top of each other. In conventional ways of directing opera very often the directors do not create any space for the form which lays within the music itself; instead, they superimpose ideas and ideas and images up to a degree where the imagination of the listener and the viewer is collapsing, because there is no space left.

My early experiments with stage concerts were dedicated to the idea of developing a format of performing art, in which the music comes to its best presentation inspiring the imagination – to develop exactly, what Romeo Castellucci describes with music already having a form by itself and not only illustrating something.

Anything, which comes late, can only ever be illustrative

“What came first, what were the important steps, at what point did musical ideas come in and how did they impact on the theatrical realisation?”1 With regards to conventional production methods, in an institutional production of theatre or music theatre anything which comes late in the process is only going to be illustrative; it does not have the power to change anything else which has already been established during the rehearsal period. When the original light is set up in the last three days of a production you can only light what is already there, you cannot change the staging by means of the light anymore.

That is why I work with all elements from the very first moment. I work with light, sound, and amplification. Even when there is no audience I amplify as if there was, because the amplification is a force in itself, sound design is an art form in itself, and I never would accept a rehearsal, where this has been just ignored and somebody says ‘we do not need it yet’. It changes the way you speak on stage when a microphone is amplifying this for a potential audience of 500 or 1000 people. So I rehearse with the microphone from the very first moment just like I rehearse with the light and with everything else. I respect those elements as artistic partners and forces, not just as tools.

“At what point did musical ideas come into the play?”

You could expect from a composer to bring in the music quite early in the process. But because once I have established such a working method, and established a flexible way in which the whole team (the technical, the visual, the acoustic team and the performers) proceed, I tend to be very open for a long time, things can even come late, because we start early: the first very early rehearsal period happens one year before the premiere, for three to five days.

I do not have a complete vision of a piece when I start it. I have a question. But looking back at this working method, which I developed and employed over the last fifteen years, most of the things which you see in my pieces (in Ou bien le débarquement désastreux, Schwarz auf Weiss, The repetition, in Eraritjaritjaka, Hashirigaki or in Landscape With Distant Relatives and also in my recent pieces Stifters Dinge and I Went to the House But Did Not Enter) most of the things you see – not hear, but see – are created in the first three or four days of these experimental workshops, where everybody can ‘sort of ’ do what he or she wants. If I would have the music already written before these early workshops I would set the music as a priority. I definitely do not want to do this.

In these first periods of production I even work with ‘blind music’ or ‘blind texts’. It has been said about Fellini that he shot some of his films like this. Because he had not written the text yet he asked the actors just to count numbers – “Quarant‘uno, quaranta due, quaranta tre!!!” – and it was only later that he wrote the text and synchronised it with the images. When I improvise with an ensemble I ask them to play something they have in their repertoire. Then I notice which register of music is interesting, who is moving in which way while playing the music, or maybe I already have an idea about the character of music I ask for – starting with the question what impression does a certain energy create in this costume and in this light together with this stage at this very moment.

I never would stage a piece, if I knew already how it would work. I really want to be surprised by the process, surprised by my team, surprised by the result.

At what point did musical ideas come into play? On a conscious level, probably very late, unconsciously it might be there already. It might already be part of the question with which I start. It might be there as a temperature. It might be there as a reaction to the first sketches of the set designer or the first ideas of the material and colour in the space we rehearse. Consciously it does not come too early.

“What is the relationship between music and the elements of performance?”

Let me explain that with Stifter’s Dinge, a performative installation piece with five pianos and without any performer on stage. There are the three water tanks, three water basins, and in the background five pianos, metal sheets, pipes and tree trunks and everything is being handled or played by machines. There is even a stone which is dragged by an engine to create stone grinding sounds. All sounds except some bodiless voices are created in the performance at the very moment. In one specific scene you hear the sound of a shutter of light. The light has (with the sound of its shutter) a musical function. At the same time you hear a recording with the voices of Indians in Papua Guinea; an incantation for the southwest winds. The light actually reacts musically and visually to the voices and works as a punctuation of the scene.

Let me describe how we created this: I had a keyboard, which was designed by my friend and colleague Hubert Machnik as an interface to all the engines (via MAX MSP) On this keyboard I could control nearly everything in a musical way: one key to set the stone in motion, another key to move the stone backwards. F sharp was used to make it go faster and G sharp stopped it. Another key was used to start the rain, one for the light shutter to go on and off, etc. and all that in addition to providing the musical access to the mechanical pianos.

This made it possible to work in a musical way, composing the visual, the space and the sound elements from this keyboard. A keyboard was used to direct like a composer. Probably this musical approach represents a way of working, probably all these decisions (when to emphasise a light or when to move something) go through my body as a director as much as they went through my body as a keyboard player in the rehearsals of this piece.

I did music theatre before the keyboard. But it allows you to do things rather uncontrolledly or to let your body (as a composer/director) react to a material or an image. I savour this option of working unconsciously after a long period of conceptional work. And the biggest advantage of working with a team since ten, fifteen, twenty years ago is: you don’t have to speak. You speak a lot in advance and hopefully come up with clever and intelligent concepts, but it’s very important that you have the space and the option and the confidence in the team to react and create directly without explaining. And everybody has that in my team, including the sound engineer or the costume designer: she can just go on stage during the rehearsal and put a hat on the actor; or the set designer can go on stage and move things or lights around while I work with the actors or with the musicians. We have a completely different, concentrated but also relaxed way of trying things out. And after maybe a certain period of irritation in the beginning, everybody notices, that this is a much more pleasant and open way, more open to inspirations for everybody, than the hysterical silence in the authoritarian way of directing.

With regard to the relationship between music and the other elements of the performance let me refer to a specific scene of the music theatre piece called Eraritjaritjaka – with a string quartet and one actor, with texts of Elias Canetti from his notebooks and Crowds and Power (1960). It is a moment when the actor leaves the stage and is being followed by a video camera and the image is projected on the backdrop of the stage. The actor is leaving the theatre, goes through the foyer to a car and is being driven through the city towards his apartment. As soon as he enters the apartment, the string quartet is starting to play a string quartet by Maurice Ravel – the only string quartet by Maurice Ravel – live on stage.

It is a very important decision for the success of this work and the special attraction of this video/movie sequence that it is made only with one hand camera following the actor for about forty minutes. But for this movie we also reversed the relationship between music and action. When you think of the conventional relationship between film and music you never have the music as the starting point. We are used to the fact that the music is there to underline images, enforce emotions and illustrate moods, prepare tension etc. (The same is true for most of the music on stage by the way). This habit, this one-way-relationship between music and film / sound and film (or music and theatre) has been industrialised by the film industry. And what Adorno and Hanns Eisler wrote in an early piece of research on this phenomenon is still substantial now, seventy years later.

The prerequisite of melody is that the composer be independent, in the sense that his selection and invention relate to situations that supply specific lyric-poetic inspiration. This is out of the question where the motion picture is concerned. All music in the motion picture is under the sign of utility, rather than lyric expressiveness. Aside from the fact that lyric-poetic inspiration cannot be expected from the composer for the cinema, this kind of inspiration would contradict the embellishing and subordinate function that industrial practice still enforces on the composer. Moreover, the problem of melody as ‘poetic’ is made insoluble by the conventionality of the popular notion of melody. Visual action in the motion picture has of course a prosaic irregularity and asymmetry. It claims to be photographed life; and as such every motion picture is a documentary. As a result, there is a gap between what is happening on the screen and the symmetrically articulated conventional melody. A photographed kiss cannot actually be synchronized with an eight-bar phrase.

(Adorno/Eisler 2007 [1947]: 4)

We tried to put the relationship Adorno and Eisler describe here on its head in a way, in that the music was actually in first place to develop the film. So once the actor enters his apartment, you hear the string quartet of Maurice Ravel and whatever he does for the next thirty or forty minutes is staged, bar by bar, following Ravel’s score. When the actor enters his apartment and starts opening and reading letters and the newspaper and peeling onions and cooking scrambled eggs and sorting through his laundry, watching TV and doing lots of everyday things, we did not try to find an appropriate music afterwards to accompany that; we try to provide him and his structure of movements and activities a sort of musical energy and tried to follow the musical form, one which is driven by aesthetic compositional aspects. This also means ‘directing as a composer’ (here like Maurice Ravel). The camera movements, the framing of moments, images and situations – all have been developed by following the score and its dynamics.

“Are you working on your own or with a group? How do you negotiate results, ways to go on, selection of materials etc.? Who is taking the decisions?” I have been collaborating strongly with a set designer for more than ten years, with a costume designer as well, with a sound designer for nearly twenty years now, and actually even with the same technical team at the same theatre, Théâtre Vidy in Switzerland, since 1998. I do not have a complete vision of the piece, but I always have a starting point and great confidence that I can share this starting point or initial question with my team so that they can start working independently. The sound designer, the set and lighting designer, develop their own autonomous languages during the process towards the creation.

‘It’s up to you!’

Brecht once wrote a letter to Hanns Eisler sending him a poem, which he wanted him to set to music. It was completely striking for me that Brecht left certain questions, even questions regarding the text form, to Hanns Eisler, saying: ‘it’s up to you!’ And this ‘it’s up to you!’ is a very important attitude, with which I respect my team. I raise certain questions and try to trust in what the others think about them in the context of their artistic disciplines as they translate them into their medium.

References

Adorno, Theodor and Eisler, Hanns (2007 [1947]) Composing for the Films, New York/London: Continuum.

Castellucci, Romeo (2008) “Das Haus muss brennen. Romeo Castellucci im Gespräch mit Lena Schneider und Frank Raddatz”, Theater der Zeit, 09/2008, pp. 16–20.

Note

1. The following sub-headings are cited from an early position paper by Matthias Rebstock and David Roesner, which formed part of the invitation to this publication and the series of workshops and presentations, which preceded it.