Chapter 5

‘Theatre in small quantities’: On Composition for Speech, Sounds and Objects

Michael Hirsch

When I was asked to reflect on the aspects of Composed Theatre within my own compositional work, I have to acknowledge, that I have not developed any coherent theory in this context. I do not even represent a particular genre or a clearly definable style of music theatre. Elements of Composed Theatre, or of theatrically conceived composing can be found in my work in the most diverse genres, forms and quantities. This ranges from the form of opera, which is quite rooted in its genre tradition, via different forms of experimental music theatre to instrumental chamber music, which nonetheless contains trace elements, as it were, of theatre. These may be integrated into the music by means of small actionist irritations or through a special, quasi-scenic constellation.

As I am going to demonstrate in the following, even musical genres which on the surface seem to lack any optical or scenic element as for example my speech compositions and even some of my tape music, contain strongly theatrical elements.

I wonder in this context why that might be. Why do theatrical elements keep sneaking into my pieces, even if I planned them as ‘absolute music’? One reason may well be that the dissolution of boundaries between the arts has become a natural achievement of the history of the arts of the twentieth and twenty-first century. Elements of music, visual arts, literature, film and theatre can be found in the installations of visual artists, in the performances of theatre practitioners as well as in contemporary music. Consequently, the reservoir of all art forms is open to a composer even when he writes a purely musically conceived piece of chamber music. A sound, a word, a gesture, a noise and an action then constitute a texture, that may be conceived purely musically, but is of a music-theatrical nature due to the diverse origins of its elements.

Speech composition

Speech composition is a particular form of dissolution of boundaries between the arts. At first sight, music that consists not of the sung but of the spoken word is hardly different to what has become known in the area of literature as ‘concrete poetry’. Fundamentally, it is primarily the composer’s self-image, which defines such a work of speech art as music and not as literature. But on close inspection, for example of the sound poems of Josef Anton Riedl, one can discover that they follow exclusively musical criteria. Their auditory gestus is entirely characterised by the sound world of both Riedl’s electronic music and percussion music however much they may appear to resemble the sound poems of literary authors. In my own Lieder nach Texten aus dem täglichen Leben [Songs after texts from real life] (1992– 95) those purely musical criteria are joined by an underlying semantic level, which keeps shimmering through or erupts. This composition for one speaker toys with the continuous oscillation between the semantic and the purely phonetic level of language. If one subtracts any semantic information from language, its musical potential comes to the forefront. Now, the Lieder nach Texten aus dem täglichen Leben are based on originally documentary materials, i.e. on entirely non-musical sources. Taped interviews, accidentally overheard or secretly recorded speech acts were transcribed in such a way, that the individual deviations from written language were advanced further and further and finally composed from a solely compositional angle into formal developments.

Elements of semantically intelligible language grow rampant from the thus developed abstract speech music, so that the act of listening sways back and forth between musical hearing to linguistic hearing, playing with comprehension and non-comprehension as well as with the boundaries between language and music.

Extra-musical reality manifests itself here in a twofold way: on the one hand through the fragments of the original material that remain intelligible, on the other – and this is the more significant aspect of this piece – through the moulds of individual intonations, that are musically portrayed here, which coagulate into musical form and become exaggerated through different levels of transformation.

I would like to use the original material of the first song, the transcript of a TV interview, to demonstrate my approach. The sister of a man, who gained notoriety in Germany by robbing a bank, followed by taking hostages and murder, spoke in a TV documentary about his childhood. She described psychological problems, which manifested themselves as speech impediments: “When he was embarrassed somehow he would begin to, like, stutter. […] he couldn’t say certain sentences: for ‘roll’ he would say ‘woll’”1 and so forth.

The first musical-compositional step started already when transcribing the interviews: I did not transcribe the sounds she made into correct speech – as one would normally do with an interview – by transcribing them into written language as accurately as possible and by omitting all mistakes, stutters or other deviations. On the contrary, I paid particular attention to any deviations from written language, and emphasised them by means of exaggeration. These could be deviations through dialect – in the case of this woman this was a dialect from the Rhineland. But there are also deviations, which are more difficult to define, that emerge from other irregularities of the speech act, such as distorted or drawled vowels due to a particularly emotional component. Or, words are being de-familiarised by sloppy speaking (e.g. ‘sumtames’ [‘meinchmer’] instead of ‘sometimes’ [‘manchmal’]). I have emphasised many of the minimal discolourations, which occur in speech involuntarily, by means of exaggeration. As an additional act of de-familiarisation I then, sometimes violently, removed the orthography from the written word. By combining such manipulations, a phonetic complexity such as ‘Whaenhesem BAArrassd sumhow’ [‘Wännerfa LEEJgnwaa Eeagnqui …’] emerged from the sentence “When he was embarrassed somehow …” [‘Wenn er verlegen war irgendwie …’]. In writing, the original sentence is barely recognisable at first sight. However, if one hears it presented acoustically, anyone who has a good command of German will certainly understand it. And he will probably even be able to identify the Rhineland dialect. For the notation of such transcripts I do not use the phonetic alphabet or any other objectifying characters, but limit myself to the material of the German written language. The text should be read according to German rules of pronunciation. Consequently, the piece can only be realised by a German-speaking performer. Beyond this, I have introduced a small number of additional indications: stressed syllables and sounds are emphasised by CAPITALisation, strongly stressed ones by putting them in BOLD. There are also staccato signs for sounds, which are meant to be articulated particularly short, and horizontal bars for more drawled sounds. Such techniques of transcription obviously do not render the documentary material of the interviews into a composition. The described liberties in the process of transcription certainly lead to some musical decisions. But the actual composition process only starts after that. With regard to this particular piece I decided to go for a very simple abstract manipulation: I read the whole transcribed text backwards and notated it. That does not mean that I simply put the letters back to front, but tried to make it phonetically exact, just as if one would play a tape in reverse. Just one example for this: the sound ‘t’ in German is aspirated, that is, the plosive ‘t’ is followed by a kind of ‘h’. So in the backward version the ‘t’ becomes a ‘h-t’.

The German word ‘stottern’ [to stutter] became ‘schtotan’ in the liberal transcription and ultimately, in its mirrored version, ‘naHHToHHTSCH’. (Here again, the duplication of the ‘H’s and the emphasis through capitalisation represent a conscious exaggeration, which results in a kind of laughing speech.)

I had two reservoirs of material now: on the one hand the liberal transcription, which for the (German-speaking) listener still contains reasonably comprehensible language. On the other hand the mirrored form, in which the material appears as an entirely abstract sound music. Hence the compositional work consisted in crossing the two levels of material and rendering them into a musical form.

Is such a speech composition ‘Composed Theatre’? I think it at least touches on aspects of it. Firstly, it is a composition by means of the theatre. A music for actors. In addition, those aspects, which transcend a purely musical perception, are certainly to be apportioned to the theatre rather than to literature. The semantics and characteristics of the language fragments are not recognisable in silent reading. It requires the interpretation by a speaker. Besides, the kind of transcription of the interviews focusses more on the individual diction of the person than the ‘literary’ content of the text. Consequently, Lieder nach Texten aus dem täglichen Leben are small character portraits, which continue to shine through the abstractly musical sound world of the linguistic phonemes.

As an aside I should mention that my temporary preoccupation with speech compositions like these also has biographical reasons: other than being a composer, I have continually worked as an actor and speaker. It therefore suggested itself that I should also write pieces which unite these activities with my compositional work. So I wrote those pieces for myself as the interpreter. Nonetheless I tried to notate them in such a way that they could be realised by other interpreters without my assistance (which has since happened).

The Lieder nach Texten aus dem täglichen Leben are admittedly an exception within my work insofar as they are the only piece for an entirely unaccompanied speaker. Normally, I have combined speech with other musical means, be it instrumental music or musique concrète.

My piece Hirngespinste, eine nächtliche Szene [Woolgathering, a nocturnal scene] is an example for the combination of instrumental music and speech composition. Hirngespinste is a composition for two players with accordion. One of the players is an accordionist, his part was written for Teodoro Anzellotti, the other is an actor, his part was created for Robert Podlesny. Both parts are not synchronised with each other with the exception of a few points of coordination. In the separate scores the notation corresponds with the respective profession of the player in question: the musician’s part is fixed in traditional musical notation whereas the actor’s part consists of a small collection of stage directions and a speech composition.

By casting the two players’ parts with a musician and an actor the elements of theatre and music are separately juxtaposed. Accordingly, the function of the accordion is different for both players. The musician uses it exclusively as a musical instrument while the actor uses it as an extension and amplification of his body by translating his own breathing into movement of the accordion bellows. Through the interaction of the two performers a musical scene is created, which is not explicitly music theatre since it lacks a decidedly scenic component, but which transcends the expressive ambit of pure instrumental music. In addition to the concretely physical and psychological expression of one part and the absolute musical character of the other, there is a semi-scenic constellation: the players sit in profile to the audience, back to back. For the audience this constellation creates the image of a singular figure with its mirror image in its back. Thereby both parts are able to rub off their respective characters on to each other, in a manner of speaking. As different, even contrary as they are in structure and material, they coalesce to a single dramatic figure, which they represent in different aspects.

The poetic starting point is a kind of dream or sleep situation (hence the subtitle ‘a nocturnal scene’). This is admittedly only a vague point of reference, from which a cocoon of musical chains of associations develops. Adhering to the principle of the associative chain the composition relinquishes any stringent, logical, cohesive material. The composition process occasionally resembles the kind of ‘automatic writing’ undertaken in literature by the Surrealists. In addition, the composition was conceived through a number of approaches in that the fragments which were written first were photocopied, pasted together anew as modular components and finally overwritten with further material. The speech composition of the actor’s part developed in a similar process of aggregation in several approaches. An initial unconscious murmur develops into a kind of dream language accompanied by the actor at first with the air noise of the bellows, eventually also with sounds from the accordion.

Later I developed the text material from Hirngespinste in a piece called Dialog [Dialogue]. This is a duo for two speakers, who are accompanied by an installation of small CD-players, which play a musique concrète rich in associations.

Musique concrète

Musique concrète continues to play a significant part in my work, most often in combination with other genres. Even though it is merely played through a set of loudspeakers, it still has a strong theatrical aspect for me. Corresponding with Dieter Schnebel’s notion of ‘visible music’ one might introduce the notion of ‘audible theatre’ here. This applies in particular when it is possible to recognise at least partially where the sounds stem from originally. Here a similar phenomenon to the one I demonstrated using the example of my speech composition ensues: this iridescence between recognition and non-recognition, between the quasi-semantic contents of a sound and its abstract-acoustic appearance. The affinity to the theatrical in my musique concrète works results in particular from the fact that most often they deal with noise material that is clearly the outcome of a physical action. Usually it consists neither of electronically generated sounds nor static soundscapes, but predominantly of material sounds which depict things in motion: rolling balls, dropping objects, burrowing, shaking and crumpling sound actions, which often have been recorded in a kind of studio performance and were edited only to such a degree that the actionist background was still clearly identifiable.

Such acoustic action can even have an immediate emotional expressiveness in which a unique theatricality is inherent: the sound of bursting glass for example has a quite unmistakable effect, immediately evoking the concrete action of throwing, smashing, destroying, and thus takes an urgent gestural shape by purely acoustic means. Nonetheless, musique concrète is – when it is not in combination with other genres – purely tape music. (I use the expression ‘tape music’ even if tapes are no longer used today, but other storage media such as CDs or hard drives instead). As tape music it is in turn more remote from the performative character of the theatre than most other genres. Hence there is the inevitable problem of how to present musique concrète: any performance of music when realised by musicians on stage always has a certain ‘performative’ character, which enhances the immediate experience of the music for the listener through his empathy with the performing musician. Any concertgoer will always look for a seat from which he can see the musicians. Staring at loudspeakers in performances of tape music is always unsatisfactory. This is why I usually add a scenic live-performance to my finished tape music pieces. This is how my piece Duo came into being: by juxtaposing the small study in musique concrète with a small musical scene for two performers on stage as an optical counterpart. Here, the rather marginal acoustic actions of these performers serve as connecting links to the actual composition, which comes from a CD through a set of speakers.

In my 1. Studie [1. Study] from Das Konvolut, Vol. 2 the musique concrète is confronted with a group of five performers which seem to do little more than the audience, namely listening. Their mere presence on stage however makes them stage characters. In addition, certain tensions and relationships are evoked by means of the given constellation of the group and by some minimal physical actions. Hence this scenic aspect of the performance hangs in the balance between being a mere projection surface for the listening audience or the nucleus for a potential theatrical action.

My open music-theatre piece Beschreibung eines Kampfes [Description of a Fight] (based on Kafka) began with a piece of tape music to which I added a small acoustic-scenic performance. This then developed further and further until it grew to a full music-theatre project. Usually I use musique concrète as a playback tape in other pieces. Particularly in opera and music-theatre projects I used the associative richness of this genre to afford the theatre with an additional atmospheric space. One might call this an ‘acoustic set design’. In my opera Das Stille Zimmer [The Silent Room] the musique concrète is integrated into the composition for singers, actors and orchestra as an eight-channel-playback. This opera on the whole was an attempt to form a unity out of different forms of music and theatre. The cast of singers and actors confronted opera with ‘straight’ theatre. The actors’ parts contain both ‘normal’ theatre and experimental speech compositions. Again the orchestral part is enriched by elements from the musique concrète level, which at times also stands alone autonomously. This approach takes opera, as the most encompassing of all art forms, as a starting point. Basically any aesthetic means of expression can be integrated into this form. Even though the pathos of Wagner’s notion of the ‘Gesamtkunstwerk’ [‘total work of art’] seems dated, its essential core, the great potential of opera as an art form, remains current when it is scrutinised and renewed with the achievements of more recent art forms.

Konvolut2

Combinations of different, even diverging aesthetic elements play an important part in my work, not just in grand opera, but also in the smaller projects. Quickly then, the question of the most suitable form of notation for such heterogeneous elements of different provenance suggests itself. If one is to notate all levels in a score that synchronises everything, one has to also notate non-musical material by and large in traditional musical notation. Mauricio Kagel, for example, often notates the steps and movements of the performers in rhythms similar to a drum part. Similarly, spoken language is often notated rhythmically. Personally, I prefer notating non-musical elements at first with other means, which are more compatible with their own potential. In particular, spoken language has an inner wealth that is impossible to translate into traditional musical notation. If one wants to realise the complex and largely unconsciously uttered rubato of spoken languages even just approximately into written notation, the resulting score would be so rhythmically complicated that it would overwhelm musicians too, not just the usually musically untrained actor. Hence I notate language solely with alphabetic letters and a few additional signs. Some complementary performance notes enable the actor to savour the natural wealth of speech rhythms even in musically abstract speech compositions.

Likewise, I feel that the elements of theatrical action and scenic play can hardly be integrated into a musically notated score without significant losses. Here I prefer verbal instructions or descriptions of working processes, which are meant to lead to a scenic result. The electro-acoustic level of the musique concrete, finally, has its own, distinct form of documentation in the pre-recorded CD, which is entirely detached from the score.

As a consequence, this diversity of notational forms means that the conventional form of the score, in which all parts are synchronised in a way that can instantly be grasped, is no longer sufficient for my music-theatrical projects. This is why I use a form that I call ‘Konvolut’. The Konvolut is a collection of documents and notes. The Konvolut as an alternative to the score enables the co-existence of conventionally notated compositions with concept pieces, verbal scores and stage directions. Verbally defined models for improvisation, electro- acoustic compositions on CD, scenic actions and self-contained compositions notated in traditional scores as well as pieces with mixed forms of notation are being composed into a macrostructure in a kind of meta-polyphony. The synchronisation happens through an individually devised system of cues. According to each project a unique balance between dependency and independency of the levels arises.

From time to time I work on a project in which the initially pragmatic choice of the Konvolut form becomes the topic of the project itself. Presumably there will not be any fixed notion of genre for the future final product, since the weighting of the genres will shift constantly within it. As a whole it will probably be ascribed as music-theatre. I am talking about a work complex, which is meant to encompass a yet indefinite number of ‘Volumina’ [volumes] under the heading ‘Das Konvolut’. These will be self-contained singular pieces as well as amount to an extensive, full-length music-theatre piece when performed together. The title ‘Das Konvolut’ describes both the form of the project as a whole, as well as the form of the individual volumes. Hence, Volumina 1-3 do not consist of self-contained scores but are also designed in a Konvolut form themselves.

Volumen 1, written for the Kammerensemble Neue Musik Berlin commissioned by the Berliner Festspiele (MaerzMusik 2002), consists of several autonomous pieces, which run simultaneously in a total time of twelve minutes. There is the monodrama Opera für eine Sängerin und CD-Zuspielung [Opera for female singer and CD playback]. This is a small opera in its utmost reduction, as it were. The function of the orchestra is held by a small CD player with small active stereo speakers positioned next to the singer. The singer’s stage is the table at which she is seated. The monodrama consists of a twelve-minute sequence of very short numbers, entitled with ‘scene’, ‘recitativ’ or ‘aria’ respectively. The phonetic material for the singer’s part is taken from opera seria libretti by Metastasio.

Simultaneously to this a piece is performed called Improvisation für große Trommel und CD-Zuspielung [Improvisation for bass drum and CD playback] in which the percussionist develops a dialogue with his CD track. The 21 Stücke für Piccolo-Flöte und Es-Klarinette [21 Pieces for Piccolo and E Clarinet] and the five parts of the Streichtrio [String Trio] establish a traditional chamber musical level within Volumen 1, while the Improvisation für Tuba [Improvisation for Tuba] finally represents more of a scenic-atmospheric reflex towards the total event. The CD playback that belongs to the singer and the other CD, which is in dialogue with the percussionist, are composed in such a way, that they not only serve as an accompaniment for the monodrama and dialogue partner for the drum part, but also result in an autonomous electro-acoustic composition in combination with a third, self-contained CD: a six-channel-composition, then, spread over three stereo CDs and characterised with a certain blurriness due to the approximate concurrence of their entries. The coordination of the performers and CD players, which are dispersed in space, is controlled by a loose system of a few acoustic signals.

The acoustic layer provided by the three spatially dispersed CDs emanating from three sets of active stereo speakers sets up a compositional web, which the other instrumental, vocal and theatrical elements are woven into and relate to each other in various ways. This is because even the parts which are performed live – however different the may have been designed in material and form of notation – have (in contrast to Cage’s simultaneous pieces) been conceptualised from the beginning in relation to each other and attuned to each other in various ways with regard to their dramaturgy and tonality. Hence the simultaneity achieved is situated in a field of tension between an autonomy of synchronously running structures on the one hand and a compositional plan on the other, which has always envisioned the sum of these structures as a whole, despite their autonomy.

Volumen 1 will have to be performed as a kind of overture in the foyer of the theatre in a full production of Das Konvolut. The spatial arrangement of the different levels in a foyer adds a further aspect to the simultaneity: the total result takes shape in different ways depending on where one is situated as an audience member. If one decides to stand next to the singer for the whole duration of the piece, one will predominantly experience a scenic monodrama with instrumental accompaniment. If one finds oneself nearer to the percussionist, one would perceive the event more as a solo concert for percussion and chamber ensemble, in which the singer is merely integrated as an added timbre, etc.

The different aesthetic elements, out of which this first ‘Volume n’ of the Konvolut is constructed, are not at least sketches, which can be developed further in various ways in forthcoming volumes.

Volumen 2 of the Konvolut is a sequence of small music-theatrical sketches or studies, while Volumen 3 contains amongst other things a veritable opera – my thirteen-minute long La Didone abbandonata. Volumen 1–3 could – according to my current plans – be the first part of the final project. Then there would be an interval, during which Volumen 4 could be played: this part is a pure noise composition for percussionists and CDs entitled Holzstück I–IV [Wood Piece I–IV]. Like the opening Volumen 1 this volume could be performed in the foyer. The ensuing second part of the evening (presumably Volumen 5–7) is not even at a conceptual stage. So we are talking about a work in progress, which is completely open ended. Its dramaturgy thus corresponds to the chosen form of documentation and notation of the ‘Konvolut’. Where and to what extent this is going to grow unchecked is entirely open at this stage.

(Translation: David Roesner)

Note

1. “Wenn er verlegen war irgendwie, fing er auch an zu stottern, oder so. […] Er konnte manche Sätze nicht sagen: Für ‘Brötchen’ hat er dann ‘Brönnchen’ gesagt”.

2. The German word ‘Konvolut’, from lat. Convolutum = ‘rolled up’ has no direct equivalent in English. It refers to a bundle of different heterogeneous documents, which may consist of different media (note from the translator).