Hayner Göbbels. "Aesthetics of absence"

On October 7, 9, 10, and 11, the Stanislavsky Electric Theater represents the prime minister of Hayner Göbbels “Max Black, or 62 ways to support his head with his hand” - an outstanding German composer and the director debuts a new version of the production released in 1998 at the Swiss Theater of Vidy Lausanne . To the premiere of the performance in the publishing series “Stanislavsky” “Theater and its Diary” is the book of the chosen texts of Göbbels “Aesthetics of the absence”, which first published in Germany in 2012 and translated into Russian Olga Fedyanina. The first publication of the fragment of “aesthetics of absence” publishers of the Russian version kindly granted Colta.ru.

Letters

Schwarz auf Weiss / black in white

Beethoven was completely deaf,
He thought all the way that he was drawing.
( Harald Schmidt )

In the Romanian writer Choran, we find the following record: “I could express everything that excites me if I was delivered from shame not to be a musician” [1] . It still did not occur to me, and most likely I would have expressed myself less tough, but nevertheless: with me, it is probably the opposite. It is too obvious in my works the presence of writers and the fact that I always leave a place for them.

So, my first ensemble composition “La jalousie” (“blinds/jealousy”) has a subtitle “The noise of one novel”. The performance begins and ends with the rustle of paper (perhaps this is the sound of a letter unfolded) and is dedicated to the Nouveau Roman, Alena Rob-Griye.

And one of my musical performances, the premiere of which took place in the fall of 2000, is called “Hashirigaki” (“Hasirigaki”). This is a Japanese word, and it means something like “write in passing” or “record on the go”. About Tikamatsu, who is called Shakespeare of Japan, they say that he, returning from Pirushka, received an urgent order to write a play about a double murder that had just happened, and began to write on the way home, still sitting in the wagon: the play begins with a road recitative, the first word of which is “Khasirigaki”. This means that the process of text emergence becomes part of the play itself.

The texts for my production, however, did not appear from Japan, but were taken from Gertrude Styin, it is like a little other author - allows the reader to take part in the process of writing, observation, thoughts and thereby turning this process into a topic. This especially applies to the novel of the century “ The MAKING of Americans ” : with its almost 1000 pages of rehearsal prose, it is considered almost unreadable, but in it you can find such excellent passages as the following:

There Are Very Many People Being Living. Certainly Very Many Come Together to See Solaring, To Do SoMething, To Hear Someting, To See See See Soeh, To See Hear SoMething, To See Do Someting, To Hear Some See SoometHing, To Hear Soome Do SoMething, To Hear Some Hear Someting <...> [2] .

In my musical production, which is unequivocal name “Schwarz Auf Weiss” (“black and white”), I still do not understand why in numerous interviews they constantly ask the question of the meaning of this name - there are three parts called “Writings” ( “Writings I” , “Writins II” and “Writings III” ). As in some of the performances staged before, a clear, first pure, and then transformed sound of a pencil on paper, is periodically arise here - sometimes live, sometimes from sampler, sometimes from the disk.

In the “Die Wiederholung” (“Repetition”) on the texts and motives of Seen Kierkegaard, Alena Rob-Griye and the Prince in the first fifteen minutes, the spectator sees:

< ...> At first, from the back of a person sitting at a desk in the middle of a brightly lit scene <...> the hands are not visible, although the position of the body of the seated allows us to assume: the left lies on the scattered sheets of paper, the right holds the pen, which in a minute of thought depended on the unfinished text. Books lie on both sides [3] .

It may seem that in my productions for the most part, single men are sitting at written tables and thus illustrate my own method of work. Both are not true. The production sometimes really begins, but this method of work is exotic for me and I am completely alien to me. Instead of musical paper and pointed pencil, computers, sampler, phone, disks, hard drives, CDs and thick books surround me. So, it seems, my own remoteness from poetic solitude awakens my fantasy.

And, perhaps, for many writers, it is also not what was once. Gertrude Stein claims: “To write for the theater means that everything that happens in the process of writing is included in the text. If you write prose, you can sit and write, but you can’t write a drama while sitting. This is more bodily language than prose " [4] . And Alexander Klyiga tells about Hainer Mueller: “He is Motorik. When he writes, his whole body is involved. He stands at the book remote control. He pounds on the keys of his iron typewriter, a very loud machine. And so - motor - its texts are created " [5] .

Such motor skills, not only for texts, but also for music, is no less integral to bodily, and this is the reason why I, instead of sitting motionlessly before musical paper, prefer to engage in composition in direct interaction with sounds and instruments. Acoustic and optical references to the writing process in my works only indicate that it is already my structural method for a long time: I often develop a musical form based on the first of all for the considerations of the musical composition - rather, the composer impulse comes from the structure, architecture of the text. Music is acutely necessary for structural impulses from other types of art, if we want to get out of the cycle of self -loving, in which we constantly compose music about music with high -meter syntax of serial musical systems - until only the musicians themselves begin to listen to all this.

In my radio shows, many of which are built on the basis of the texts of Heiner Müller, I just try to make a linguistic syntactic structure audible - sometimes in the literal sense, that is, to make punctuation, and thus, make this structure transparent for the listener. The fact that this method is especially fruitful with Müller's texts has its own reasons, which I will explain separately.

So, the texts often supply me with creative impulses, moreover, it is very noticeable (and can become the composer’s envy subject), how much writers have the opportunity to focus on themselves and their writers. First of all, at its fear of a clean sheet of white paper. (For me, even at the main conductor of the Berlin Philharmonic, Sir Simon Rattla, there was no consolation: from my fear of ordering a musical composition, he dismissed that the composers have not so white and empty, at least five lines have always there.) Allan in, for example, this fear embodies a terrible vision at the end of the story of Arthur Gordon Pima: a huge creation with skin, “white as snow”; Later, it will again arise in the “Monologer in the elevator” by Heiner Muller: another “with my face from the snow”. Already in ancient Greek poetry ants, black as ink, "allegorically take the place of letters" [6] . Despite everything, this abstract tells us something far beyond the limits of individual conditions of creative production. So, for example, in “ Bildbeschreibung ” (“Description of the picture”) Hayner Müller, where the killer’s knife “writes” and where he, with the help of a metaphor of “lazy pencil” and “poorly executed barbell,” tries to express the difficulty of a reliable text statement. Or at the end, where the text tries to gain imaginary certainty in the wording “I am a bird that with the font of its beak indicates the killer the road into night” [7] .

True, ultimately, the texts that give impulses of my work are not texts written for the stage, not dramatic texts, but much more likely - a fragment of prose or, more often, diaries (that is, still “writtenly sitting”) Joseph Konrad, Francis Ponja, Elias Kafka, George Christophe Lichtenberg, Fields Valerie, Ludwig Wittgenstein or Henry Shliman. In my radio spectacle “Schliemanns Radio” (“Radio Shliman”), the protagonist has a pen, which he always tries to make an entry in the diary and from the pen of which, instead of ink, seem to stem sounds, noise, music.

That is, as a rule, we are talking about text forms, to which what the French writer Moris Blancho said:

The diary roots the movement of the letter in time, in humility dated and stored by this date of everyday life. <...> This is said under the supervision of the event, belongs to the category of acts, incidents, secular communication, some active real <...> [8] .

This is how an important impulse of my work is formulated: the presence of another, external, outside world, “active present”. Previously, this was often denoted by the concept of “an intelligent occasion”, in which I really need my composer practice. It can be an experience or story recorded in another artistic form, for example, in literature. It can be a thematic context, theatrical, impulse emanating from fine art, or sounds that arise not where musicians gather for music, but sounds recorded and stored on a film, on a disk, on sampler. This can be the acoustic presence of a car-for example, in Schwarz Auf Weiss - which, by means of time and structure that is external to the musicians and not subject to them, makes it known: you cannot alone determine the laws by which the game is ongoing.

What is important for me in this case, you can try to explain with two examples from fine art. The abstract artist Mark Rotko explains the large formats of his work using the following arguments:

I draw very large paintings. I understand that historically the function of drawing large paintings is to draw something grandiose and pompous. However, the reason I draw them - I think this applies to other artists - just that I want to be very intimate and human. To draw small paintings means placing yourself beyond your own experience, look at the experience on a stereoscope or through a diminutive glass <...>. No matter how you draw a big picture, you are inside it. This is not what you can dispose [9] .

And here is the second example. In the photographs of the Dusseldorf artist Andreas Gursky, people are located in places that correspond to their social role. Small figures walking under large road bridges, people like ants at the crossroads, individual visitors in a giant supermarket. This one, always sharp, has two features: firstly, he does not decide for the viewer, which is important and what does not matter, leaving him an opportunity for a free look. Secondly, he displays the actual balance of power in a realistic proportion that does not try to flatter the subject-another invitation to the viewer to think about this balance of power.

Artistic matter, structured exclusively subjectively, in which these positions are not in a free state, but are occupied by a creative subject and his own expression, can hardly give some information about the actual balance of forces. The writer leaves his work, he has no other choice. This is a property of writing, the property of the written text. Even in ancient Egypt, the god of letters is the carrier of the dead, and in this sense the story of Edgar on “Shadow” is indicative, which Hainer Müller repeatedly pointed to me and which he even read aloud for me, starting with the words:

You, reading, are still among the living; But I, writing, by this time I will go to the edge of the shadows for a long time. For truly the strange will happen and the strange will open before people see what is written here. And when they see, others will not believe, others will be accelerated, and yet few will find food for long thoughts in the letters that are cut here with iron stylos [10] .

That evening, when I learned about the death of Hayner Müller, I listened several times this record made a few years before. But no matter how significant the first lines touch me, the development of this parabola, which comes from the absence of the writer, quickly showed me that they should be understood not only literally.

Everything written, “each grapheme is inherently the nature of the will” (Jacques Derrida). And although in what was written and it is clear that someone addresses us, but “who says? Who says? " [11]

This applies in the same way to composers, only for us - how many can read scores? -This is less obvious, because music appears before us as an artistic form, again awakened to life, performed by musicians, the form in which the subject-composer remains present.

Let's take a closer look at the letters that, in the course of the development of the Parabola Edgar, arise on the wall:

But little by little the songs were interrupted, and their echoes, rolling into black, like resin, have peace, became quiet, indistinguishable and finally stalled. And suddenly, a dark, whitish shadow arose from the black curtains that drowned out the tunes-a similar shadow could be discarded from a human figure-but either the shadow of a man, or God, or any creature who was known to us was not. And, whitening between the curtain of rest, she eventually froze on the copper of the door. But the shadow was unclear, shapeless and uncertain, not the shadow of man and not the shadow of God-neither the god of Greece, nor the god of Chaldea, nor any Egyptian God. And the shadow froze on the copper of the door, under the door arch, and did not move, did not utter a word, but she became motionless in place ... [12]

In these trembling, restless movements on the wall, a letter is manifested in accuracy, the subject of which, however, is not present, but only discards the shadow (later those present ask the shadow who it is, and the shadow does not answer too informatively: “I am a shadow”). However, it is also interesting how the voice sounds that the shadows sounds in the voice:

<...> for the sounds of her voice were not the sounds of the voice of any one being, but the sounds of the voices of countless creatures, and, shimmering from the syllable to the syllable, gloomily struck our hearing, well-memorable and familiar voices of many thousands of departed friends [13] .

This means: the one who writes there for us on the wall, shadow, addresses us with collective experience. These words are not the result of a brilliant individual (artistic) invention, although composers still want to make us believe in it.

What is fascinating in the movement of letters? Preparing for Schwarz Auf Weiss , I came across the most magical text about a letter from all I knew - an essay called “essential loneliness” written by Maurice Blancho. Blancho describes the unraveling of the parabola when looking at the writer as if he was familiar with the “shadow” by (of course, he is familiar with her by his own literary practice, even if he never read it):

It happens that a certain person holding a feather in his hand, on purpose, wants to let him out, but he cannot, for his hand does not give him this - on the contrary, he squeezes the pen more and more, so that she can no longer get sophisticated. Then another hand comes into business, and with great success, and then you can see how a hand that we can say that it is not in, performs some slow movement in an attempt to overtake a removable object. <...> This is the shadow of the hand ghostly sliding to the object, which has become its own shadow. <...> The writer’s skill is not in the writer, not in the “ailment” hand that never lets out the pen is not able to let him go, because she actually does not hold what she holds, that she holds the shadow, and she herself is a shadow. Mastery is always a matter of another hand, the hands of a non -writing, capable of interfering at the right time, grab and throw a feather. Therefore, skill is the ability to stop writing, interrupt what is written [14] .

Perhaps this is exactly what I find with writers and do not find in many of my colleagues-composers: this is a conscious farewell with the concept of identity, which looks whole, from which a musical consumer consumption of craftly made “soundproof”, the first-person music, so to speak. We are talking about the "disappearance of the author", as Heiner Muller calls it; And indeed - in his text landscapes, I disappear after the choric speech: "I must talk about myself, I, who is it ..." [15] or speaking together with Blangho: "To write means to break the bonds connecting me with the word" [16] .

And that’s why I would like Choran’s phrase cited at the beginning - “I could express everything that excites me if I was delivered from shame not to be a musician” - turn inside out. Because the uncertainty of writers contains a completely different, conscious idea of ​​all repeatedly refracted and fractional identities involved in the scripture, an idea that I sometimes do not find in the self -confident behavior of expressively composing music.

Как хорошо, что Чоран оставил нам такие слова и все, что его волновало, не дошло до нас выраженным в музыке.

[1] Emile Michel Cioran, Syllogismen der Bitterkeit, Suhrkamp, Frankfurt a. M. 1995.

[2] «Есть очень много живущих людей. Конечно, очень многие собираются вместе посмотреть что-то, сделать что-то, услышать что-то, увидеть, как некоторые смотрят что-то, увидеть, как некоторые слушают что-то, увидеть, как некоторые делают что-то, услышать, как некоторые смотрят что-то, услышать, как некоторые делают что-то, услышать, как некоторые слушают что-то <...>»: Gertrude Stein , The Making of Americans , Contact Editions , Paris , 1925.

[3] Alain Robbe-Grillet, Die Szene , в: Momentaufnahmen, Hanser, M ü nchen , 1963.

[4] Cit. по: Heiner M ü ller, Gesammelte Irrt ü mer, Verlag der Autoren, Frankfurt a. M. 1986.

[5] Alexander Kluge, Es ist ein Irrtum, daß die Toten tot sind , в: Kalkfell, Theater der Zeit, Berlin , 1996.

[6] Этим наблюдением я обязан книге Йеспера Свенбро: Jesper Svenbro, Ameisenwege, Droschl, Graz , 2000.

[7] Heiner M ü ller, Werke, Bd. 2, Suhrkamp, Frankfurt a. M. , 1999.

[8] «Сущностное одиночество», пер. Art. Офертаса, в: Морис Бланшо, «Пространство литературы», М.: Логос, 2002.

[9] A Symposium on How to Combine Architecture, Painting and Sculpture, в : Intenors, Vol. CX, Nr. in, Mai 1951, S. 104.

[10] Э.А. По, «Тень», пер. В. Рогова.

[11] Бланшо М. «Ожидание забвение»: Роман, пер. В. Лапицкого. СПб.: «Амфора», 2000.

[12] Э.А. По, ibid .

[13] Э.А. По, ibid .

[14] Морис Бланшо, «Пространство литературы».

[15] Heiner M ü ller, Landschaft mit Argonauten, Werke, Bd. 5, Suhrkamp, Frankfurt a. M. 2002.

[16] Морис Бланшо, «Пространство литературы».