Performance as Composition

Goebbels, Heiner.
Gourgouris, Stathis, 1958-

PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art, PAJ 78 (Volume 26, Number

3), September 2004, pp. 1-16 (Article)

Published by The MIT Press

For additional information about this article

http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/paj/summary/v026/26.3goebbels.html

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 PERFORMANCE AS COMPOSITION

Heiner Goebbels
Interviewed by Stathis Gourgouris

F
or more than two decades the German composer Heiner Goebbels has
written music for theatre, ballet, opera, radio, TV, and concert hall as well as
tape compositions and sound installations. He has created music for many
theatre productions, such as Danton’s Death, directed by Ruth Berghaus, and Richard
III, directed by Claus Peyman. In recent years New York audiences have been
introduced to his work with performances of Hashirigaki at the BAM Next Wave
Festival and Eislermaterial and Black on White with the Ensemble Modern at the
Lincoln Center Festival. Goebbels had worked frequently with the texts of Heiner
Müller, including The Liberation of Prometheus, Shadow/Landscape with Argonauts,
Wolokolamsk Highway, and The Man in the Elevator, seen in New York at The
Kitchen within days of the fall of the Berlin Wall. It featured Müller himself reading
his text, accompanied by the musicians Don Cherry, Arto Lindsay, George Lewis,
and Ned Rothenberg. Other authors whose writings have been used in musical
settings are Gertrude Stein, Poe, Thoreau, Robbe-Grillet, and Kierkegaard. Paul
Auster’s In the Country of Lost Things was featured in Surrogate Cities. Heiner
Goebbels’ music is performed frequently in festivals on several continents
(www.heinergoebbels.com). In 2003, Sir Simon Rattle conducted his orchestra
piece, From a Diary, in its Berlin Philharmonic premiere. This interview was
conducted in New York, March 19, 2003.

Welcome to the United States! I extend the greeting in the fashion that Frank Zappa does
in his piece with the Ensemble Modern, but with the present moment in mind. I wanted
to ask the art-in-relation-to-politics question last, and I feel I have to ask it at the outset
because the historical occasion demands it. So, I would like you to consider the problem
that one’s art can never entirely control the context of its performance. The New York
performance of your piece Hashirigaki happens to coincide with the initiation of the
bombing campaign in Iraq. If nothing else, this is what the audience brings to the
theatre; its thought and affect is weighed down by this occasion, whether acknowledged or
not.

© 2004 Stathis Gourgouris PAJ 78 (2004), pp. 1–16. 䊏 1

I doubt that an artist has much of an influence on the political relevance of his
artistic work. If art is too much on purpose, if its destination is too obvious, it loses
certain qualities as artwork. As Heiner Müller points out: “It is like harnessing a
horse to a car. The car doesn’t run well and the horse doesn’t survive it either.” So I
think it’s good that the artist does not completely control the political context of a
performance. Especially if you are a political artist and you want the work to be
open to the world, to whatever occurs out there, I think one day or another you will
face such a coincidence. It is much better than to pretend that your work is
imminently actualized. I’m very skeptical about direct political relation between
artistic statement and the message to the audience. Once you’re working in an open-
minded way, I trust that sooner or later the work will come to breathe in the
situation around it. I’m not sure how this will come to be with Hashirigaki, which
is rather colorful and playful and perhaps light, except to say that the piece already
stands in a strong controversial position toward my other work, which is rather dark
and concrete.

I just finished an opera in Geneva, called Landscape with Distant Relatives, where I
also used texts by Gertrude Stein, from Wars I Have Seen, which she wrote during
the Second World War in the south of France. Texts she wrote sixty or seventy years
ago nowadays seem as if they were written yesterday. It’s much better this way: to
discover, almost by an accident, the political importance in the material than to
pretend there is such importance in advance. This pertains as well to Eislermaterial.
I don’t deny the historical difference between this piece now and Hanns Eisler’s
situation. In fact, I do the opposite. I rather enlarge the differences by putting the
original musical material in a sound-frame which is quite “old-sounding” (with the
harmonium, the big bass drum and the particular way of singing), precisely in order
to allow the audience to discover how close a connection it can feel to this sound, or
how touched it can be by this nostalgic material. I prefer that the audience discovers
this 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 would
ask it of Hanns Eisler in the 1940s. During the war and in exile Eisler similarly did not
have control over the context of his performances compared to the way he did, let us say,
during the time of performing Die Mütter around Germany, in 1932.

Actually, I just saw a Berliner Ensemble performance of Die Mütter. It’s very
interesting how these words fall now on completely different ground than even ten
years ago. I mean, in the 80s everybody would be so provoked by their strangeness;
they sounded so far away. While now—unfortunately, I have to say—the floor is
ready again for such words.

The story between you and Eisler is a very long story, as you have acknowledged. But also
it’s evident in the recordings, the history of your recordings. I’m very interested in your
various glosses on Eisler and I’ve gone back recently even to your earlier work. You
obviously revisit Eisler’s work, as if drawing from an unending pool. The record you did
with Alfred Harth in 1976 ( Vier Fäuste für Hanns Eisler) is a bit of a deconstruction

2 䊏 PAJ 78
Eislermaterial, a stage concert with Ensemble Modern and actor Joseph Bierbichler.
Photo: Courtesy Lincoln Center Festival.

GOEBBELS / Performance as Composition 䊏 3

of specific Eisler tunes or even his tonalities in general; the word “deconstruction” is
overused, but I can’t think of a better one here. While Eislermaterial is not quite a
deconstruction; it’s a sort of distillation, a contemplation of the core material of Eisler.
And there is lots of work in between. I’m not sure how I’d categorize the Duck and Cover
performance (1985) in this respect. And certainly, the brass group you founded in the late
70s, Sogenanntes Linksradikales Blasorchester, had a distinctive Eislerian feel, though it
was also very loose structurally. How is all this connected for you, both musically but also
politically?

I think all this started in the mid-70s. Listening to Eisler changed my life. His work
conveyed to me that there is a way in which music and politics can be linked, not by
forming one layer upon another but by incorporating the political within the
musical material. That’s what I learned from him, and that’s what made my decision
to study music after sociology. So, I owe him a lot. And, as you said, I performed a
lot 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 that
even when I had sort of “forgotten” him Eisler was always there. Even during my
close collaboration with an author who is considered a grandchild of Bertolt
Brecht—you know, when I was working with Heiner Müller—I never thought of
Eisler, perhaps because of a different mode of working. With Müller, I worked with
literary texts that rest on a notion of landscape or on texts and music where the two
elements are competitive with each other, whereas Eisler worked differently with
texts; he composed songs. But, of course, this way of accepting literary texts as an
authority for the music is ultimately very closely related to the work of Eisler and
Brecht. And it’s nice to discover after twenty years of working in different areas that
an undercurrent relation was always there.

We’ve been talking about Eisler but your work as a whole belongs not just to Eisler but to
Brecht as well in a direct sense. And again, not merely to the Brecht/Eisler duo as
composer and lyricist but to both of them as dramatic and performative artists. Brecht as
a dramaturg, I believe, is crucial to your performative understanding and it is in this
sense that I see your association with Heiner Müller. All of this constellation belongs to the
great tradition of Musik Drama in German art, but explicitly politicized. (I would
include Adorno’s reading of Wagner in this as well.) How do you situate yourself in this
tradition? 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 wasn’t there then music was just a private thing for me even in the
earlier days. So, I started to do a lot of film scores and compose with words and
rarely did “autonomous” musical work until the late-80s or early-90s. That’s why I
think I discovered, with the help of Eisler of course, that there must be a gesture in
music. Music which chatters away does not interest me. I can see the circumstances
of my musical biography as quite logical actually. In my development I came to
include more and more media, but I didn’t start that way and didn’t use them all at

4 䊏 PAJ 78
once but moved from one into another and so on. But the basic assumption—music
reacting or referring to other art forms or other forms of perception—has been with
me since the beginning. I like Bach and that’s where I come from, not Chopin, for
example, where the pianistic virtuosity will always be celebrated.

It’s funny, I had in my notes here a sort of off-beat question, which I might as well ask
now. What does Eisler owe to Bach?

The effect is quite direct. Actually, there have been certain musicological studies in
Germany which have pointed to passages in Eisler exemplifying direct quotes from
Bach, like in the beginning of the Die Mütter cantata, where it is quite evident. He
loved the functionality of Baroque music. There are also direct quotes from
Schubert, by the way.

I remembered thinking this when I first heard some of Eisler’s cantatas. I had gotten my
first recordings in East Berlin around 1980. Nowadays, much of this has been transferred
to CDs, including the great historic recordings of the pre-Nazi years with Ernst Busch
singing. The arrangements are quite remarkable.

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

Yes, there is a whole way of singing in this, let’s say, epic theatre tradition that’s quite
compelling. It’s 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 Drama
and Heiner Müller particularly. How did you become so extensively involved with his
work? What is the importance of his work for you musically and dramatically? I mean
not just the poetry itself (which is singular and barely evaluated as poetry outside
Germany), but his whole conceptualization or perhaps his method. Is it a matter of
method?

I think that, generally speaking, the kinds of texts I like to work with are always by
authors who strongly consider the matter of literary form and structure as important
as the content, the semantics. Hence the few authors that reach this level for me:
Gertrude Stein and Heiner Müller—who have a lot in common, by the way—and
Kafka, and Edgar Allan Poe in a way, because he was able to instrumentalize his style
toward the intention of his text; he could slip into different paths of writing. This is
the basic view I have on literary texts, which is not only on what they tell but on how
they tell. And if this question of “how” has a musical dimension, like the rhythm in
Gertrude Stein or the substantial reduction to single words in Heiner Müller, then
I 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

GOEBBELS / Performance as Composition 䊏 5

magnifying glass. My interest is to share my observations with the reader or with the
listener or, looking behind the authors’ way of writing, to show some of their writing
strategies, 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. That’s a fascinating
way to go about it.

That’s right. Reading as a form of composition.

You know, I remember your performance of Heiner Müller’s The Liberation of

Prometheus, which I saw at Delphi, in the ancient stadium in 1995, and remains still
one of the most memorable theatrical experiences of my life. It was the closest I ever came
to having some sort of understanding of what Aeschylean theatre might have looked like,
which had always been a mystery —the idea of the one actor, particularly.

It’s interesting you say that because you have experienced so much Greek theatre.

Well, I was astonished. And I came there knowing the Müller text very well. The one
scene that really got through to me was the one where Hercules is circling around the rock
because the stench from the encrusted feces is so intolerable, and he is circling around the
rock for three thousand years, as the text says, and then another three thousand years, and
so on, trying to find the proper angle for ascent. And the way you did this, with Ernst
Stötzner going way out to the end of the stadium, which from the audience’s point of view
on the front end, where the performance space is set up, is pitch black, with only the
shadows of the tips of the trees from the surrounding woods showing over the Delphi gorge
and 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 the
performance was musical, strictly speaking. The drama came through the musical
performance, not through the acting in the conventional sense, though Stötzner is a
brilliant actor, no doubt. The point is that the whole thing was extraordinarily theatrical
without any “traditional” theatrical elements.

But the key for this scene, you see, is in the sentence itself. The complexity of the
sentence is performing exactly the difficulty of Hercules to reach Prometheus
because the sentence doesn’t reach the point without a lot of grammatical obstacles.
The circling and circling creates obstacles and you can’t understand finally, you can’t
reach the point of resolution of meaning, let’s say. Especially not with the first
reading.

Let’s 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, Schliemann’s Radio (1992)?

I did a piece in Frankfurt in 1990, collaborating with a set designer, Michael Simon.
We called it Newton’s Casino, but it was in fact a piece about Schliemann’s

6 䊏 PAJ 78
excavations and his diaries. And he did this amazing set—it was exactly somehow
what I just described about the sentence of Heiner Müller. He emptied out the
whole theatre—the audience was only sitting in the balcony—and he put in there a
giant mobile machine with a set of buildings which he reconstructed from
Schliemann’s plan of the wall of Troy. So, in a very customary way, he put together
the 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. But
when we performed it we took all the texts out—we thought it was better without
text—so it was like a big installation of sound and music, voices, etc. For the radio
version, I brought back the diary text.

It’s interesting because in my sense of the radio piece it seems as if Schliemann, in his
observations, might be making a field recording, which is obviously a form of music as
well 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 floor
where the performer would walk around in front of the wall of inscriptions. In the
theatrical performance we subsequently did in Greece, I enriched the written
material, and wrote a part for the “folk singer,” which was performed by Lydia
Koniordou.1 It was real fun working there. It premiered in Olos.

Yes, I remember. I wasn’t in Greece then, but my friends, who knew of my interest in your
work, sent me lots of press clippings. It was quite exciting. And seeing the video later I was
impressed with the way you used Greek music. Which brings me to another set of notes I
have here, concerning your ability to weave together lots of, let us say, “non-European”
musical material with your own. The work you did with the African musical material in
Ou bien le débarquement désastreux (1993) was particularly impressive—these
passages with the kora, the electric guitar, and the trombone, all woven in a contrapuntal
relation to each other. What concerns me is the question of how we can avoid, when
intertwining all sorts of musical and cultural elements, a sort of postmodern bricolage, a
kind of mixing of commodities? Might we speak of a certain dramatic ethos perhaps, or
a musical ethos, all of which is also a specific 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 to
which I then submit my choice of material. In the case of both pieces you
mentioned, in the process of one or two years in advance, I created a system of
outlines, which I probably install in my body because I’m not able to be totally
conscious of all this, that serve as a system of criteria. I then pour through this
system my musical material, and whatever falls through it I throw out. And only
what remains along with these criteria I then use. For example, the sound choice in
Ou bien le débarquement désastreux was completely faithful to whatever has to do
with wood, because the forest was somehow one of the elements that patched
together this choice of texts of Heiner Müller, Francis Ponge, and Joseph Conrad.
Behind this theme of conquest and estrangement, there was a whole metaphoric
substratum built on the different ideas of forest. So I only chose sound material that
fit into that. I’m quite superstitious concerning material. In the Schliemann work, I

GOEBBELS / Performance as Composition 䊏 7

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 before
I chose them.

A thing that remains consistently fascinating in your music is the entwinement of

composition and improvisation. Can you speak a little bit about how you understand this
entwinement? How improvisation might in fact be composition in itself? Or, how it
might be linked to performance?

I think improvisation is the last step in what I describe as building a system of

criteria; it’s the last step in using musical material, not the first step. In this whole
long process of composition, I always allow myself to improvise as well, but I do so
because I think that the paths which are already in place are so limited, so defined
by what I may have been doing in the period of contextualizing the material, that
whatever 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 very
end everything is completely precise. Though music will not always be written
down, it will be completely precise in the way it is appointed. For instance, in The
Liberation of Prometheus there is not one note written down, but every show is like
every other. You see, there is a lot of freedom in creating a very precise window of
music to which all the musicians agree.

Since we’re talking directly about making music, let me ask you: do you still play the
saxophone?

No. I haven’t played for probably . . . I don’t even remember . . . fifteen years maybe.

Do you miss it?

No, I only learned it in three months to be able to found this brass band. It was by
virtue of a certain musical-political perspective, in many ways already prescribed by
my university research on Hanns Eisler, with which I completed my sociology
studies. And I’m sure there were a couple of biographical strong impressions which
helped me to think this up: a lot of free jazz concerts in the early 70s, as well as some
other experimental brass groups, like De Volharding, around Louis Andriessen in
Amsterdam. The nice thing with this band was that it balanced out all kinds of
different origins of musicianship. There were professional musicians and composers,
like my teacher Rolf Riehm, or other colleagues from the music conservatory, and
also jazz players, like Alfred Harth and Christoph Anders. And there were also
politically interested musical dilettantes. And so we came nicely together and were
able 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 various

commitments, to decisions about where to perform, or what to perform, how to
learn a piece, how to compose it, etc.—you know, collective judgment in musical
terms in the widest sense—which was very helpful and constructive. I never

8 䊏 PAJ 78
Black on White, music theatre with Ensemble Modern at Lincoln Center Festival.
Photo: Robert Douglas, courtesy Lincoln Center.

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

GOEBBELS / Performance as Composition 䊏 9

considered these decisions to get in the way of my aesthetic point of view. I found
it a very helpful experience to accept that, as a composer, you don’t have to be alone
in your room. It was very important for me.

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

Yes, that’s why the collaboration with the Ensemble Modern was so workable. You
see, the political challenge begins for me with the ways of production. As the
German film critic Georg Seesslen recently pointed out, “an artwork with many
participants and collaborators, like in film or theatre, has to reflect the internal
relationships. As an experienced spectator you can easily see if the director uses the
actors and musicians in a hysterical repressive authoritarian way, or if he is able to
create with them in a fruitful atmosphere. You can see by the performance if the
director is an asshole.”

I try an open process, in which every light technician or wardrobe assistant can easily
make suggestions and everyone in the crew always has a fair chance to make the best
out of his field (light, sound, stage, costume, musicians, performers etc.). It ends up
being very precise, of course, because the combination of all these media can only
work properly with precision. Black on White wouldn’t have been possible without
the strong inspiration and creativity not only by the staff, but also all the musicians
included. They proposed to bring instruments; they developed characters, atmo-
spheres, gestures, etc. Also, the fact that the music seems to have diverse cultural
backgrounds, the fact that three different languages are spoken (and in the latest
opera 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 special
solo 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 how
the musicians can incorporate the material instead of just playing the parts. Because,
you know, the Ensemble Modern play some hundred concerts a year; they perform
works from all sorts of different composers. But, thinking entirely in terms of Eisler,
I wanted them to incorporate, to embody, the material: first of all, by not giving
them a conductor, which means that each player must know exactly what everybody
else plays; second, by having them participate in the process of arranging the
material (who plays what); third, asking them to improvise on the material, which
demands that everyone must be very aware of what they are riding on; fourth, by
choosing a stage construction that, as you’ve seen in the video, is three sides of a
square on an empty stage. This means to amplify and make public the necessary
communication of them performing without a conductor, indeed by including the
audience as an important fourth part, fourth side.

10 䊏 PAJ 78
It becomes sort of a Lehrstück in a way, because the musicians have to go through
this experience learning the material. When they’re playing a very intimate string
trio, for example, the violin, viola, and cello are in entirely different sides of the set,
having the biggest distance between them, fifteen meters or so. And when they have
to communicate on this intimate passage even the last row of the audience will note
it because it is so public.

That’s fascinating. You know, Frank Zappa’s work with the Ensemble Modern strikes me
as very similar in this way, although not the splitting up of musicians. But he also spent
a 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, extraordinary
musicians.

That’s not the main point. Of course, they are incredible virtuosi, extraordinary
musicians. But the real difference is that they are a self-organized ensemble, and this
makes their motivation so much higher than in the case of an orchestra where an
artistic director tells them “tomorrow you play Eisler” and the day after whatever
else, and then “we get a break.” That’s the difference. They decide whether they want
to work with me, where to perform, what to do next, etc. As musicians, they decide
collectively 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 don’t know why. Maybe
because we are talking about the group process. I wouldn’t identify you as a rock musician
but the presence of rock music is all over your work. So, what is the importance of rock
music for you? How have you found yourself inhabiting this domain over the years, or
maybe, if not inhabiting it, going in and out of it at different times, traversing it? Is it
a matter of a certain kind of sound, a certain ethos, a matter of technology, of
performance?

I grew up with classical music in my parents’ house and with pop music. There was
no experience of contemporary music otherwise. I was very interested in visual arts,
contemporary visual arts. But pop music was my most important influence after
classical music. And my first way of liberating myself from teachers who taught me
the classical repertoire was to play songs that I heard on the radio, songs of the
Beatles, the Beach Boys. Later on, I had a band and we played Eric Burden, Jimi
Hendrix pieces, whatever. But this is how I learned a certain freedom, primarily in
the way of performance, non-conducted performance, and definitely the freedom in
creating music together as a group, which is really the most important thing about
rock music. I mean, what is Paul McCartney without John Lennon? Even if John
Lennon didn’t write as much, even if they didn’t actually write everything together
or 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 the
creative instance. No one was ever, truly, working alone. And the thing about rock
music is also the belief in the structure. The point is not so much to worry about the
harmonies, not so much to worry about the solos or the lyrics. It’s really to pay

GOEBBELS / Performance as Composition 䊏 11

attention to the structure, the rhythm breaks, the orchestration, the sound—that’s
what 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 wouldn’t consider

us a rock group; we were too weird in a way. But when we tried to improvise, we all
agreed not to improvise as jazz musicians. We improvised shapes, we improvised
song forms. The early Cassiber albums Man or Monkey (1982) or The Beauty and the
Beast (1984), though they seemed like collections of songs, were entirely improvised.
Chris Cutler and I were improvising forms and the other members were improvising
sounds. In this way, we created together a form of instant composition. We created
songs spontaneously, without rehearsing them. All these song forms were unre-
hearsed, just played straight. And later on, when we would meet for recording, we
would recall these as shapes and improvised them as shapes. There were never any
written parts; there wasn’t even an agreement to play a certain theme in a certain
way, four bars here or four bars there. That was the magical moment of playing with
Chris Cutler, for example: to be able to communicate in terms of shapes without
discussing it in advance. Chris has real understanding, a great sense of symmetry, of
music as shaping. After thirty two bars we could come back to an initial field
without counting—this worked magically between us.

It’s very interesting that you mention the notion of the “song as a form” which Chris
himself uses a lot and has written about, particularly in terms of the Brecht/Eisler
relation. I mean, for me, the Art Bears’ fantastic performance of the song “On Suicide” . . .

. . . It’s a masterpiece.

It is a masterpiece. First of all, as a song, as an Eisler/Brecht composition, but also, as you

say, this particular performance. For me, this was a definitive moment in understanding
this notion of the “song as a form.” And my interest in rock music itself—or certain
aspects of rock songwriting—is fueled by this notion and by this experience. A very
similar instance is your own song composition on Hölderlin’s poem Hälfte des Lebens.
But I brought us into the topic of rock music for another reason too: to discuss the
connection between rock music and the piece being performed today, Hashirigaki. I
mean, I can sort of picture how Gertrude Stein works in it and certainly how Japanese
music might be integrated in such a piece, but I’m very curious about the Beach Boys
material.

As I told you, in the 60s I was playing pop music on the piano just by listening to
tunes on the radio. And I remember there were one or two Beach Boys songs which
I had heard only once or twice on the radio, and I could recall them but I couldn’t
catch them, I couldn’t play them on the piano, because the harmonies were
somehow weird. That’s the one thing. Then, in 1998, The Pet Sounds Sessions was
released, where they published the backing tracks, the rhythm tracks, vocal
harmonies, etc. And it was on that occasion that I heard the complete Pet Sounds

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album again after so many years, and those couple of songs—like “Caroline No” and
“Don’t Talk”—reminded me of my failure. So I discovered this material again, really
fresh four years ago and, of course, I understood immediately why it had been so
difficult for me to catch. They have harmonies which just float, they never satisfy the
bass register that brings them back to the ground; they keep on going, never really
coming to a resolution. That’s the secret of this wonderful composition. It’s not only
because of the melancholy quality of these songs that this music is so formidable for
me—I mean, it’s such a classic— but also because of this strange floating quality, as
if everything is being lifted from the air. It’s just not grounded; it’s never grounded.

So, somehow this connected in my mind with The Making of Americans, with
Gertrude Stein, because she does a similar thing with words. She keeps words going
constantly by changing some elements in the repetitive language. If we attend to the
letter in her process of observation, of thinking, of writing, we might get a better
sense—it’s very hard—of what she means about love, about sadness, about
relationships, about men and women, because she is just evoking associations in a
process of reflecting toward the reader, at the reader. But she is fading this sense and
it is also hard to catch, you see—so this is the connection that brings this piece
together. And then there is another thing: She starts The Making of Americans as a
family history, but she immediately goes off on a digression toward an overall
human statement, which also makes it ungrounded. She starts off on the ground,
with the family, the brother, the sister, the mother, marriage—but then immediately
she tries to find an overview from outside, about other families, about America,
about the whole world, about humankind—before coming back to her subject from
ten pages earlier with the words “as I was saying.” And this strange, elevated
expression works very well, I think, in the performance, particularly when we do the
last song “I Just Wasn’t Made For These Times” which is itself an important phrase,
coming, of course, from Brian Wilson, but it could very well have come from
Gertrude Stein. She certainly felt untimely.

You’ve also talked elsewhere about how you are drawn to the melancholy song. It’s evident
in most of the Eisler songs you choose to perform—not all obviously, you also take on the
more playful, ironic ones. But still, there is specific attention to melancholy songs. Why is
that?

Well, probably because they are the truest ones. That’s the great thing about Eisler.
He doesn’t exclude feelings. He includes doubts and aggressions, hopes and fears—
he includes everything. That’s why I think these songs allow most of the truth to
come through. Because they don’t pretend just to be powerful, to have no doubts—
they’re full of everything.

Perhaps your insistence on this totality of contrary feelings in music might be linked to
your preference for a certain tragic mode in your selection of texts or in the way you frame
or stage your musical composition. I feel that in your particular conception (and in the
tradition of Music Drama I spoke of earlier—Brecht, Eisler, Müller—ancient tragedy is
given a remarkable actualization in modern terms. Does tragedy—and I mean this in a

GOEBBELS / Performance as Composition 䊏 13

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

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particular way: as the entwinement of drama and myth—have meaning nowadays
where the polis is so dispersed? How do you confront this politics or aesthetics of
dispersion? How is myth important nowadays, not as an archaic thing but as something
very contemporary?

Probably tragic myth is the presence—and representation—of powers greater than

what we control. Because what you see in the traditional humanist drama is more
and more conflict being brought down to the level of personal relations or conflict
brought down to psychological relations, which is something I really hate in
contemporary staging. Actually, the movies are better. The film industry has
understood that people need more than just love stories. Of course, they continue to
produce lots of love-story sorts of films, but there have been many films in the last
fifty years that try to represent other forces that we deal with in life, stronger forces.
The science fiction genre exemplifies this, of course. But the point is that certain
films show an awareness that not everything can be discussed and resolved in the
context of a personal relationship. Yet, modern theatre always seems to do just that;
even with the most political subtext, even when dealing with tragic mythologies
themselves, it often seems to try to reduce things to some sort of domestic drama,
and I think that’s horrible. I’m just not interested in this sort of thing. As I have
experienced the world always as a political world, I think we face daily so many
relationships of power which are much stronger and cannot be so easily reduced to
personal dimensions. So I’m always looking for references or representations of that
in literature or music or theatre. And, of course, I don’t use mythological figures
(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, shifted—or how lives
are finished and started—is sometimes done without mercy, without any possibility
of being a individual story.

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

Well, in the 70s I was very involved in the movement. It was a very lively, outgoing
sort of movement, with people like Joschka Fischer, Daniel Cohn-Bendit—I lived in
the same building with Joschka, now he is flying first 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 this
has changed. The context where everything is so immediate, so precise, and where
your work is but a trial, a commitment to all that, doesn’t exist. But my relation to
what it means to translate a political experience into an artistic one hasn’t changed
much at all. When I compare my work with Sogenanntes Linksradikales Blasorchester
and my work on Eislermaterial with the Ensemble Modern, for example, I find that
it’s not all that different. It’s more elaborate now, of course. I’ve got more possibilities
and resources, I can work with lights, costumes, sound engineers, and virtuosi
players, but the way we talk to each other, the way we deal with each other, the way
we try to solve aesthetic and political problems is not so different. When I look back

GOEBBELS / Performance as Composition 䊏 15

through all those different steps, which you have also followed here today, there is
nothing that I regret, nothing where I would say “let’s cut this out” or “don’t look at
that.” This is something that makes me very happy because there is a lot of
continuation and development in these steps, and there’s nothing to be embarrassed
about or, in the opposite way, to long for the good days of the past. I never had such
a feeling.

Then, I have to add one more dimension to that question: What does it mean to be a
German artist today?—as opposed to the 70s, working within the situation of a divided
Germany, which seems to have been important for you and the politics involved in your
music. I mean, it was important to the leftist movement in the West. Does this matter at
all? 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 specifically to Chris Cutler, this way of working at an
international level. He was an important figure in this movement because he was the
first to open up the space for an international collaboration of musicians and ways
of playing. Since that time, I think Eislermaterial is the only piece that’s entirely
German. I work consistently in an international context. But I never ignored my
German roots. I started very strongly with developing my German point of view—
the music I grew up with and was educated in. I remember the matter of playing jazz
then. Other jazz musicians would complain: “He’s got no swing. He’s much too
German.” But I was proud of the way I was improvising. And in fact, when I saw the
Sun Ra Arkestra performing for the first time—and it really changed my way of
looking at things—I 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 of
straight jazz musicians, even in Europe, Sun Ra was too much. But it’s precisely this
collective way of making music, of bringing various fields together, which appeals to
me.

NOTE

1. Lydia Koniordou is Greece’s foremost actress in classical tragedy, with exemplary

performances in Euripides’ plays, particularly Electra. The way she is used in this play, as a
folk singer, is itself a defamiliarizing gesture.

STATHIS GOURGOURIS teaches comparative literature at Columbia

University. He has also taught at Princeton, Yale, and the University of
Michigan. He is the author of Dream Nation: Enlightenment, Colonization,
and the Institution of Modern Greece and Does Literature Think? Literature as
Theory for an Antimythical Era as well as essays on political theory,
psychoanalysis, film. He is currently working on a volume of essays on
music, performance, and the politics of sound, titled On Transgressive
Listening.

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