The works and their recordings on this CD were created in times of war and destruction. We already know how long-lasting their devastation is. The trauma lasts a lifetime and subsequently shapes several generations. Humans are capable of brutality - but at the same time they are highly sensitive beings. They are fragile and should be treated with appropriate care. This album aims to raise awareness of the importance of empathy and to express the longing for life.
I would like to thank DLF editor and producer Frank Kämpfer, who has given me immense artistic freedom over the years. Thanks are also due to the artistic contributors:
Florian Juncker, the duo Ingólfur Vilhjálmsson / Laurent Bruttin, the E-MEX Ensemble under the direction of Christoph Maria Wagner and the sound engineers Robert F Schneider and
Stephan Schmidt.
Eres wood
A person realizes that he was never human
The composition is based on a book published in 2011 by historian Svenja Goltermann, which, according to the subtitle, is about »German war returnees and their
Experiences of violence in the Second World War" and how they were perceived and accepted - or not - by post-war German society.
The Society of Survivors is the title of the book. On the special situation of the German War returnees had to realise that their suffering had been in vain and that they had served a criminal ideology. Or – if they held on to National Socialist beliefs – that they had failed. In other words: they were burdened not only by traumatic experiences of violence, but also by feelings of guilt. On the other hand, this very experience – alienation from society, including and especially from people who were actually close to them, from family, from friends – can be extrapolated to any other conflict: trauma cannot be shared and often cannot even be communicated.
The statements quoted in the book did not arise in situations of everyday communication, but rather come from minutes of conversations with the treating psychiatrists.
The composer Eres Holz nevertheless tried to put himself in the shoes of these men, and he did so quite consciously as a Jew, as an Israeli, as the son of a Holocaust survivor. "Every war," he says, "creates a system of coercion that binds society together, and then it leaves no room for individuality. Because we are social animals, we unite into a kind of organism, so that we suppress our own thoughts. This is also very clear in the reports from these documents, where they tell how they detach themselves from their own bodies, how they put their feelings aside completely and look at the situation in the war as if they were outsiders."
Original quotes from Svenja Goltermann’s book play an important role in Eres Holz’s composition: They describe the stages of depression – meaninglessness –
Trauma – escape from reality – self-knowledge. They are projected as text panels during the performance.
DEATH
This is perhaps even more true of the composition DEATH for two bass clarinets and live electronics. Here too there is a visual dimension, fog, spotlights, colored light, stroboscopic effects, even a flashlight - quite modest as an evocation of a battlefield, but in the concert hall, in combination with quite violent music, it has a disturbing effect. Because this is not about the question of how experiences of violence in war change people - here violence is experienced very directly: vicariously by the two bass clarinettists, who are at the mercy of a pandemonium of electronic sounds, in the production of which they themselves participate. But the audience is also involved in the action.
by directly participating in how violence is carried out and suffered. Acting out this vicariously is the technically, musically and emotionally extremely delicate task of the two soloists. The visual level in this piece therefore has no role in terms of content, but merely in enhancing the effect: a feeling of being at the mercy of others arises even when just listening.
The composer also very consciously refers to the emblematic nature of the instrument. The bass clarinet has the same wide range of expression as the clarinet – from shrill alarm to silent lament – but is overall tuned down by the low register. It is the profound sound of a single bass clarinet that is heard in the second act of Wagner's Valkyrie the omnipotent Wotan realizes that things cannot be shaped by power and domination. In Eres Holz' composition, the bass clarinet gains another color through electronic amplification: a booming, thunderous sound quality, eruptive sounds, strange and uncanny.
Reflecting on violence, its causes and reasons, was the starting point for the composition. The increase in violence within societies and in the context of political-systemic conflicts, the dwindling willingness to communicate and compromise and the resulting global instability have long troubled Eres Holz: it was from this distressing experience that he conceived the composition DEATHShortly before its premiere, Hamas attacked Israel – and subsequently the Gaza War.
The composition DEATH speaks of the pain, of perpetrating and suffering the violence, of all those involved.
MACH for trombone and electronics
DO – this is the name of a cycle of pieces for solo instruments that Eres Holz began in 2011 and which now comprises ten pieces. These pieces are about the "loneliness of life" as a human condition - the knowledge, as Arthur Schnitzler put it, "that we can never fully get into each other, will never fully understand each other." But it is certainly no coincidence that five of these pieces were written in the years of the Corona pandemic in 2020/21. Not just because of the performance practice - rehearsals and performances by ensembles were not possible for long periods of time due to contact restrictions. Rather, loneliness suddenly became a daily experience and a subject of debate, and so these pieces also have a diagnostic quality of the times. The individual who seeks to get in touch with all means - including electronics: even in isolation, even in loneliness, still in relation to another person.
In the composition DO for trombone and live electronics, this constellation is shifted – namely, by trombone and live electronics working together and convey a message. Because apocalyptic perspectives open up here too. They result almost inevitably from the basic constellation of the DO-cycle, the pieces are developed from a repertoire of virtuoso techniques and expressive playing figures specific to each instrument. In the case of the trombone, these are, for example, call motifs (tone repetitions, repeated second or third motifs), and the "appellative" character of the heavy brass plays a role here.
In the German language, a corresponding association space is formed: trombones can be heard at solemn church ceremonies, at funerals and, according to Luther's translation, at the Last Judgement: "We shall not all sleep / But we shall all be changed / and the same in a moment / at the sound of the last trumpet." (1 Cor. 15,51:52-XNUMX) This connection is revealed in Eres Holz' composition. The performance instructions at the climax of the piece, roughly in the middle, are "uncanny, apocalyptic." Strongly accentuated forte and fortissimo attacks of the trombone, sometimes with flutter tongue, over bursting and rushing electronic sounds are the characteristic vocabulary of this episode. This is followed by a section entitled "dance-like" but quite eerie, in which the established order of the music gradually disintegrates until finally only electronic sounds remain, in which the sound of the trombone resonates as a mere reminiscence: the human being disappears.
Ingo Dorfmuller