The distant sound

The motto of the Thirteenth Munich Biennale is a deliberate choice as a reference to a work that more or less opened portals to the music theatre of modernism, and at the same time reflected on the meaning and role of art and artists as well. In Franz Schreker’s opera of the same name, it represents the goal and ideal of the protagonist, who is a composer. He perceives it clearly when he finally finds the loved one he left at the beginning of his career. Symbolically, the distant sound is the primordial cause and utopia of composing, all rolled into one. In this sense, it is the guiding idea of the Thirteenth Munich Biennale’s music theatre productions. In Sarah Nemtsov’s L’Absence, as the characteristic coloring of the music it opens up the perspectives on a long story. With Eunyoung Kim’s work, it emerges as a utopia where contemporary life takes off the shackles of tradition in order to have history as a foundation for existence. In Matthias Ockert’s work, the protagonist moves through the large space accompanied by the distant sound. In Arnulf Herrmann’s music theatre piece, it becomes the allegory for a grand farewell.

L’Absence

Opera in five acts with a prologue and epilogue, for 12 vocalists, narrator, dancer, and orchestra
Libretto based on “The Book of Questions” by Edmond Jabès

Music: Sarah Nemtsov
Libretto: Sarah Nemtsov, based on texts by Edmond Jabès

Commissioned by the City of Munich for the Munich Biennale

Premiere: May 3, 2012, at Muffathalle

Sarah Nemtsov selected excerpts from Edmond Jabès’ Livre des Questions for the libretto of her opera, which at the same time offer plot elements for the stage with its suggestive, poetic language. The focus is on the tragic story of Sarah and Yukel. The lovers have been separated, and Yukel searches desperately for Sarah. Is she dead? Her parents were killed after being deported. A realization slowly unfolds: The terrible events have driven Sarah mad. Her loss (and loss of personal identity) results in Yukel feeling he is half-dead, too. Thus, the initial crime claims two more victims – not physically, but their souls are dead. The insane woman is, basically, a wise woman: Once a young woman (the past is told in retrospect through dream sequences), now she can only scream when faced with the horrible memories: “I don’t hear the scream. I am the scream!” (Jabès). The structure of the text is reminiscent of Talmud tracts. There is a narrator. A choir of imaginary rabbis appear over and over again. The continuum of time has been nullified. Through the openness and ambiguity of the plot, the sense of time is permanently distorted.
Sarah Nemtsov has woven elements of ancient Jewish vocal traditions into the modern texture of her music with its delivery, rhythmic, and melodic inflections. Microintervals, glissandi, and certain vibrato forms become bridges between modernism and the primordial cause of traditions. They make up the special “sound” of this score.

Sarah Nemtsov

born in 1980 in Oldenburg, studied oboe and composition at the University of Drama and Music Hannover and in Berlin (oboe with Burkhard Glaetzner, and composition as a master student of Walter Zimmermann). From 1995 to 1999 she won the German-wide competition “Student Compositions” five times in a row. From 2003 to 2007 she received a scholarship for composition from the German National Academic Foundation. In 2007 she received the Hanns Eisler Prize for Composition, as well as a grant from the Aribert Reimann Foundation, and in 2009 she received a grant from the Wilfried Steinbrenner foundation. Her works have been performed at renowned international festivals, such as the ISCM World New Music Festival; the Festival Musica in Strasbourg; the Klangwerkstatt in Berlin; the A•DEvantgarde Festival in Munich; zeit•punkt in Hannover; Klangwerktage Hamburg; and Musik 21 Niedersachsen. Her chamber opera Herzland (Heartland) celebrated its premiere in 2006 in Hannover, and it was presented in the series “Unerhörte Musik” (Berlin).

Mama Dolorosa

Music: Eunyoung Kim
Libretto: Yona Kim
Director: Yona Kim

Commissioned by the City of Munich for the Munich Biennale
A coproduction with Staatstheater Braunschweig

Premiere: May 5, 2012, at Carl-Orff-Saal / Gasteig

In traditional Korean society, this Confucian rite was important: A woman has to obey three men – as a daughter she obeys her father, as a wife her husband, as a mother her son. This rule was strictly adhered to for over a thousand years. Even Christianity, which centers on a male redeemer, could not override this. Will it vanish from the mechanized, digitalized present? The breathtaking tempo of modernization does not allow much time for a deeper change in self-awareness.
Eunyoung Kim’s opera takes place in a loud, lively quarter of Seoul. After years of trying, a woman finally gave birth to a boy. However, he isn’t the shining light she longed for, because he’s mentally handicapped and also anything but handsome. This presents an even greater challenge to a mother’s love. “She overcomes her female powerlessness and becomes stronger than all fathers combined. The power she has over her son is immense, as he could not exist in a humane manner without her.” One day, he is accused of raping and murdering a girl in the neighborhood; the circumstantial evidence is overwhelming. “The interrogation, yes, the crucifixion of her underage son begins. What can a mother do? Helplessly weep in despair? Stabat mater orientalis? No, this mama dolorosa asiana takes up the battle against the unknown superiority that threatens her maternal power” (Eunyoung Kim).

Eunyoung Kim

was born in 1973 in Seoul, Korea. While still at school, she received a professional education in piano and composition. From 1992 to 1996 she studied composition at the Yonsei University in Seoul, and from 1998 to 2002 she studied historical and systematic musicology at the University of Hamburg. Since 2001, Eunyoung Esther Kim has been continuing her music education at the Hochschule für Musik und Theater Hamburg with Peter Michael Hamel and Wolfgang Andreas Schultz, and since then she has performed numerous of her works in public. In 2005 she received the sponsorship award for students of the Hochschule für Musik und Theater Hamburg. In 2008, for the Munich Biennale she wrote one of the sections in a collective composition and collective production of the Hamburger Hochschule für Musik und Theater.

Die Bibliothek von Babel (The Library of Babel)

Music theatre work based on the short story of the same name by Jorge Luis Borges

Music: Matthias Ockert
Libretto: Achim Heidenreich
Director: Yasmin Solfaghari
Set designer: Etienne Pluss

Commissioned by the City of Munich for the Munich Biennale
Premiere: May 9, 2012, at Lukaskirche

The core of this music theatre work is Borges’ short story The Library of Babel, a speculation on a possible world depicted as an endless library, which has always existed and contains every possible book. In the opinion of the narrator (the narrator in this music theatre piece is Borges as a blind actor), the texts of the books – for the most part incomprehensible to the library’s inhabitants – contain every combination of letters in the Latin alphabet, and as a subset also every text from all of the languages based on this alphabet. The result is that “no one is able to articulate a syllable that is not filled with tenderness and chills, which would not be the almighty name of God in one of these languages.”
The protagonist of this music theatre work is primarily the space filled with music, a space – the library – that is constantly transforming. Its shape was inspired by Breughel’s painting The Tower of Babel. Borges walks through the space without saying a word, as an observer who listens, walking through galleries and up and down winding stairs as he follows the “distant sound.” Singers, instrumentalists, and loudspeakers are positioned in the galleries of the space. There are no fixed roles, but rather transformations, changes, metamorphoses of the space (spatial sound). Temporal chronologies and causalities are pried open by a layering and/or delay of concurrences. Different compositional methods are derived from the description of The Library of Babel. The text has an associative effect on the composition and on the creation of electronically influenced sound characteristics and progressions.

Matthias Ockert

integrates instrumental and electronic composition, improvisation, and spatial composition into cross-style and cross-art genre projects. In 1998 he received his degree in architecture from the Technische Universität Berlin. While he studied architecture he took courses in composition from Carlo Inderhees and in jazz guitar from Costa Lukacz. He performed as a guitarist with different groups in the Berlin jazz scene. From 1995 to 2004 he took regular guitar lessons from Attila Zoller, and then from Bill Connors in New York.
From 2001 to 2008 Matthias Ockert studied composition with Wolfgang Rihm and Sandeep Bhagwati at the University of Music Karlsruhe. In 2008/09 he did postgraduate work in composition with Hanspeter Kyburz at the Academy of Music Hanns Eisler in Berlin. Matthias Ockert teaches guitar and electric guitar at Klangfächer Karlsruhe and he is a visiting lecturer in interactive spatial sound at the Offenbach Academy of Art and Design. The Munich Biennale organized a composer portrait of Matthias Ockert, which was presented on May 3, 2010 as part of the series Klangspuren plus.

Wasser (Water)

Music: Arnulf Herrmann
Lyrics: Nico Bleutge
Director: Florentine Klepper

A coproduction with the Oper Frankfurt (Bockenheimer Depot) and Ensemble Modern.
Funds for the commission of the composition were provided by the Ernst von Siemens Music Foundation.

Premiere: May 16, 2012, at Muffathalle

Water is the story of an obliteration.
A man is fleeing. He wants to erase his past. He keeps experiencing abstract, schizophrenic moments that indicate a catastrophe has occurred.

But he doesn’t succeed in escaping – he cannot shake off his past. It’s like a nightmare: he tries to flee but he doesn’t get anywhere, as if he were treading in a sticky mixture; he doesn’t move forward at all.
In the end, the only thing he has is the obliteration of his own existence and history.

Arnulf Herrmann

born in 1968 in Heidelberg, first studied piano in Munich with Gernot Sieber, and then he studied composition (with Wilfried Krätzschmar), music theory, and piano (with Arkadi Zenzipér) at the Dresden University of Music. From 1995 to 1996 he was a student of Gérard Grisey and Emanuel Nuñes at the Conservatoire in Paris before he went on to finish his studies in Berlin with Hartmut Fladt and Jörg Mainka (music theory), and Friedrich Goldmann, Gösta Neuwirth, and Hanspeter Kyburz. In 1999/2000, he took part in the one-year composition and new technologies course at IRCAM in Paris as part of a DAAD postgraduate study grant.

Arnulf Herrmann works in close collaborations with leading international ensembles of contemporary music, such as Ensemble Intercontemporain (he won their Comité de Lecture in 2005, which is held every two years); with Klangforum Wien; and in particular with Ensemble Modern. His pieces are performed in Germany and abroad and can be heard at festivals such as, for example, Donaueschinger Musiktage; Wittener Tage für neue Kammermusik; Wien Modern; Ultraschall Berlin; Eclat Stuttgart; and Musica Strassburg.

Herrmann has received various prizes and awards for his music works, including the Hanns Eisler Preis for Composition (2001); the composition prize of the City of Stuttgart (2003); and the International Rostrum of Composers (for Terzenseele, 2006). In 2008 he was awarded the sponsorship award/art award of the State of Berlin. Arnulf Herrmann also received a grant to study at the Villa Massimo in Rome in 2008. In 2010 he received the composer award from the Ernst von Siemens Music Foundation.

Arnulf Herrmann is a lecturer in composition, analysis, and instrumentation at the Academy of Music Hanns Eisler in Berlin.

Additional projects of the thirteenth Munich Biennale

Biennale Special

A collective composition in collaboration with the Berlin University of the Arts
Premiere: May 13, 2012, at Reaktorhalle

Concerts

Symphonieorchester des Bayerischen Rundfunks
Conductor: George Benjamin

May 4, 2012, at Philharmonie/ Gasteig

Münchner Philharmoniker
May 18, 2012