A House of Call - my imaginary notebook - Heiner Goebbels Kartoniert (TB)

In recent years composer and theatermaker Heiner Goebbels has regularly collected recordings of voices during his travels chance encounters projects and research. Unique peculiar voices that have touched disturbed excited alienated him. These are voices from very different contexts soundscapes musical traditions and languages folk material rituals literature recorded in the course of the last hundred years or so. This phonographic collection in an imaginary notebook has now become two things: A House of Call as a full-evening concert for the Ensemble Modern Orchestra in which t hese voices will often be heard on a concert stage for the first time and set the tone: cries calls invocations incantations prayers speech acts poems songs. The orchestra presents supports accompanies them responds to or contradicts them - like a secular responsory. A House of Call. Material Counter as a book that uses numerous documents texts images and sources to try to trace what distinguishes these voices. About half of these voices were recorded on wax cylinders with historical phonographs and their origins are often ambivalent. Many reasons may have led to the recordings: ethnomusicological or music and linguistic research sociological or anthropological interests. Heiner Goebbels' music is a direct answer to the complexity and grain of the voices their vibrancy and the history of these recordings. The book discusses the heterogeneous contexts of how they were created and explores the question for example of whether these voices were recorded at concerts or under questionable for example colonial circumstances and what makes them unique.