O moon my pin-up
| O moon my pin-up | ||||
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| Studio album by Franz Koglmann | ||||
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| Label (s) | HatHut Records | |||
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CD |
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Title (number) |
13 |
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running time |
43:45 |
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Studio (s) |
ORF Radio Studio, Vienna |
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O Moon My Pin-Up is a music album by Franz Koglmann that was recorded from March 8th to 10th, 1997 at the ORF Radio Studio in Vienna. It contains Koglmann 's cantata of the same name , which is based on excerpts from the cycle of poems Pisaner Gesänge (Cantos LXXIV – LXXXXIV) by Ezra Pound . It was composed by Koglmann for the Hörzüge 97 festival , which premiered on March 7, 1997 in the Vienna Konzerthaus . The subsequent studio recording with an extensive accompanying book or its publication is a joint production of ORF Vienna, Pipe Records, Wiener Musik Galerie, HatHut Records and the magazine Wespennest .
The music
O Moon My Pin-Up was Koglmann's first major vocal work ; The idea came from Christian Baier , who compiled the text from the English version of Pounds Pisan Cantos and wrote the libretto . Koglmann had already become aware of the poet in his youth through the radio broadcasts of Wieland Schmied . Christoph Becher, responsible for the program of the Hörzüge festival , immediately showed an interest in it, as the general theme of the 1997 festival was music and attitude ; "Due to Pound's explosive political position [on fascism ], a pound cantata seemed ideally suited for the opening concert."
Peter Niklas Wilson pointed out how deeply Koglmann's music was shaped by his preoccupation with poetry ; "Many melodies are de facto unsung songs, wordless settings of texts by Jean Cocteau , Paul Valéry , Karl Krolow , Georg Trakl or EE Cummings , whose rhythm and melody arose directly from the internal speech of the original." Koglmann commented on the suspicion To musically evaluate Pound's political theories:
“Of course there was no intention to wash Pound away from the charge of fascism, because of the facts that would not be possible. Conversely, however, it was not a question of exposing him know-it-all, like a lesson, as the evil fascist. That would be too cheap. We do not expose and we do not teach anyone. In contrast, we bring the physical and nervous very tense state of a brilliant poet said of mental in a mild decadence marked Disciplinary Training Center expressed. Or rather: Pound brought his situation into an artistic, artificial form. I add the dimension of music. "
Ezra Pound, who had supported the fascist Mussolini as early as the 1930s and wrote inflammatory and blatantly anti-Semitic radio speeches, was indicted in absentia by an American court in 1943 for high treason. Shortly after the end of World War II , he was in 1945 in the Disciplinary Training Center interned, the near Pisa for tried by court martial GI had been set up 's. Pound was waiting in the camp to be transferred to the United States, where he was charged with high treason . First he was locked up in the open air for a few weeks in one of the three square meter "security cages". This had been reinforced with a steel grille especially for Pound; no one in the camp was allowed to speak to him. Pound had to sleep on the concrete floor and only had a piece of tar paper over his head during the day. At night he was allowed to pitch a shelter against the cold in the cage; the passage can be found in the 3rd movement of the cantata:
- “Rime comes down on your tent
- You will be very happy when the day brightens. "
As Pound's health worsened - he was attacked by acute delirium-like anxiety and lost memory - he was moved to a tent of his own on the premises of the medical station for the remainder of the time. Pound had it relatively well there; he had a camp bed, books, writing paper and a wooden box as a desk.
Pound wrote his Pisan Cantos here , “an extensive lyrical opus in which he relates personal experiences, human history and a thoroughly ideological pessimism to one another. Pound's work uses the method of content encryption, puts the lines together, works with seemingly unrelated contrasts, and lets other languages flow in over and over again. [...] So Pound uses poetic techniques that are extremely musical in their own way [...] "
Koglmann and his librettist Christian Baier used Pound's Pisan songs as text material . For this purpose, they put together passages in English from the eleven Cantos in a different order and chose “those stanzas in which the poet - at least in parts - broke through the hermeticism of his thinking, the mask-like nature of his language and into an unprecedented directness of expression, immediacy of sensation, yes an attitude of humility, ”wrote Peter Niklas Wilson. It is these new facets and new tone cases in Pound's language that fascinated Koglmann and inspired him to musically reflect. "Musical starting points" offered at different levels, most obviously in the mentions of music and sound when the poet as a violin version of Canzone reprinted a Renaissance According virtuosos (Canto LXXV) or in the image of four sitting on electricity wires birds sheet music for saw the descending motif ffdg (Canto LXXXII) . Further musical quotations resulted from the mention of swing hits. However, musical links were also not taken into account, such as references to Bach and the opera repertoire (Canto LXXX) .
For Koglmann's composition, the structure of Pound's language is more significant than its “acoustic semantics ”: “its abrupt shifting between different tones, between moments of the sublime and the profane linguistic reality of the camp, between evocations of antiquity , meditative view of nature, the angry staccato, ideological Obstinacy and serene reflections on the beautiful [...] this assemblage of the heterogeneous with its abrupt contrasts, its cinematic logic of hard cuts, flash forwards , and déjà-vus had to trigger a sympathetic response from Koglmann [...]. "
To represent the tension of Pound's expressiveness, Koglmann created with the artifice of the cantata and its allusions of the sacred and the solemn, Wilson stated: “Here the statuesque-declamatory gesture of the vocal ensemble [...] and there the soloistic counterpoint to this collective sphere of the lyric- Sublime in the form of Phil Minton: physical directness, even coarseness to the point of desert and choleric. ”Between the 'fronts', the musical mediator is the instrumental ensemble, which virtuously masters all idioms between“ difficult counterpoint , cultivated swing and fruitist eruption ”.
Wolfram Knauer describes Koglmann's complex compositional language: “It includes full-voiced orchestral parts, interlocking passages, and parts that seem almost kitschy, parallel chords. The musical mood alternates between aggressive and harmoniously conciliatory sounds. Above all, individual rhythmic motifs act like stops in the course of the almost one-hour composition. "
First movement - clouds
Already in the first movement of the cantata the described opposites collide hardest: "Rhythmically and harmonically complex instrumental textures, opulent vocal chords, jazz allusions, hysterically exaggerated vocal lines, nested motivational work, text-inspired tone painting," before the tempo calms down again.
In an interview, Koglmann described the content of the first sentence, Clouds :
“ Clouds , the first movement of the cantata, reflects the restricted communication and freedom of movement, the physical strain that Ezra Pound was exposed to during the first weeks of his imprisonment in a cage reinforced with steel bars, the so-called gorilla cage . Christian Baier intended the continuous motif of the clouds as a symbol for the longed-for connection to the outside world, as Pound perceives excerpts from the cage . "
Musically, No. 1 is based on an observation made by Pound in Canto LXXXII :
- “8th day of September
- f - f - d - g
- write the birds in their treble scale. "
Pound was referring to the birds crouching on four electric wires above death row, which he interprets as a notation system , so that the tone sequence f - f - d - g results. No. I contains the self-incriminating pounds sung by the choir:
- I'm nobody,
- My name is nobody.
At the beginning of No. II , Pound (voiced by Phil Minton ) describes the field where the prisoners were harassed, the four watchtowers and the care of a few fellow prisoners:
- “Dark sheep on the drill field and clouds on wet days
- 4 giants at the 4 corners
- three young men at the door
- and they dug a gully around me
- so that my bones don't get wet. "
The aria is introduced with a distorted guitar to express the structural aggressiveness that Pound is exposed to. The following middle section in the swing gesture (No. IIb) reproduces the conversations between guards and prisoners, which Pound overheard and mentioned in Cantos LXXIV . The choir takes part in IIb a role that traditionally him in the musical drama falls, the voice of the people, here the voice of the prisoners and their guards. Koglmann takes up elements of American popular music with a jazz reference and quotes from the jazz standards O Sweet and Lovely by Gus Arnheim and Lady, Be Good by George Gershwin , “which are definitely related to Pound, after all he liked jazz-influenced music, he wasn't happened to be friends with George Antheil , the composer of the Jazz Symphony [...]. ”.
The “anarchic improvisation spaces” of Phil Minton's voice is followed by the subtle aria of the first soprano Ursula Fiedler in the classic vocal style The Muses are daughters of memory as an antithesis to Pound, an aesthetic statement from Pound, which is followed by the Aubrey-Beardsley quote beauty is difficult , in order to start a first attempt to escape from within in the "postscript with Paradise is not artificial ."
When asked in an interview about the ironic break in the quotation "Le Paradis n'est pas artificiel" alluding to Charles Baudelaire (in his book The Artificial Paradise of 1860 , the composer extolled the delights of drugs ), the composer explained:
- “Locked up in a very small space, in a lattice cage, alone, he observes the phenomena of the sky, the small world of animals and insects. [...] Among other things, it was this perspective on the world that suggested the insight: “Le Paradis n'est pas artificiel”. [...] Pound becomes aware of his human failure, which is why there is this repeatedly flashing turning away from the artificial paradises that represent his early eccentric world in the Pisan Cantos . [...] You have to take a poet at his word, but it never seemed entirely credible to me that Pound wanted to leave behind the aesthetic principle of the artificial paradises from Baudelaire to Oscar Wilde to Cocteau [...] for good. The artist does not simply leave the world of bizarre beauties in order to mutate into a humanistic honest man. Somebody like that doesn't write innovative poems like the Cantos . This is of course a contradiction in terms, but I had to remove the pathos from this, so to speak, enlightening statement . "
Towards the end of the part, Koglmann puts in an insert in the popular big band style of that time, which reflects the musical climate of the time, as it was also present in the camp. This is followed in No. IIb-IV on swing and 1940s jazz-inspired passages through to free improvisation in the second movement.
No. IIc is determined by calm brass chords and continuous guitar eighth note movement, “which gives Tony Coes a solid grip on the tenor solo. And the various elements of III. - Fugato hints of the men's quartet (no cloud ...) , massive vocal tutti ( 20 years of dream ...) and ballad-like English horn improvisations - are framed by a veritable soprano aria, a meditation on the difficulty of the beautiful ”.
Second movement - Cassandra
The second movement of the cantata, entitled Cassandra , shows Pound as a cynical recipient of world events; allegedly on the latrine he learns the news of the end of the Second World War:
- “I stopped in the loo
- an appropriate place
- to find out that the war is over. "
The second movement: Cassandra begins and ends with the aria of the Pound Cassandra your eyes are like tigers' ... and there is no end to the journey , with small divergences in the text. In No. IV (second movement), Koglmann integrated elements from two lute pieces by Francesco Canova da Milano , "used in advance as accompanying figures, putty, ostinati, etc.". This serves as the basis for the improvisations in numbers V and VII , for which he only gave the specifications for the instrumentation (oboe, unamplified guitar, trombone and double bass). This is followed by a short, fully composed dialogue between the fellow prisoners (No. VI) , which seamlessly transfers into a second improvisation part (No. VII) , which is also based on Francesco's sheet music. Phil Minton unfolds here on the basis of a few passages in the text; his dialogue partner is Tony Coe on the clarinet, who gradually incorporates tuba, guitar and flugelhorn.
After the two improvisations, in the spring and autumn, a part of the sentence follows , which begins in a ballad-like mood, with Pound's pleading exclamation God bless the Constitution (so that she may be saved from the American government) being conspicuously aggressive, supported by a cluster of the guitar.
According to Peter Niklas Wilson, the second movement unites
- “Greatest unity and greatest openness. A concise, complex sound cipher of oboe, Bugle, bassoon and guitar and insistent rhythmic pattern of tuba , trombone and (later) guitar, by a pushed- 5 / 4 device -Stroke quasi out of step, acting unit stiftend as prelude , Ritornell and Coda , between which heterogeneous elements such as swing echoes, rock and roll quotations ( Suidice, degeneration ...) and instrumental characters - taken from Francesco da Milano's lute - are inserted. "
Third movement - Distinctions
The third movement: Distinctions is designed by Christoph Baier "based on the pattern of the baroque opera finals, that is, as a brilliant summary of what happened". The second movement bears the name of the mythical seer Kassandra , but it is only in the third movement that she appears. Pound describes it earlier in his aria:
- "Kassandra, your eyes are like those of a tiger, not a word is written in them ... no light plumbs them."
After an atmospheric double bass introduction by Barre Phillips, a soprano aria can be heard, "a simple but moving evocation of an Elizabethan lute song from the spirit of the jazz ballad."
A prophecy of Kassandra leads back to the real world:
- “ What you dearly love is permanent, the rest is slag
- What you dearly love will not be snatched away from you
- What you dearly love is your true inheritance . "
After the two verses of this song, “a kind of mechanical music” breaks the mood, and its five-bar bass figure becomes the structural framework for the entire finale. In the second part of this instrumental episode, the flugelhorn brings a flash forward of the later choral melody of a fat moon rises ... , while the vocal line from And now the ants ... on the after the rain motif from the first movement falls back.
In the sense of the intended representation of a purification of Pound, as intended by compiler Christian Baier, he finds, in alternation with the choir, “finally to a new form of humanism , to a connection with the outside world, which in a formally and rhythmically linked improvisation of pound / flugelhorn about the text Reading while the white beat of the wings of time brushes against us, isn't that bliss? The introduction to No. X is intended to express the “ inner clock pounds, his intellectual clockwork” with the text O moon my pin-up, my chronometer when he collapses after several weeks in the “gorilla cage” .
In the finale of the cantata the flow of time slows noticeably; from the point Oh moon, my pin-up the pace almost comes to a standstill; "A dreamy slow motion, the manic curdling" gives the adequate keynote of a purified Ezra Pound, de sings:
- " To have friends come from far countries
- is not that pleasure? "
The choir determines the final scene of the cantata; “In the role of the commentator on the development he leaves us with the ambiguous formulation: These are sharpnesses in clarity. "According to Christoph Baier, this sentence means that" the distance between Pound and the outside world cannot be bridged. "Carried by the five-bar ostinato of the double bass, in a kind of spoken chant , an improvisation over the last lines of text these are distinctions of clarity , the vocal ensemble dissolves.
reception
Wolfram Knauer wrote on the occasion of the world premiere of the cantata in 1997 in the Jazz Podium : “Koglmann's music is as always impressive. As a parallel to Pound one might emphasize the complexity that arises in the interrelationships between [Phil] Minton, the instrumentalists and the vocal ensemble (in that order). The fact that one hardly understands the text is not a problem: as with Pound, with Koglmann it is not so much about making clear statements but rather about working out an atmospheric picture made up of many details, beautiful and kitschy and ugly and aggressive. Further interpretations of the content are only hinted at in the program text, which indicates that Pound is controversial between avant-garde art and fascist ideology. "
In his essay Music and Politics - Notes on Frank Koglmann's Ezra Pound Cantata, Bernhard Kraller emphasizes the basic idea of the cantata of trying to “attempt an artfully and cryptically arranged whole from fragmentarily compiled passages of the Pisan Cantos . [...] The logic of the libretto is the logic of purification. "However, in the Pisan songs are hard to find sites that appeal to for this view, have Christian Baier them out of the woven metaphorical natural observations and very modest increases Versgebilde and derived from the sayings of the prisoners and guards quoted by Pound. This also led to the use of the figure of the mythical seer Kassandra (which Pound introduced in Canto LXXVIII in connection with the Potsdam Conference 1945 ) - "for the interpretation of the individual fate of the guilty poet".
What attracts Koglmann to Pound is "the poet's innovative genius and the aura of dissidence". Koglmann had "never intended to accuse Pound with music-dramatic means, even though he evokes a series of musical impressions that ironically parry central statements in the pisaner cantos ." He had "emphasized several times that it was not his intention either To put the cantata in the service of an instructive morality. ”So with his setting he is useful
- “The morally indifferent phenomenon of art ( Peter Gorsen ), but he also works with the moment of lustful agreement with his hero. He depicts him without aesthetically worshiping him, but still in such a way that the listener is not denied enjoyable aesthetic appropriation. From this, however, it cannot be inferred that whoever sets Pound to music would inevitably affirm his political attitudes, which, in a nebulous and concrete manner, also form the foundation of the Cantos . "
Steve Loewy gave the album 4½ stars in Allmusic . The work, designed as a serious work of art, combines "elements from opera , classical music and jazz improvisation in order, if not to produce a synthesis, at least a calculated relaxation between apparently disparate elements". Loewy praised both the “great production and the beautifully designed book with its informative comments.” With his Pipetet, Koglmann had succeeded in an outstanding musical interpretation of part of the Pisan songs by Ezra Pound. The success of this project is not only due to the great musicians, such as Phil Minton as pound reciter, woodwind player Tony Coe and double bassist Barre Phillips , but also to the band leader, trumpeter and composer Koglmann. Even if the jazz element is less than in other Koglmann productions, it is an important work of 20th century culture.
In their review, Richard Cook and Brian Morton highlight the extraordinary contributions of Phil Minton (stroke of a genius) and the great choir accompaniment.
Peter Niklas Wilson sums up:
- “With O Moon My Pin-Up , Koglmann's creative composition has undoubtedly gained in wealth. From the synthesis of cool jazz idioms and Viennese school expressionism, which has been characteristic since the foundation of the Pipetet , over the years a microcosm of manifold structural references to the whole (occidental) world of music between Renaissance and improvised music has grown, which is the coordinates of historical Third Stream transcended - not to mention the new dimensions that opening up the vowel for Koglmann's music brings with it. O Moon My Pin-Up is not a musical 'judgment' about Ezra Pound, it is neither condemnation nor apology, but rather a sensitive, relational listening to the fragile polyphony of language levels and intonations in Pound's poetry at the time of the existential crisis that immediately is linked to the political events of the end of the war. "
Philippe Méziat commented on the release of the album's second edition in 2001:
- “Musically you can classify it between jazz, which is called Cool or West Coast , the Vienna School, the music of the Renaissance and the current practices of improvised music - but not too much! Franz Koglmann is a kind of André Hodeir , who on the one hand doesn't really practice the choppy twelve-tone music , but on the other hand has no inhibitions towards improvisers like Phil Minton. One thinks of Berio , sometimes of Carla Bley , even for a brief moment of Kurt Weill , it is definitely more original than it initially appears, that is pleasantly good to listen to, even partly understandable, in any case, it is closed recommend, but you need attention, a sure instinct, care ... [...] "
In the same year, Bill Shoemaker expressed himself somewhat more critically in JazzTimes :
- "Occasionally, however, Koglmann's music poses profound intellectual challenges. His most disturbing recording to date is the newly issued O Moon My Pin-Up (hatOLOGY), a 1997 cantata based on Ezra Pound's The Pisan Cantos, which were written when the notorious poet was caged in the waning months of World War II for collaborating with Mussolini ’s regime via his fascist speeches on Italian radio. Employing prickly Viennese modernism, Koglmann's score for octet (which includes sterling improvisers like Coe and bassist Barre Phillips), eight-person chorus and solo voice is thoroughly harrowing. Singer Phil Minton's portrayal of Pound, a genius undone by anti-semitism and a fixation with fascism, who spewed doggerel one moment and sang transcendent verse the next, is a tour de force. Yet Koglmann refrains from judging Pound — a denial of resolution that intensifies and complicates the listening experience. "
Track list
- Franz Koglmann: O Moon My Pin-Up - hat [now] ART 133 (1998), hatOLOGY 566 (2001)
1 Introduction - 0:55 (O moon my pin-up)
First Movement, Clouds
2 I - 1:56 (The enormous tragedy of the dream)
3 II A - 1:51 (after the rain)
4 II B - 1:34 ("goddam motherfucking generals")
5 II C - 2: 13 (Cloud over mountain, mountain over the cloud)
6 III - 4:41 (The muses are daughters of memory)
Second Movement, Cassandra
7 IV - 3:37 (Bright dawn on the shit house)
8 V - 4:36 (Improvisation on Canto LXXV)
9 VI - 0:44 ("Hey Snag, what's in the bibl '?")
10 VII - 5:10 (improvisation on Canto LXXV)
11 VIII - 1:44 (in the spring and autumn)
Third Movement, Distinctions
12 IX - 5:33 (What thou lovest well remains)
13 X - 9:08 (This liquid is certainly a property of the mind)
Text: Ezra Pound, The Pisan Cantos LXXIV-LXXXIV ; Compilation Christian Baier
Music: Franz Koglmann
literature
- Ezra Pound: The Pisan Cantos . New York, New Directions, 1948.
- Ezra Pound: The Pisan Chants . Complete edition. Transferred by Eva Hesse . Zurich, Arche, 1956.
- Richard Cook , Brian Morton : The Penguin Guide to Jazz on CD . 6th edition. Penguin, London 2002, ISBN 0-14-051521-6 .
- At the intersection of jazz and modern classical music. Bernhard Kraller in conversation with Franz Koglmann. In: Bernhard Kraller (Ed.): Franz Koglmann: O Moon My Pin-Up . Wasp's Nest, 1999 ISBN 3-85458-302-8
- Bernhard Kraller: Music and Politics - Notes on Frank Koglmann's Ezra Pound Cantata . In: Bernhard Kraller (Ed.): Franz Koglmann: O Moon My Pin-Up . Vienna, Wasp Nest, 1998
- Peter Niklas Wilson: The difficulty of the beautiful . In: Bernhard Kraller (Ed.): Franz Koglmann: O Moon My Pin-Up . Vienna, Wasp Nest, 1998
Web links
- Review of Steve Loewy's album O Moon My Pin-Up on Allmusic . Retrieved May 30, 2012.
- O Moon My Pin-Up at Discogs (English)
Individual evidence
- ↑ a b c d e At the intersection of jazz and modern classical music. Bernhard Kraller in conversation with Franz Koglmann. In: Franz Koglmann: O Moon My Pin-Up , p. 60
- ↑ a b Peter Niklas Wilson, The Difficulty of the Beautiful , p. 9
- ↑ At the intersection of jazz and modern classical music. Bernhard Kraller in conversation with Franz Koglmann. In: Franz Koglmann: O Moon My Pin-Up , p. 69
- ↑ a b c d e Cf. Wolfram Knauer : "O Moon My Pin-Up" - intimate music and world premiere by Franz Koglmann. In: Jazz Podium . No. 5, 1997, p. 29.
- ↑ a b c d e f g At the intersection of jazz and modern classical music. Bernhard Kraller in conversation with Franz Koglmann. In: Franz Koglmann: O Moon My Pin-Up , p. 62
- ↑ a b c d e f Peter Niklas Wilson, The difficulty of the beautiful , p. 10
- ↑ At the intersection of jazz and modern classical music. Bernhard Kraller in conversation with Franz Koglmann. In: Franz Koglmann: O Moon My Pin-Up , p. 68
- ↑ In fact, he did not come to Pisa until May 24th.
- ↑ a b c At the intersection of jazz and modern classical music. Bernhard Kraller in conversation with Franz Koglmann. In: Franz Koglmann: O Moon My Pin-Up , p. 70 f.
- ↑ At the intersection of jazz and modern classical music. Bernhard Kraller in conversation with Franz Koglmann. In: Franz Koglmann: O Moon My Pin-Up , p. 74
- ↑ a b c d e f At the intersection of jazz and modern classical music. Bernhard Kraller in conversation with Franz Koglmann. In: Franz Koglmann: O Moon My Pin-Up , p. 76 f.
- ^ A b c Wilson: The difficulty of the beautiful . P. 11.
- ↑ a b Kraller, Music and Politics, p. 81
- ↑ Kraller, Music and Politics, p. 82
- ↑ Review of Steve Loewy's album O Moon My Pin-Up at Allmusic . Retrieved May 30, 2012.
- ↑ Richard Cook & Brian Morton: The Penguin Guide To Jazz on CD . (8th ed.) Penguin, London 2006, ISBN 0-14-051521-6 . P. 753
- ↑ In the original: “ Voilà. Musicalement, cela se tient entre le jazz qu'on dit cool ou West Coast , l'école de Vienne, la musique de la Renaissance et les pratiques actuelles de la musique improvisée - mais pas trop. Franz Koglmann est donc une sorte d ' André Hodeir qui n'aurait pas vraiment de réticences vis à vis du dodécaphonisme, ni de réserves à l'égard des improvisateurs déjantés, façon Phil Minton. On songe à Berio , à Carla Bley parfois, même à Kurt Weill en de brefs instants, c'est finalement plus original qu'il n'y paraît au premier abord, cela s'écoute bien, cela s'entend même en bonne part , enfin c'est à conseiller voyez-vous, mais enfin il y faut de l'attention, du doigté, de la caresse ... Adeptes de l'énergie à tout crin, craignez. Amoureux de la broderie, brodez. "
- ↑ http://www.citizenjazz.com/Franz-Koglmann.html Citizen Jazz Review of the Philippe Méziat album in Citizen Jazz 2011
- ^ Review of Bill Shoemaker's album in JazzTimes 2001
- ^ Edition in the book published by Wespennest