HEINER GOEBBELS Stifters Dinge

It's hard to describe Heiner Goebbels' homage to the Austrian writer Adalbert Stifter (1805-1868), whose descriptions of the natural world have been admired by generations of writers – from Rainer Maria Rilke and Thomas Mann to WH Auden and Marianne Moore. When it was first presented in Lausanne in 2007 Goebbels categorised Stifters Dinge (Stifter's Things) as a "performative installation"; it came to London the following year. The "performance" comes from five grand pianos, all played in different mechanical ways and forming part of a set that, in the course of an hour, inches menacingly towards the audience across tanks of inky black liquid only to retreat again. The pianos stumble out repeated morse-like signals, Nancarrow-style cascades of notes and the slow movement from Bach's Italian Concerto, while samples of industrial noise, ethnographic recordings, interviews with Claude Lévi-Strauss and Malcolm X, and readings from William S Burroughs and Stifter himself play in the background. It's a typical Goebbels collage and typically, too, all the elements somehow cohere. Even on disc it's mysterious and compelling.

HEINER GOEBBELS Surrogate Cities

Commissioned to mark the 20th anniversary of the Junge Deutsche Philharmonie and the 1200th anni-versary of the city of Frankfurt. “Surrogate Cities” is one of German composer and music-theatre innovator Heiner Goebbels’ most far-reaching projects. The work is an examination of the “concrete jungle” in all its complexity, its positive and negative ramifications, its past and present. It is about the dynamic power and the power dynamics of the city. Heiner Goebbels: “Surrogate Cities“ is an attempt to approach the phenomenon of the city from various sides, to tell stories of cities, expose oneself to them, observe them; it is material about metropolises that has accumulated over the course of time. The work was inspired partly by texts, but also by drawings, structures and sounds, the jux-taposition of orchestra and sampler playing a considerable role because of the latter’s ability to store sounds and noises occasionally alien to orchestral sonorities... My intention was not to produce a close-up but to try and read the city as a text and to translate something of its mechanics and archi-tecture into music.

“When it comes to the power dynamics of the city, the individual is always the more vulnerable party. Art rebels against this overpowering structure by strengthening the subjective element. Composers usually justify what they write by saying that they need to get it out of their system. This is only partly true for me. I try to gain a bit more distance: I construct something that confronts the audience, and the audience reacts to it, discovering in the music a space they can enter complete with their associations and ideas.”