Words and Music. Siliziumherz
‚My faithful ones! Make up!‘
Samuel Beckett, Words and Music
It is the rhythm that creates the structure
The interaction between words and music can generate a new genre. Not the spoken pop song. Not the musically underlaid word experiment. Rather referring to the audiobook Siliziumherz it is the art form ‘Tonbilder’ as we call the rhythms shaped by voice and composition in which words become tones and sounds become words.
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The rhythm sets the pace in repeating similar segments, while the interplay of both elements, words and music, creates pictorial narrative structures. Thus, small radio plays and historical dramas (Karthago; Mehrfach übermalt) are lined up with moments of elegiac sentiments (Museum Erde. Magazine). And word cascades of complaint, reclamation, declaration (Siliziumherz; Katze. Kupiert; Der verbannte Fuchs) follow soft tones or a spoken chorus whose powerful words seem like a ritual conjuring and tuning into contradiction and agreement. (Graffiti; Im Orchestergraben; Die Indianerfrau).
The transformation of the circle over time
Line breaks within the poems and lyric prose adapt to the altering words for time and space like a Möbiusian word band, giving the impression that subject and object are continuously oscillating through shifts in perspective and meaning. All this finds its congenial correspondence in the inventive improvisations of the musical compositions.
At times the ‘Tonbilder’ appear like haunting echoes from the depths of our subconscious, or like audible soliloquies that appear and disappear (Graffiti). And then again acoustic flashes can reveal the urge to overcome the indescribable (Das Orakel).
When several voice-modulations and sound sequences overlap while breaking symmetries and repeat themselves in loops, leitmotif-like themes emerge: for example, our bonds with nature, its beauty and transience (Prélude. Après) or our conflict between inner turmoil and moments of happiness (Pan ist nicht tot).
Composition, poems, lyrical prose and voice, they all consist of musical elements and claim their own right. First and foremost, however, it is the voice with its special expressive power as an instrument and inspiration for both words and music that shapes the art form of Tonbilder in Siliziumherz.
© Rosemarie Zens
in: Booklet of the audio book Siliziumherz, Berlin 2003. Reprint 2022
to the audiobook „Siliziumherz“