One week from today, ECM New Series will release its latest album of the work of Heiner Goebbels. The full title of the recording is A House of Call - My Imaginary Notebook. This is a four-movement composition for large orchestra, which also incorporates recordings of sounds and voices from all over the world. All of those sources were collected by Goebbels himself during travels, research, and chance encounters. As can be expected, Amazon.com has created a Web page for processing pre-orders of this new release.
The Ensemble Modern Orchestra is conducted by Vimbayi Kaziboni; but, for the most part, the orchestra instruments basically provide a backdrop that facilitates listening to the rich diversity of concrete sounds that Goebbels collected for this project. The titles of the four movements draw upon three different languages. The first movement is entitled “Stein Schere Papier,” which we know in English as the game “Stone, Scissors, Paper.” The second movement draws upon a phrase coined by Roland Barthes, whose academic pursuits resist any single category. The title is “Grain de la Voix” (grain of the voice), which Barthes associated with a concept he called the “sung writing of language.” The third movement, “Wax and Violence” refers to those wax cylinders, which served as the first medium of audio recording. The title of the final movement is “When Words Gone,” which accounts for those utterances that extend beyond semantics, such as speech acts, rhyming, lamentation, and incantation. Taken as a whole, Goebbels’ undertaking could just as easily be described as anthropology, rather than the composition of music.
Back in my days as a researcher for Fuji Xerox, about fifteen years ago, I undertook a deep dive into Barthes’ writings, as well as those of his contemporaries, such as Paul de Man and Jacques Derrida. It did not take me long to realize just how limited the mathematical foundation of “information theory” was. When I added Jürgen Habermas to the mix, I realized that those of us in the world of technology were seriously limited by a strictly objective perspective. Clearly, communication had a subjective dimension, as well as the objective; and, to go beyond the individual mind, there was also a social dimension.
Subjectivity clearly thrives when it comes to making music. One might almost say that both the creation of music and its performance may be grounded on an objective foundation, but it is only through subjectivity that the music tweaks the mind of the attentive listener. The social dimension then comes into the picture because, even if the performance is that of a soloist, there is still the relationship between performer and listener to take into account.
The booklet for A House of Call beings with an introductory essay by Goebbels, given the title “My imaginary notebook.” The crux of his thoughts can be found in a single-sentence paragraph:
A House of Call is not a scientific media archive, but a phonographic collection from my imaginary notebook, which does not follow a systematic approach, but whose sources have emerged from many journeys, chance encounters, scattered research on artistic project, sometimes also on projects that were never fully realized.
It would probably be overly reductive to say that, in listening to A House of Call, that one sentence is all you need to know. Nevertheless, I would argue that the composition, taken in its entirety, leads the listener on a journey through the social dimension that is decidedly unlike just about any other experience of listening to music. I suspect that many listeners may initially feel uncertain about taking such a journey. I would encourage them to at least consider taking a “leap of faith” in experiencing the work that Goebbels has created. Perhaps the best guidance can be found in one of the most familiar couplets by T. S. Eliot:
Oh, do not ask, “What is it?”
Let us go and make our visit.
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