Black on White

FINANCIAL TIMES (27.August 2003)
Schwarz auf Weiß
Lucerne Festival
Heiner Goebbels's Schwarz auf Weiss pays homage to the German writer Heiner Müller, who died in 1995. Yet a work more unlike a conventional requiem would be hard to imagine. In this experimental music-theatre piece, the instrumentalists - 18 members of the Ensemble Modern from Cologne - are the actors, and they discharge their theatrical duties with the same considerable eslan they bring to the music. At the outset, as the players straggle on stage, a solo bassoon is heard, soon to be joined by other instruments in good-natured cacophony. After a while; the musicians regroup, therebiy setting a pattern for a work consisting of short episodes, each with a musical and dramatic idea. In one, the players throw tennis balls at a bass drum and a sheet off metal, with good shots rewarded sonically. Most impressively, the versatile musicians rarely had printed notes before them. From time to time readings fron Müller, Edgar Allan Pce amd Maurice Blanchot blended into the wide-ranging sonorities. It was all engaging, but one wondered where it would lead. Happily Goebbels didn't run out of steam, and some of the best moments of the 70-minute work came toward the end. A woman serenely plucks out a melody on a koto (a Japanese instrument) whilie a battery of noisy brass players menacingly stalk her; gradually their music turns more amiable, thougth punctuated by saxophone utterances that rank among the most superbly wretched sounds I've ever heard from a musical instrument. Another woman repeatedlyr declaims John Webster's lines quoted in T.S. Eliot's The Wasteland: "That corpse you planted last year in the garden, / Has it begun to sprout?" in an ever more frantic crescendo. The close finds all the musicians witih violins, quietly bouncing the bows off the strings.
(George Loomis)

ANDANTE.COM, August 2001
Black on White
Between Bertolt Brecht and le jazz hot, Antonin Artaud and Louis Andriessen, Bernstein's Mass and the proverbial "kitchen sink" lies German composer/theater artist Heiner Goebbels. The Lincoln Center Festival's presentation of Black on White was a completely involving evening of non-linear music theater, never pretentious or artsier-than-thou - and this is no easy trick.
It's an interesting notion: compose a work in which the orchestra (in this case, more like a sinfonietta) does more than the usual assemble-play-leave routine - in other words, make them "characters" in a "drama." As the lights dimmed, the sound of a stylus scratching on parchment was heard while a mysterious, elegant voice intoned in German a gothic text by Edgar Allen Poe and the band filed in to form a tableau vivant on a row of benches that vaguely resembled a locker room. The first bits of music in the piece are a good example of Goebbels' use of disparate elements: the ensemble plays wild and loud unisons over steady jazz-kit drumming, leading to a New Orleans brass band stomp. The piece was full of such strange and powerful moments - yet things never became frivolous or out of control.
Amidst the extravagance were moments of pure, quiet beauty: an achingly melodic piccolo solo (accompanied by a boiling teapot); an elegant section where a koto player ritually assembled her instrument, only to have the rest of the ensemble, all playing brass instruments, fiendishly converge on her; the entire cast playing violins in eerie pantomime; sampled cantorial singing; choral repetition of the words "And a dead weight hung upon us" in the fashion of a jazzy funeral dirge. These moments of repose were well balanced against the more quirky parts to create something that was thought through and complete.
Goebbels' score is skilled and precise, ranging from hot jazz to traditional atonal music to heavy metal rock (after a fashion) to just about everything else; this is pluralism at its most plural, but done with heart and class. The rock element is definitely not the sign of a composer's midlife crisis: Goebbels incorporates it with the taste and panache of an enthusiastic musical collector - it is entirely genuine, never predictable, and always theatrically germane. Black on White is also (perhaps surprisingly) completely notated: listening to the CD (on BMG, but sadly out of print at this writing) gives an accurate account of what will happen in the live performance. Even though the "actors" hurl tennis balls against an amplified thunder sheet, play instruments that are not their own, leap to microphones to deliver poetry, etc., this well-wrought work contains very little improvisation.
The true "star" of Black on White is the Ensemble Modern. They were involved in the creation of this piece, and it shows in things aside from their musicianship such as oboist Catherine Milliken's ferocious, sexy delivery of T. S. Eliot and violist Susan Knight's impressive throwing arm. Though not an overt political statement, composing this piece for a collective (Ensemble Modern is a truly democratic organization, without an artistic director) reflects the composer's politically active past, adding an autobiographical edge.
If there is a proscribed way an artist ought to behave in the 21st century, Heiner Goebbels has captured it. Unlike much avant-twaddle, Black on White is a whole piece of music which comes alive in performance, rather than an unsatisfying performance-art piece which wears its own incomprehensibility like a badge of honor. Getting the musicians out of their chairs is not a new idea (Haydn's "Farewell" Symphony is an early precursor), but to do something like this and have it not come off as a rough-hewn free-for-all is nothing short of wizardry. With Black on White, Heiner Goebbels is the wizard behind the curtain - and we should pay attention.
(Daniel Felsenfeld)

THE GUARDIAN, 03.07.1999
Masterly memorial
Black on White
Barbican Theatre, London
*****
Heiner Goebbels' Black On White is a defining achievement in contemporary music, one of those rare works that reorders our perception of what music theatre is and what it can be.
It seemed extraordinary and unclassifiable when the Ensemble Modern, for whom the piece was written and who realise it with a virtuosity and commitment that are sometimes hard to believe, introduced it to the Edinburgh Festival two years ago. The London premiere on Thursday demonstrated that it has lost very little of that power to amaze and enchant. Unsurprisingly perhaps, the show is a little less slick that before - tonight's performance at the Barbican will be the 50th the Ensemble has given - but it is still unique.
Black on White operates on several planes. On one level it is a memorial to the German dramatist and director Heiner Mueller, a close collaegue of Goebbels, who died while composition was in progress. Mueller's recorded voice is heard at several points during the 70-minute work reading from an Edgar Allan Poe short story, which is one of the elements binding the structure together. Leading on from the tribute, it becomes an exploration of the whole business of creativity, too, of putting black on white - words on paper as Mueller did, notes on staves as Goebbels does.
But most allusively of all, the whole relationship of instrumental performance to dramatic gesture is redefined. The musicians are required to do many other things besides playing their instruments superbly: they play skittles with brass mutes, use the lid of a harpsichord as a chequerboard, throw tennis balls at a metal sheet. The soundworld combines conventional music - driving bass riffs, delirious instrumental breaks and bluesy laments - with the sounds of the surreal byplay; at one point the piccolo player solemny fills a whistling kettle with water and brings it to boil, before playing a intricate little solo around the sound of its whistle.
There is a whole emotional world there, with moments of menace and moments of eloquent stillness. The ending is heartstopping: to the sound of a Japanese Koto strummed by a swinging pendulum, the ensemble makes a silent salute to Mueller's memory. Catch it while you can. Black On White is a masterpiece.
(Andrew Clements)

REALTIME 24, April/May 1998
Music as Theatre
Black on White
Heiner Goebbels, Ensemble Modern
Adelaide Festival, March 12
In Black on White, subtitled 'a musical play', professional musicians in ordinary dress occasionally form a static ensemble, but often they are on the move, choreographed across a vast space into small and large groups, playing while standing, while walking, sometimes oddly seated (crouched over keyboards or their backs to us), singing, changing instruments, taking turns at conducting and at speaking. This is musical performance as theatre. The music is in large part committed to memory, save the moments when the musicians carry small score sheets with them, rest them on the rows of benches that fill the space, stick them on their instruments, leave them behind.
Black on White begins with an almost empty stage. A musician draws a glass across an autoharp, another arranges a pendulum to casually strike the strings of an electric guitar laid across a bench. Black on White also begins with the sound of writing, an amplified pen scratching across paper, and the murmur of a voice. Other musicians enter, the playing apperently informal, but fast assuming shape as they also 'play' - a dice game, bat and ball, the throwing of soft balls at amplified gong and bass drum - and then transforms into a powerful united ensemble.
Later the sound of pen against paper recurs. A wall of paper receives projections and shadows (echoing the Edgar Allen Poe Shadow text) until it crumples later to reveal double the performing space through which almost the entire ensemble will march across the bench tops like a brass band (for this work they all learned to play brass instruments). One 'proscenium arch' midway down the space falls floating as if in slow motion to the floor raising dust and scattering score sheets left on benches. The flautist sets fire to the paper that held his tea bag before his Debussyian duet with whistling kettle; as the paper burns it takes off up over him, sparking and disintegrating. Huge washes of light flare up, reframing the music, the space, the play with the acoustic. Many of the instruments are amplified but the play of near and far, especially in the 'brass band' and solo koto exchange, is fully exploited. Fluorescent lights flicker up from beneath every bench, lengthening the space. A light is dragged slowly along the floor by its power cord throwing up travelling shadows of the benches as giant tables.
Musicians read Poe (the trumpeter alternating his playing with reading), Eliot, Blanchot aloud, the recorded voice of the late Heiner Mueller fills the space, a violinist screams into the microphone over the bridge to complete a musical line. Different musics compete and coalesce, hard against soft, form against form - a saxophonist wails with be-bop intensity against a wall of elegiac brass, snapping to silence as the first proscenium falls. The world of Black on White is of words on paper, notes on score sheets, shadows on a paper screen, musicians against shifting white light. Paper crumples, burns, falls , prosceniums collapse, notes disintegrate. In the final darkness violins creak and twitch and fade. Not a few thought this the performance of the festival.
The Ensemble Modern perform unselfconsciously and with an ease that belies their considerable task. In a generous two hour illustrated talk (to be reported in RealTime 25), Heiner Goebbels told us that having been commissioned by the Ensemble Modern to create a work for them he went to the first week's workshop without a note in his head and asked them what they couldn't do or hadn't done. By the end of that week he knew what he would create with them.
(KG)

THE TIMES, 01.09.1997
Dazzled by the future
At last here is progressive music that makes sense
Sometimes, alas too rarely, a critic stumbles across a new work that is so ingeniously conceived, so mesmerising, so far ahead of the rest of the field, that the only immediate response is a dropped jaw, a dazed grin and a gulped croak of 'bravo'. I entered the Royal Lyceum with no great expectations of Black on White, a 'music theatre piece for 18 players' written last year by the 45-year-old German composer, Heiner Goebbels. Seventy-five thrilling minutes later I staggered out with renewed faith in the musical avant-garde. Once every decade or so, the progressives do actually manage to make a bit of significant progress. I gues that Black on White is it for the Nineties.
On a stage packed with dozens of bare benches, the players are required to be both conventional musicians and unconventional actors in a series of enigmatic tableux. Some are funny and quirky. There is a marvellous hard-driven rock opening, for instance, with half the instrumentalists playing the music and the other half playing mad games of badminton, skittles and dice.
Some are whimsical and poignant, such as the scene in which a lonely piccolo player concocts a haunting lament while waiting for his kettle to boil. And others are downright menacing: there is a terrifying moment when an entire brass band advances on the audience, bench by bench, while repeatedly hammering out two baleful chords.
Described in this piecemeal fashion, Black on White probably sounds like some born-again Sixties frolic. But running through the work, unifying it and giving it richness and direction, is a thread of dark and deep elegy. Black on White was written as a memorial for the German theatre director and writer Heiner Mueller, and a recording of Mueller reading Edgar Allan Poe's morbid parable, Shadow, is a recurring feature.
Time and again in Black on White some striking musical or visual image of mechanistic brutality is conjured up, only for a single player - a wailing saxophone, say, or a bluesy trumpeter - to rise above it with a fierce or tender assertion of individuality. The metaphor is left deliberately open-ended: it could be a rebel making a political stand against oppressive conformity; or the creative artist raging against the dying of the light: or the human spirit transcending some crushing misery or terror. But when, near the end, the entire ensemble sits in silence and watches a metal pendulum, suspended from the stage roof, eerily strum back and forth across the strings of a Japanese Koto, the feeling of being drawn into some timeless ritual of mourning is overwhelming.
To evoke such intense emotional states Goebbels draws on a huge range of musical styles: everything from big-band jazz and Hungarian-style cimbalom music to African chant and appearances by a didgeridoo and an air-raid siren. His staging is no less eclectic, mixing classic Expressionist effects - shadows, silhouettes, bare bulbs - with stunning group scenes in which the musical ensemble moves with the precision of a well-drilled ballet company.
In less competent hands, such a collision of disparate elements would be a mess. But this synthesis of music, mime, lighting, projection, speech and electronic sound is marshalled with dazzling assurance. And executed - by the magnificently versatile players of the Frankfurt-based Ensemble Modern - with the total conviction that comes from having lived with the composer through the creation of the work.
The trouble with presenting such a piece on the final two nights of the Edinburgh Festival is that it makes much of what has gone before sound desperately hackneyed. Especially other pieces of new music! [...]
(Richard Morrison)

THE SCOTSMAN, 30.08.1997
This will make you change the way you look at the orchestra for ever
It's pure dead brilliant
Figures sit astride benches in what appears to be a deserted lecture hall. They have instruments and make strange papery noises. More join them, busy, elegant, swift moving people with bassoons, a drum, a sheet of music. (disgraceful, snaps outraged from Barnton in the row behind. 'They hustled us in here saying it was starting... they haven't even finished the rehearsal.')
A voice begins to read text - Heiner Mueller, intoning Edgar Allen Poe's parable Shadow. We move, via voices, movement, light, invention and dreams, through shifting landscapes where the colour in the music daubs monochrome walls of shapes and stark shafts of light. Musicians speak and make secret sounds.
The elegance has the sudden fragrance of a slap of style on the catwalk, the playing, in startling bursts of chamber ensemble and solos ehich slither and stretch like lines from a sonnet, has breathtaking assurance in jazz, Japanese jangle and fugue of baroque complexity.
Twenty-three tiny scenes flow seemlessly; they have titles in the programme, grave pointers towards earnest sections of prose, but also veiled clues to what one might expect. Toccato for Teapot and Piccolo is just that - but more wonderful than any might expect. The respect for the chosen text is, in fact, unflinching, the music, in the way that it transcends any possibility of comparison - it is, in fact, a fusion which celebrates rather than reflects any language of our time - is bewitching.
So Heiner Goebbels' Black on White will change the way you feel and think, will cause you never again to worry about the future of the orchestra, but to recoil in fright at how easily, in recent years, we have accepted and affirmed the cosy etiquette of the concert hall.
It would be unfair to describe in dogged or euphoric words the freefalling cleverness - no, brilliance - of the ideas, the charm and intelligence of this extraordinary piece. Simply it will make you feel well.
Beware of falling scenery and preconceptions and take everyone from telecentric child to liberated grandmother. Ensemble Modern, young, beautiful and some of them British, will gift you glimpses of desperate seriousness and remarkable joy. And whoever is complaining in the row behind, they're likely to hug you by 8.45 pm.
(Mary Miller)