musica viva of BR | Ensemble Modern Orchestra| Vimbayi Kaziboni | Heiner Goebbels

Commissioned by Ensemble Modern, Berliner Festspiele/ Musikfest Berlin, Elbphilharmonie Hamburg, musica viva/ Bayerischer Rundfunk, Kölner Philharmonie, Wien Modern/ Wiener Konzerthaus and beuys2021. The Munich guest performance is made possible by the Ernst von Siemens Music Foundation.

The Ensemble Modern Orchestra had already included an orchestral work by Heiner Goebbels in the programme of its founding tour in 1998. Now, on the initiative of the Musikfest Berlin and the Ensemble Modern, the composer is writing a new cycle for the Frankfurt orchestra for the Beethoven Year 2020.

"A House of Call. My Imaginary Notebook" is a four-part cycle with compositions in which the Ensemble Modern Orchestra will respond to voices that Heiner Goebbels has preserved in an imaginary notebook; voices that he came across during projects, journeys, encounters or in archives - sometimes by chance - and which now return and 'set the tone' with their own sounds and languages: Dialogues, incantations, prayers, invocations, calls, speech acts or songs. They are unmistakable, 'peculiar' voices that now, usually for the first time, have their say on a concert stage. The musicians of the orchestra respond to them, individually or collectively, like the choir in a 'responsorium': they comment, interrupt, support and contradict.

In many of Heiner Goebbels' works the attraction of absent, acousmatic voices plays an important role; whether in 1981 on his first single "Berlin Kudamm 12.4.81" (1981), in the "Chaconne / Kantorloops" from "Surrogate Cities" (1994), in the performance "Stifters Dinge" (2007), the sound installation "Genko An" (2008ff.) or in his radio plays. In "A House of Call" the voices become the protagonists of an entire concert for the first time.