LOADBANG: LAND OF SILENCE Announced At Goethe-Institut Boston
Featuring compositions for baritone voice, bass clarinet, trumpet and trombone by Reiko Füting, Helmut Oehring, Eva-Maria Houben, Artur Kroschel, and Andy Kozar.
By: A.A. Cristi Feb. 15, 2024
The Goethe-Institut Boston invites New York City based contemporary music quartet loadbang in a program titled Land of Silence.
Called ‘inventive' by the New York Times and ‘a formidable new-music force' by TimeOutNY, loadbang will be performing music for the ensemble by German composers including Reiko Füting, Helmut Oehring, Eva-Maria Houben, Artur Kroschel, and the ensemble's trumpeter Andy Kozar.
The program will be book-ended by two works by Reiko Füting, a long-time collaborator of the ensemble. Land of Silence, set to texts by the German poet Kathleen Furthmann, simultaneously treats the instrumentalists as vocalists and the vocalist as an instrumentalist, linguistic and pitched material trading bodies from player to player. mo(nu)ment for C was written as a series of palimpsest pieces by Füting in which two pieces happen simultaneously, different, but necessarily related. This particular piece, inspired by sculptures of American artist Dan Flaven, exists in two forms: loadbang alone (which will be heard at this concert), and loadbang with string orchestra.
Much of Helmut Oehring's output is informed by his upbringing as a hearing child to two deaf parents and SunRise Song for 4 is no exception. Setting his own poetry, this piece is delicate and intimate, the text and instrumental writing presented at the edge of audibility, and the audience is forced to move forward in their seats to witness the conversation. Halfway by Artur Kroschel is a musical exploration of the act of hesitating and the difficulty of decision making, while the Wandelweiser Group composer Eva-Maria Houben's echo fantasy V sets the ensemble up with very simple instructions which result in a rich and complex set of interactions between the 4 voices. Andy Kozar's Goodnight. for loadbang and electronics is a setting of a translation of Wilhelm Müller's Gutenacht, famously set by Franz Schubert in his 1827 masterpiece Wintereisse. Though the electronics are comprised of elements of Schubert's original work, the instrumental and vocal writing is disoriented and disjunct, as if looking through this original work through a modernist kaleidoscope.
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