Belenish Moreno-Gil & Óscar Escudero

Musicologist Michael Zwenzner in conversation with Belenish Moreno-Gil & Óscar Escudero.

MZ: For a beginning, would you just shortly introduce yourself? Tell us in what ways you have been collaborating in your music theater works of recent years, but also specifically within this project now?

 

BM: My name is Belenish Moreno-Gil. I am a post-composer and also a musicologist. And since 2018, I have been working with Oscar in tandem. We have been working on this piece for like the last 3 or 4 months. And maybe, Oscar, you want to introduce yourself?

 

OE: Yes, I am Oscar Escudero. I can say my educational background is very classical. I studied oboe and composition in Zaragoza, in Spain, and then a master’s in composition between Denmark and Austria. And we found out since we started collaborating that we were exploring hybrid ways to face performance. Of course, the field of music theater, »Musiktheater« in German–because it means different things in each language–is something that we feel very comfortable with because it’s a never ending speculation. We are also dealing with one of our favorite topics, which is technology and of course its impact on bodies on stage and in data.

 

MZ: We will come back to the specific setup of the piece later on. Before we get to that, I would like to ask you a more general question first. You might agree that that we are living in rather dark times. And I would like to ask you: how do you both deal with this as composers and artists? Is there any intentional relationship between what you do artistically and what you experience in daily life, or is it just rather by chance, or do you think you are just creating a counter universe somehow? What would you say about that?

 

BM: For us, music is political. So since the beginning when we started to work together it was very important to know that what we say is important, at least for us and hopefully for the people that had come to the shows or to that concert. But we feel that we have a compromise between what we want to do artistically and also what it means to create art nowadays. Of course, our daily life is completely inside our pieces also because we don’t believe that we are composing just for musicians, because we are composing for the people that play these instruments. It’s a different approach to the people that play our pieces. So at the moment we believe that they are a person, not just a musician–not a violin player, it’s a person who plays the violin. We also consider identity in all senses of the word because it’s important to know who the people are behind their instrument. So of course what is happening nowadays affects the pieces. Maybe you can explain a little bit more, Oscar, about the personalization, because I think it’s a good point to understand how we deal with all these problems and how we connect music with the reality.

 

OE: So I can continue by saying that the identity is part of the score, it’s part of the music, it’s an instrument. So it is political because for us, above anything else, counts the fact: Who is composing? Who is playing? And where and when are we playing this piece of music, this music theater play? So since the pieces change a lot, depending on who is playing, their political consequences also change. And of course, identity is not something naive for us. I mean, we can take as an example a piece that we premiered at the Munich Biennale: Subnormal Europe. From the very beginning it was crucial for the piece that the only person whose nationality was not European was the singer and the rest of the elements of the production were from Germany, and from Spain in our case. So we were speaking about Europe and the main character was not European. So it played a fundamental role in this piece, for example.

 

MZ: So would you be rather hopeful that the space that you are creating in an aesthetic sense will have something to do with our reality and this will also be transported to the audience? And does that have any influence on the idea of historicity that always seems to be a goal for many composers today? Do just do your work for our time or would you also say the piece in itself is something that can be transported to other times–as Fanny Mendelssohn’s music can be transported maybe to our times to make clear things? What would you think about that?

 

OE: I think we put a lot of effort into making this an archeological exercise. And of course, this is a non-fictional creature that we are creating. So when we speak about archeology, we are speaking about a figure that is very present in the academia nowadays, which is the »anarchive«. So of course, we are looking at history when we’re searching for information, but we understand our position as artists very close to that of historians. So for us, of course we are addressing the past through the present in order to grasp what is going to happen in the future–above all, with the impact of artificial intelligence, considering the fact that history is data. I mean, history can be copied, can be pasted, can be faked. Of course, music and theater will always be a fiction and theater will always be a technology–the technology to create a fiction. The most contemporary and the most time breaking technology to create these sophisticated fictions–to sum it all up–is what really interests us.

 

MZ: Belenish, now comes into the game that you told me that you have been a musicologist or you are a musicologist. So maybe that’s one hint at the way you got involved with this specific sujet of The day Fanny Mendelssohn died. What interests you about this bourgeois musical genre of the romantic lied and this part of musical history? We will speak about how this comes into your music later on, but how did the topic itself come about of this piece?

 

BM: Yes, of course, I am a musicologist. So I’m always thinking about history. I mean, it’s part of what we do and it really makes sense to know that because I think you can see the relationship between both things. Fanny Mendelssohn for me makes a lot of sense in this piece because we wanted to talk about so many topics, for one: about what’s happening with women creators nowadays. And also the Fanny figure is very interesting, of course, because we know about her brother, Felix Mendelssohn, and all the historical ways to approach this figure, while there is always his sister in the shadow. So for me it was important to have that in mind–but also that Fanny was a rich woman. So that was one of the reasons she couldn’t have the possibility to publish her music. That’s another level. There is always this comparison between Clara Schumann and Fanny Mendelssohn in the way that Clara didn’t have enough money, so she had to sell her music in order to live.–So first of all that. And second, I am here in Rome in this fellowship. In all her life, Fanny fondly remembered her time at the Villa Medici, which was an academy for French artists at the time. So there she had the opportunity to know so many different figures like Gounod that were completely in love with her music and also her knowledge about, for example, Bach. So she in that time had the opportunity to consider herself as a composer, not just a person who composed at home for friends. So for me, that was important also personally, because we–Oscar and me–compose together. Sometimes it’s difficult to understand which one of us does what, I mean, which role we have. So sometimes for people it’s easier to think of Oscar as the composer. So to have this opportunity now in Rome was also an opportunity for me like the one Fanny Mendelssohn had in that times: to be considered as equal. So Fanny Mendelssohn inspires me to create a world of so many meanings and topics that we will want to bring alive with this piece.

 

OE: And I think something that is also very important is that Fanny Mendelssohn is a bit like Die Zauberflöte, you know. This is a little piece of a whole universe, but it’s a good entrance into that whole magic world of the opera. Now, for us, Mendelssohn is also an excellent entry gate to speak about many women, to make an archive that is not eurocentric, by the way. So there is a whole archive of women who existed in the past and who exist now. We very much take into account the biographies of the performers. This is very important. Magdalena Fiorito and Johanna Vargas, the pianist and the soprano. And we also speak about AI-generated stories of people who don’t exist at all, but we mix everything together and we create many stories that, throughout the songs…–because in a way we can call this a very traditional »Liederzyklus«! We are speaking in each song about some aspects of this very polyhedric constellation that we are imagining.

 

MZ: I’ve been at the grave of Fanny Mendelssohn just a few weeks ago. And the funny thing is, that there is another grave, that of Emilie Mayer. You might have heard of her maybe, she was also a composer in the 19th century. And she also had the opportunity to be a composer because she had this rich heritage from her father. But I think for Fanny Mendelssohn, it still was rather a struggle to compose. Also in just being confronted with her brother all the time, who also didn’t really believe that she would be able to to follow this career.

 

BM: Yeah. Her storyy is very interesting, because there are so many details that are amazing. For example, just a few weeks after she gave birth, Felix wrote to her: why you are not composing? So he was in a way pushing her to compose. But at the same time he says: You don’t have the level to publish your music. So it’s a very interesting game of power between them. Because at the same time he was in a way acting completely out of love for his sister. So he was like: I cannot live without her… and then all this tragedy about debts. So it’s really kind of a very… I mean.

 

OE: …full of colors…

 

BM: …and flavors, full of brightness and darkness at the same time.

 

MZ: You say you bring many things together and you’ve spoken about artificial intelligence. So I think we should speak about the textbook next that you generated for this piece. Maybe you can just explain: How did this textbook come about? What are the sources that you are using?

 

OE: There are many, of course. Well, this is going to be a 30 minutes long Liederzyklus. This is important. It is divided in 11 to 12 songs. We still have to decide. And the text really varies. There is one song, for instance, which is a lullaby called Meta Content Moderator’s Lullaby. And the text is completely generated by artificial intelligence, sentence for sentence, just trying to catch the atmosphere of a weird lullaby. The situation for us is very clear. It’s a person who is moderating content, seeing violence all the time and ignoring or deleting it all the time. It is very well known, there is also a well-known documentary about the companies that Google, Meta etc. hire to moderate this content. And we are imagining this extreme, which is the mother trying to protect her daughter who is a baby and wishing for a better life. But of course, the words are artificial. So it’s a sort of emptiness somehow that we are practically generating. So, there are no words anymore that a mother can say to her daughter because it’s completely void of love and hope.

 

BM: And in other songs we wrote the text ourselves. And we also had some interviews with Johanna, who is a mother, to know more about their lives, and we have some songs that follow word by word what they said in that interview.

 

OE: It deals a lot with trauma and colonization. Again, it was really important that Johanna was born in Colombia. And especially we were very interested about Johanna’s case, again as a non-European person. And of course, Magda has her own really interesting story, but as a European, perhaps her life–in terms of passports–was a bit easier. They are both based in Germany. There are many languages in the songs German, Spanish, English, Japanese, Swahili… there are over 15 or 16 different languages. We are playing with subtitles, with wrong subtitles. There is another song which is called Ein Döner mit Alles–und nicht mit Allem. Because we speak about, the connection of violence and language. And that, funny enough, is a song almost without any word, but rather sounds trying to initiate a sentence until the very end, which then is the only sentence that the person says. So they are quite different. There are some others who are more storytelling and super narrative speeches, above all those who speak more directly about Fanny Mendelssohn. So it’s really, really, really varied.

 

MZ: Do you also draw on historical musical sources and text sources from the time of Fanny Mendelssohn? And how do you do that? How do you deal with that in your score?

 

BM: There are three songs that tell her story from our point of view. So we have been researching a lot, we read so many books and articles about her life. And we deal with this whole research process that was necessary in order to have this text. And about music: We didn’t want it to contain a lot of material from her quoted explicitly. I mean, if you know her music very well, you might notice it, because it’s not like if we used Mozart for example, where maybe it would be easier to recognize than with her music. But we use some part of this piano cycle Das Jahr that she composed here in Rome. So we use some part of her piano language and we try not to copy but to translate it in an aesthetic way.

 

OE: We also use an extract of an organ prelude that she composed for her wedding. It’s a G-major prelude. Nothing special. But it’s still very meaningful, there is even a source, it’s a letter of her saying that she composed it the very day of her wedding. This music could actually have been played in Berlin, in this church at Alexanderplatz, I think it was in this very old one that survived the war. I think it was that one.

 

BM: She was actually very angry because she had asked her brother to do that for her. But he couldn’t, we don’t know why, so she had to come up with it the same morning. So it’s very basic, but for us very »Fanny«.

 

OE: Yes, because it speaks about the daily life. And I think this is something that we want to deconstruct: the capital letters in history. We are always speaking about tiny details, not only concerning Fanny Mendelssohn’s life but all the women that appear in the dramaturgy. We speak about linen, we speak about ordering a döner kebab. We’re speaking about, you know, seemingly meaningless moments.

 

MZ: Would you say that there are really underground relationships between the life experience at the time and the life experience of today? Would you say so or do you rather see many changes in this respect?

 

OE: For us, it’s something very important that we are creating a living room–because this is living room music, we like to think about that–which is hyper technologized and has many mirrors. So everybody in the room is being watched by security cameras–fictionally or not fictionally. We don’t want to tell. And there are always many levels of representation of reality. So at the moment when you are amplifying some tiny sounds on the piano and at the same time you are using the video to conceptualize them and to locate them in one specific moment in history, and then you add some other electronic fragments and you are saying »this is what Fanny Mendelssohn was hearing at this very specific moment«…–and by juxtaposing all of that, we are creating this illusion of flat time, of presentism. We are really touching history. And I think the whole cycle is full of those moments, full of meaning. That’s why the live electronics is so important for us.

 

BM: Yeah, in that way, yes, we are really connected with our past. And I mean, today it’s not the same. I cannot say we are at the same point that Fanny was, of course not. But we still have so many problems or issues that we have to solve. And it’s taking more time than it should have done in our history. So yes, we will point to that, I think you will see that.

 

OE: I mean, on speaking about female representation, it’s obvious it has happened to us many times. Many times that we have, you know, sent the right information with all the names to someone and suddenly in the end her name is not there. So this really happens. And of course, we don’t want to create a manifest on that, but it’s… yeah, we have to talk about that!

 

BM: It’s not the case for us because we can see how many women composers there are now in our concert halls–that’s just numbers. I’m not talking about any feelings, it’s completely obvious. So we have to think about it and we need a reference because maybe that happened with Fanny in that times. If she maybe had the support of other women or also men, maybe she could have imagined herself as a real composer. But she couldn’t, because of her father, first of all, who decided that wasn’t something for women and certainly not for women »with your money, you don’t have to work! This is just for your brother!«–and that also for all her environment it was something not really meaningful. If I am not going to say anything, if I can‘t give more things to history, why I am going to do that (at all)? So I think it’s really important to consider that and to say to all the women that want to start a career as a composer, that we have a lot of things to say and we have a lot of things to share. And of course we still have to fight for equality, but we are on the way. So it’s not all bad, and we have so many things to be happy about and not feel like victims, we can feel on the way to obtaining what we deserve. And of course to believe that if we create art, on the one hand, but also platforms and a conversation to encourage us, on the other, maybe in 100 years, maybe we can solve it. I hope so, I cross fingers for that.

 

MZ: Yes, I hope so too. Maybe a last important question is: How do you share your work? What are the modes of collaboration? Who is responsible for what within this very complex, beautiful score with so many layers of different things happening all the time?

 

BM: Thank you.

 

OE: The process is complex, too! Ideas come from the both of us, for this specific work. At the very beginning, we had ideas for many songs. So we started, you know, cleaning everything up. We started shaping the columns of the Liederzyklus, for instance, by these three songs speaking about Fanny Mendelssohn, which gave us also our title, The Day, Fanny Mendelssohn, and Died. So they are like three columns, that are quite historically oriented. And then in between there are some others perhaps more contemporary songs, speaking about the situation that we are creating. And in creating the text, I think we both collaborate… it’s like 50/50, right?

 

BM: And of course in each song we have to find a balance. So sometimes if you have a very good idea and you are very comfortable with that topic or when I have a musical idea, then we give some freedom to each other. And then we have all this time to double check each step. So our working process is a little bit….

 

OE: … hard! It’s harder, because we both have to agree with every single note …

 

BM: …and it’s not a fast working method. So that’s why when people ask about our songs and our pieces, we have a lot to say because we have been thinking about them for a lot of time, more than necessary sometimes, in order to really clarify every single word on every single note.

 

OE: Not to forget the dancing part of this piece! Very important. And also for lap 51 the Lied duo. It was very important to dance and choreograph the performance, the body actions in general as a way towards empowerment. So we can say that Belenish is the expert here in choreography. And also there is a moment where you really have to write everything down. So I am writing down everything. She’s making a lot of sketches, fragments, electronic tracks, and then I am taking them and I write them down and try to present it to our editor who is helping us to create the scores in the clearest possible way.

 

MZ: So you share the complete work. That’s seems to me a wonderful model for how society could work, somehow should work.

 

BM: It’s not easy. It’s not easy and takes a lot of time. And I think for us, we found a way to do it that is very rewarding because at the end we feel very comfortable and we can say: yes, we did what we wanted to do. And I would like to have more references like that too, because it’s difficult. So maybe in the future if at a Hochschule we have a pair of composers, or people that work in tandem, teaching, we could maybe give them tools to do that.

 

OE: Because it’s like having a piano duo. Or to have a string quartet. It’s a mini parliament. It’s a mini democracy. And for instance, I’m colorblind. So it means that in reference to colors, Belenish is always… I mean, I trust Belenish because I cannot trust myself with that. But with design, for instance, I think I am particularly good and light design especially. We will have a lot of lights in the concert as well. So we are really sharing the whole process and as we write down every single detail as much as possible in the scores, it’s very easy for us to come with the score and say: »Hey, I have written this. Do you agree with that?« We have been developing a code in this project because it is different. But of course, it allows us, on the other hand, to know each other very well. And sometimes, only sometimes, we don’t have to argue so much because we know what the other thinks beforehand.

 

MZ: Thank you very much. I’m so much looking forward now to this project!