Bnaya Halperin-Kaddari (composer)

Musicologist Michael Zwenzner in conversation with Bnaya Halperin-Kaddari.

MZ: Thank you very much for being ready to tell me something about your project. But first of all, reading your name, it’s music in itself somehow. First I would like to ask you to introduce yourself shortly, and maybe tell me about the origins of your name, because it’s the first time I ever encountered this name Bnaya.

 

BHK: So my name is Bnaya Halperin-Kaddari. I’m a composer and artist based in Berlin. And I work across a broad equality of practices to reinvigorate ways of music making and explore different modes of being through sound and listening. I try to digest and to think about and navigate our chaotic times through instrumental composition, improvised music, making instruments and sound installations, but also video, film and somatic practices. My name is in Hebrew. It’s biblical. It literally means the Son of God. Ben Yah. And my last names, the first one, I guess, is the Hebrew version of a Russian origin name of Galperin and Kaddari is the Hebrew version of Schwarz. My grandfather was a linguist, and he translated his name, it’s translated literally as »Dunkelheit« [darkness].

 

MZ: So he somehow also was a composer in terms of creating wonderful names. Maybe you just could tell me something about the general concept of this Poetry Affairs project, in which you got involved together with Anglo-Welsh poet Deryn Rees-Jones. How did the personal relationship between you and Deryn come about, and how close was your way of collaborating?

 

BHK: So I often work through long term artistic engagements and collaborations, and the current work for Poetry Affairs and the Eclat festival is no exception. It’s called Bears Nudging at Pleasures in the Dark. It’s a line from one of Deryn’s poems, and it is a three part vocal cycle that grew out of two years of artistic engagements between myself, Deryn Rees-Jones, who is a Welsh poet and the Neue Vokalsolisten Ensemble. Together we were looking for ways of how a poet and composer can make room for each other and search and reach for moments where feelings and memories actually become sounds and symbols. And how can these two emerge in the gaps between the sonic and the semantic? So it’s structured as a kaleidoscope of three vocal movements that reflect, augment and interpret each other, and each is shedding a different light or a different sound, if you will, on the other movements making for a kind of unstable triptych.

 

MZ: Did you regularly meet or did you do this by email, or just having conversations all the time going on about the project emerging part by part, step by step. Or did you also have some concentrated meetings for several days or weeks to collaborate?

 

BHK: All of the above. Except for the intensive physical meetings that were not really possible. So it was mostly an online exchange of written correspondences and voice calls, exchanging ideas and references and texts and sketches and sounds and doing this ping pong and finding out that we are both quite interested in this nexus of poetics, politics and personal realignment and how to bear witness to what is happening and especially, yeah, through the body, with open senses, with open ears.

 

MZ: And how did you get to know Deryn? Was it a proposal by Christine Fischer, or did you meet him yourself, or how did this constellation come about.

 

BHK: So Poetry Affairs was initiated by Christine and Andreas Fischer and the Neue Vokalsolisten, bringing together composers and poets with the idea of a collaboration. It was quite open ended. And for me personally, as I really like knowing the details of the language when I work with language and music, I thought that I better work in English. But also I really resonated with Deryn’s writing. And when we started talking, it was clear to me that we can continue and develop something together. And that’s what we have been doing. There were two rounds for this project. It was a very unconventional and generous constellation that they commissioned a work or a kind of a work in progress that we presented last year already. It’s the first movement of this cycle. And then we decided to continue and elaborate another two movements around it for the coming version of the festival.

 

MZ: Okay. So you plan four parts or is it the three parts that we know?

 

BHK: It’s three parts. I can tell you about them because they have quite interesting relationships between them. So the first movement is called Elephant, and it is for voice and electronics. And in Elephant we meet a woman who is getting lost inside a hospital in search of a medical mask. She’s navigating the city and the hospital and its corridors. And the world around her is an advanced stage of collapse with war raging and a virus that continues to mutate and to harm. We actually know this story, but narrated by Deryn’s very, very special voice, it is constructed as a kind of a liminal mise en scene. The breath movements of Andreas Fischer are in focus and they open a kind of portal of dreams that gradually transform this woman into something else, into an elephant or memory itself, or even something that is not quite graspable. And the soundtrack, the narration and Andreas’ breaths are kind of spiraling between the semantics and the non verbal, thereby creating some almost ineffable moments that are opened through the concert hall. The second movement or the central one is called Rest and is a sound installation for a single person with headphones. It’s an invitation for a nap in the public space of the theater’s foyer. To rest is to pause and recharge. And this is kind of an intervention in the common flow of the festival that is often full of music, up to the point at times of exhaustion. So we invite listeners to just lay on a bed themselves and they can either listen to some somatic instructions and poetry or to simply sleep and nap and escape for a while when they’re in the safety of the community of listeners. It’s a kind of music to rest to in a rest from music. And the soundtrack of this rest features filtered versions of the other two movements, a bit like listening from the outside of the concert hall and getting reflected or diffused sonic impressions of what’s happening inside. The third movement is called Consider the Lilies and is a poetic and lyrical contextualization of the whole cycle. It’s focused on the Snowdon Lily, which is an extremely rare and almost extinct flower that often is found on the Welsh mountainsides. And the music here, it’s for five voices and they’re always bending upwards, kind of corresponding with the ever more charged atmosphere and raising temperatures. And this lily is both witnessing the environmental changes, but it’s also a symbol for resilience and strength and a promise of a possible future in a harsh world. So these three movements and the whole cycle together explore what we call: ethics of care through listening. How? By listening to the dynamic interplay of words and music, we can tap into different positions and embody different sonic perspectives through our minds and through our own bodies. These musical experiences, they try to nudge us to a hopeful and a necessary realignment of ourselves before the world, to bear with the world and not to duck it. Or, as Deryn says, that everything matters in particular ways, and we try to put these different perspectives in this kaleidoscope.

 

MZ: Thank you very much. I can skip many of my questions because you wonderfully have answered them now already. But there’s still questions to ask, of course. What acoustic, instrumental, electronic sources do you draw upon? You said there is electronic fixed media involved. What’s your approach there, what’s your gamut of sound possibilities that you will use in all three parts?

 

BHK: So here I would start in a reverse order. In Consider the Lilies, the third movement with inaudible fixed media, they have a tone guiding track that is providing them with the tuning and it’s constantly rising over the course of the six minutes of the movement. It goes up about a fourth. So they constantly need to readjust their voices and to adapt to a constantly changing musical environment. For the second movement, Rest, I recorded this third movement and parts of the electronic track of the first movement, that I will tell you about in a moment, and kind of rearranged and reflected it. So the voices that I recorded in Stuttgart with the ensemble are singing the same poem, only humming it, but gliding downwards as if lulling you into sleep, into slumber. And I juxtapose that with one of the instruments from the first movement and with some other environmental sounds and with their inspiration that is quite central. There are both an English version and a German version narrated by Truike, the mezzo soprano of the ensemble, inviting a German speaking audience to really be at ease and not needing to translate and interpret a text that is very somatic and guides you through a body scan. The first movement Elephant is the richest in terms of its sonic materials. It juxtaposes Deryn’s voice, narration, Andreas’ breathing sounds, another acoustic instrument that is a very long, I think seven meter long corrugated pipe that I am playing and an electronic track. The track itself is a combination of synthesizers, recordings of this corrugated pipe, a recording I made in Münster of a Thomas Schütte sculpture–he has an environmental sculpture that looks a bit like in between an atomic shelter and an elephant and sounds gorgeous–and archival recordings from the Berlin Zoologischer Garten, the Berlin Zoo from the 1960s, of the Elephants they had there. So constantly through the story that Deryn is telling, you have in the background these zoological documents that are cataloging different elephants roars and sounds and they kind of counterpoint the whole happening.

MZ: How does the idea come about to have an elephant involved? I think it’s a question of the text, I read it once, but at the moment I can’t remember. What was the idea behind that aspect of nature and zoology?

 

BHK: So from very different angles, both of us are often engaged with animals and animal sounds in our work, me mostly through sampling or transcribing animals or bird calls–there’s a long tradition of that. And Deryn is also putting a very delicate and nuanced focus on animals in his writing. Through our conversations–to be honest, I can’t even locate when precisely the elephant came to be–but at some point it was simply there. And we relate to it as a kind of an embodiment of memory. They are very known to have an extremely sharp and long term memory. And since this movement deals with the memory of a disease and the memory of being healthy and the burden of going through long processes of healing and enduring what could be a chronic condition, the elephant’s solidness and its resilience and its memory and compassion… it was kind of very a very crystallized symbol of all these things.

 

MZ: And at the same time being a threatened species that gives it another dimension also somehow.

 

BHK: Of course. Yeah.

 

MZ: Beautiful. If I look at the score of the third part, Consider the Lilies, at first glance, it looks like you make reference to historical music of some kind. It’s a combination of classical choral setting combined with those drone elements that you have described already. Those like Alvin Lucier’s sine tone generators, just giving the reference for orienting the musicians. Do you intentionally have some historical aspects in your music?

 

BHK: In this instance, of course, it’s almost like a style study or a pastiche of something between an Organum or the Notre Dame School and British Island folk music from the 14th century. So yeah, in a very aware manner I chose to set the music here as a very plain–it’s modulating, of course, through this kind of critical band that is constantly on the rise–but tonal modal music. And the melodic cells reflect this of course. And that was my immediate reaction to the lyricism of the poem itself. I thought that actually in all instances of the texts, I felt that the best service I could do to these really beautiful and heartfelt and thought provoking texts was to just make sure that there is clarity in communicating them to an audience. And in the case of Consider the Lilies, it almost composed itself in terms of the speech undulations by the leading voice.

 

MZ: So it’s a wonderful network of relationships, external, internal, different topics arising in different spheres of existence coming into the play. I love what I hear from you and I really look forward to listening to this, and the live situation then and also the new piece of course. Maybe it’s a bit difficult question, you can also ask me just to skip it: How do you generally consider the relationship between language and music, the naming and the sounding aspect, which is of course connected to very different modes of reception? And sometimes I feel a bit overwhelmed by the task to follow both modes of reception at a time. Sometimes it works wonderfully, but there’s also maybe a conflict always near when you combine sound and semantics in a way. What do you think about that?

 

BHK: It’s a very good question and I will happily answer, I don’t think it should be avoided. Funnily, in the last decade, the only other texts I set into music were basically magical spells or forms of witchcraft from like Kabbalistic texts or the names of God itself. So I very consciously tried to avoid this situation of taking words that have significance and should be understood, and smearing them and losing their signifying capacity in favor of their sonics. It always felt like a compromise and it’s an either or. So fittingly here and also that was part of the definition of the project of Poetry Affairs that they wanted to do something different. I chose to really be in service of the text as I said before, and I let the text lead the way while always remembering that it should be–at least the majority of it–quite understandable, and to convey what the text itself wants to do. So in the case of Elephant, which is a kind of a prose poetry, there is a narrative, there is a story of what this woman goes through. And basically you follow it. It’s almost like a film with no images or only the image of an empty stage and a strange figure that is breathing this empty space from the corner of the stage. And you can follow what Deryn is saying, probably except for a sentence or two that are quite carefully positioned so that the music can sometimes take over and swallow the narration and the narration thus becomes music because singing and speaking are just continuous along a spectrum.

 

MZ: Great. Thank you. Maybe as we are coming to an end, I would ask you a more general question. You wrote me that in a few days you will visit your family in Israel and consequently will be traveling to one of the epicenters of human conflict in our times. How do you deal with this as an artist? What is your personal crisis mode as an artist and composer facing this very sinister reality? Do you wish to keep that apart from your artistic work? No, you don’t. You told me already. But maybe you could give me some general remarks on your thinking about your profession in relationship to the world you’re living in?

 

BHK: My initial reaction is that I’m in a constant state of being heartbroken and basically day by day, my heart is being broken again and again by stories from both sides and by this reality that seems hopeless and dark and sinister, as you say, and cynical and is being exploited by so many different players and entities. And the people and the lives and the environments, these actual things on the ground are just being squashed by higher powers. And I think that this work Bears Nudging at Pleasures in the Dark both provided for me personally an escape to a world of sound and of thought, but a kind of escape that is not escapism. That through music and through art and through this insistence of bearing with what’s happening while still keeping our ears open… that this is my humble contribution. Otherwise, I don’t feel like I can do much. I mean, I’m in no position to convince anyone and we live in such a post truth period that the horizon of political discussion is being narrowed more and more. So my offering is a space, is curating and composing spaces for listening with the hope of enduring this with the hope or kindling a kind of hope, even though I don’t even know exactly what I’m hoping for.

 

MZ: Bnaya, thank you very much. I think what you said is really very much encouraging, I must say, because for me it’s clear there is a very intense relationship between your work and life somehow, but in a way that is not placative, but very, very differentiated. And that’s really what I’m looking for as a listener and as an experience of contemporary art. So thank you very much. I think we have a wonderful interview recorded now. This meeting would end in ten minutes. Would you like to add something which you have the impression has been forgotten somehow? Or would this be fine for you?

 

BHK: Maybe. I don’t know. I don’t know how you edit this, but just to mention what I think regarding this project: I think this project is a really special one and is a very good position towards a post-pandemic way of contemporary music making in Europe, in Germany and generally. As I said, it was a very generous and open invitation to really experiment both with the ways and methods of working and developing a new work, as well as the format. It moved away from this at times very impersonal commissioning process of: me being a commissioning body, granting a composer with a sum of money to provide me with a final score to be rehearsed twice and premiered and the premiere and the dernière is often the same thing. Here it was something quite different, and I think I’m very grateful for that. And I think that it’s important to acknowledge that for other festivals and cultural organizations that, when going towards more interdisciplinary and long term collaborations, setting up such platforms can yield wonderful results. And I think we’ll see that through the whole festival and the concert on Sunday.