Volker Heyn: Ferro Canto

Instead of a comment
(to Josef Häusler, the then editor for new music at SWF Baden-Baden)

 

Hey Joe, what should someone say about his music?…
Maybe first play and listen,
play and listen to 247 bars of music and then say something?…
Reports about calculated construct-destruct
and sound and time things, about doubt-delay?…
Saying what after the scaffolding has come down?
Hey Joe, what I can do at best is explain the title:
Ferro Canto sings of the man who sat on the corner of George Street and
and Town Hall, Sydney, beating an iron drum with heavy wooden sticks…
on an iron drum.
So vehemently he did it, as if the drum were the embodiment
embodiment of what was tormenting him….
but also his last iron armor.
At the same time he stomped and shouted at passing gaff people
and spoke of the
»biting late autumn of the white-hot pigs«
and announced that he, who was actually a happy man,
would have liked to become a happy man, too; but
that it had become too late for that here and now.
Oh no, not a street musician with a fancy protest song or complacent denial.
No, his tones were final signs (signals) of despondency
of despair, tones of despair at a dull-dumb human world in failure.
And of his inability he sang,
to sing along to this world’s squeaky-clean song.
No madman, as we would like to have it;
rather one in the process of recognition.
Rather one, who–ridden by the demon of knowledge–nevertheless
nevertheless blows for departure.

 

Freely after J.H. (Jimi Hendrix) to J.H. (Josef Häusler)
Volker Heyn 1989