Harald Muenz Conducts Experiments in Sound

Draw a long line. Call one end speech, the other song. Conventional opera--with its recitative, parlando and aria--occupies only a small portion somewhere around the middle of the continuum. Modern composers, poets and novelists, for much of the past century, have done a lot a poking around everywhere else on that line, and they are still at it.

One such composer is Harald Muenz, a young German in residence at the Villa Aurora. Tuesday night in the Villa’s living room, he and an extraordinary American soprano, Beth Griffith, demonstrated just how confusing the whole question about what constitutes speech and music can be. Curious things can happen when that confusion is embraced, as it was in this program of music by various composers.

The project Muenz has been working on as part of his activities at the Villa is the transformation of an infamous 1943 speech by Joseph Goebbels in which the Nazi propagandist called for total war. Goebbels cultivated a beautiful tone of voice, and Muenz has found that politicians everywhere still employ (unconsciously, presumably) the same manner of speaking, the same kinds of intonation.

In the excerpts Muenz played from “schweigenderest” (“silent relics”), his chilling work-in-progress, Goebbels’ voice is electronically chopped up into striking pointillistic melody. At one point, Muenz ran the speech through Dolby filtering time and again, and the process that makes movies sound the way they do makes Goebbels chirp like a bird and whistle like a flute.

One of the interesting aspects of the speech-sound experiments is that writers who stretch language were often thinking in terms of conventional music (James Joyce sounded like an Irish crooner when he read from “Finnegans Wake”). Muenz included two John Cage songs with texts from Joyce’s novel--”The Wonderful Widow of Eighteen Springs” and “Nowth Upon Nacht”--which let the rich language express itself with simple music at two extreme volumes that make all the difference. The first is a quiet monody accompanied by a “pianist” tapping the piano instrument with keyboard closed. The other is monody at the top of the soprano’s lungs, the keyboard lid violently banged as accompaniment (Muenz did the tapping and banging). Griffith sang with a focus and presence (as she did everything) that held a listener at rapt attention.

Most of the music on the program went, however, in the other direction of implying meaning (though not specific) from nonsense syllables through sound. In Marc Sabat’s “theory; numbers,” Griffith made astonishing pops from the back of her throat and sang syllables in impossibly long wavelike melodies, creating the miraculous effect of entering into the point just where syllables are about to be born from music. In Maurizio Kagel’s flamboyant “Melodram 2,” for soprano and tape, she showed the shriek to be language all by itself; in Alvin Curran’s gorgeous “Madonna and Child,” also for soprano and tape, she produced a mood of a Christmas merely by singing a vocalise that then became electrically layered.

There were further short examples of Muenz’s experiments. In “deChiffrAGE,” he expressively read text (some words, some not, in many languages) that was being generated at the moment from a computer program he created. The spontaneity of intonation and word implied remarkable but inexplicable meaning.

Music and poetry entered into other indefinable realms in his “parkfiguren,” where he read a poem in a nearly extinct German-Sorbian dialect while Griffith sang unrelated eloquent vocalises, interrupting herself with sharp snaps of a ratchet. Song and percussion played interference rather than supported a poem in a language that sounded vaguely familiar. There was no footing for understanding, but it was beautiful.

Griffith, a Texan, recently returned to the United States after a 20-year career in Germany. It is our good fortune.