Output details
35 - Music, Drama, Dance and Performing Arts
Brunel University London
Kafka's wound
CD of music created for the digital essay 'Kafka's Wound'
This CD consists of music originally created by Wiegold and his ensemble “notes inégales” for the Arts Council SPACE/ London Review of Books digital essay ‘Kafka’s Wound’, curated by Will Self and selected for the “Best Digital Humanities blog, article, or short publication”, DH Awards 2013. For the CD the music was extended, developed, remixed and recomposed in the studio; it includes Self reading from his essay and from Kafka.
The music for this project necessarily addressed the role of music within a digital essay in which multiple readings are possible and it constantly switches between the comfortably familiar and ‘the hidden’: the distant, subconscious echoes beneath a familiar surface. It also addressed the relationship between music – live, improvised and recorded – and spoken text. In response to Self’s subject matter, it was decided to derive the music from the Eastern European klezmer tradition. This in turn raised issues as to the extent to which new music can be made out of such a highly encultured form.
In the recording studio, melodies and chord progressions of traditional klezmer pieces were placed in front of the musicians and they immediately began playing, making spontaneous arrangements which were improvisatorially transformed under Wiegold’s ‘conduction’ signals. This process was designed to enable Wiegold, in real-time, to direct the musicians towards the ‘unconscious’, the world of Kafka’s nightmares. Precedents for the use of folk musics within ‘composed’ art music exist in the work of composers such as Ives, Stravinsky and Berio, and Wiegold was influenced by their techniques for appropriating familiar material and particularly by Berio’s fascination with individual musicians’ articulation and inflection which in this project was achieved through directed improvisation. Five hours of material was generated in this way and then edited by Wiegold into a final form, often superimposing multiple recordings.
