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Hans g helms: fa:m' ahniesgwow

First complete CD recording of Helms’s experimental sound-text

This CD presents the first complete realisation of Hans G Helms’s experimental sound-text ‘Fa:m’ Ahniesgwow’ (Cologne: DuMont, 1959) – often referred to as the German ‘Finnegans Wake’ – and represents the culmination of a five year collaborative research process undertaken by the members of the ensemble ‘sprechbohrer’ (Sigrid Sachse, Harald Muenz, Georg Sachse) under my guidance.

Fa:m’ Ahniesgwow is an extended text in which Helms ‘composes’ with the semantic, grammatical and phonetic elements of more than 30 different languages but, despite its reputation (see, for example, Adorno’s essay, "Voraussetzungen. Aus Anlaß einer Lesung von Hans G Helms", in Adorno: Gesammelte Schriften vol. II, Frankfurt: suhrkamp, 1974, 431-446) and its author’s wish that the book ‘be read aloud’, it had never been performed in its entirety, although the author had made a number of partial readings. The complex structures of the text – in chapter IV, for example, the text is spatially distributed in both horizontal and vertical configurations – implied a polyphonic approach and ‘sprechbohrer’s’ polyphonic version of ‘Fa:m’ Ahniesgwow’ was authorised by Helms.

The research process alternated between preparation of the text – tracing the linguistic origin of each word, partly re-notating them in the International Phonetic Alphabet, matching the text’s spatial distributions with timing and voice distribution, and so on – and ensemble rehearsal. Gradually a new performing score emerged; this version contrasts solo passages, dialogues and trios and explores the whole range of possibilities, from free floating speech to ‘sprechstimme’, from the heterophony of three voices to a ‘forcible-coordinated’ unison in the final structure (which could be interpreted as a parallel to the Nazis idea of ‘gleichschaltung’ to which it refers). The research began in 2004 and was finally realised in a studio recording in 2009; ‘sprechbohrer’ subsequently performed the complete work live in the presence of the author in 2010.