My (German) Concert
Proposal for a presentation - work in progress, 2024
For many years I have been asking myself, what for heaven’s sake
could have been the music that the Der Rattenfänger von Hameln
played to the rats and the children, which made them follow him, to their death.
I didn׳t find an answer.
This project is based on devotion to music. But also and especially to
understanding the context in which it is created, and the consequences
of that devotion to pure music. Does it have its own “blind spots”? The
art of music is abstract, but what happens when it is not accepted? It
might become the ultimate noise, and the response to noise is
aggression and violence, a chaos one is afraid of, one wishes to demolish.
The starting point of the process was Wagner׳s article: Judenthum in
der Musik, 1850.
In this article Wagner claims that the cultural roots of Judaism are
loud - prayers, mutterings, shofar cheers. According to him, any
attempt to create music from this cultural root will end in noise and
not in musical harmony, and if the artist is striving to achieve
harmonious music, following the influence of Christian music, in
order to be accepted in European society, he has to disconnect
from his environment, from his context, which leaves him with no
cultural roots at all.
Wagner knew Jews, they were the ״other״ for him, the ״other״ living
in German society. But in a contemporary reading of the article,
when we relax from the anger and the disgust - it actually reveals
the situation of the exiled artist, the immigrant or the refugee.
Between east and west.
Following this article, I will go on a journey and research, and I will
invite my partners to join me - a group of artists from different
cultural roots, speaking different languages. All of them, in one
form or another, are in the status of a migrant exile or refugee.
We will examine the development of music from the 19th century
until today, East and West, through its acceptance by society, and
through the often prejudiced attitude towards the music of ״others״
the colonialist or orientalist approach.
This project is not a concert. It is theater that uses the written word
and the sound to tell a story and to raise relevant issues, with a
combination of irony and personal stories, we would like to check
and research the combination of the music`s subjective beauty -
and the subjective dark and evil of the racism.
We are a group of artists, Israelis, Palestinians, Syrian, German.
Sources of inspiration: New writing, Wagner׳s essay,
Nietzsche׳s answers to Wagner, and a new adaptation of Franz
Kafka׳s short stories.
For many years I have been asking myself, what kind of music did
Der Rattenfänger von Hameln play for the rats and the children,
that made them follow him, to their death.
I still don`t have an answer. Maybe there is no answer, and
maybe the answer is hidden in the noise. In this theatrical piece
you will certainly hear a lot of it.
Ofira Henig
sko-studio