Solo voice, 3 channel recording, texts based on a reduction of Heiner Müller’s Bildbeschreibung, 12 mins.

This is the third composition using texts from Heiner Müller in the 1980s as opposed to music and sound design for staged performances of his work. This is the period just before the fall of the Berlin Wall (Müller lived and worked in E. Berlin.)

During this period, Müller seemed to have joined the postmodernist interest in deconstruction, writing his work, Bilbeschreibung (1985) the title of which means, the description of an image. The play text does just that. There are no characters, no dialogue, just that description. I was invited to create the sound/music for its first performance at the Steirischer Herbst Festival in Graz which was directed by his then wife, Ginka Tscholakowa.

This composition, simply takes Müller’s approach to the next level. Bildbeschreibung is a reduction of a play text and B is a reduction of Bilbeschreibung. All texts used come from the script. They are, as is the case in other pieces of mine, cut up and recomposed as one does with samples. Some electronic and nature sounds are also used.

The stage has a form of a B as well in that there is a triangle of loudspeakers completed with the live performer front and middle which forms a sort of capital B. Furthermore, there is a drone in this piece that moves from a B (in most of the world, however in Germanic and some other countries, that note is called H) to a B-flat which is called B in those countries.

The composition is often atmospheric with a few passages of a repetitive nature for the live vocalist that are challenging to perform. Is it about anything? A crime story? A description of an image?

A performance of the piece which follows is a recording of the vocalist, Ruth Rainero and then the score of B is at the bottom of this webpage.

B performed by Ruth Rainero. The other (recorded) voices are Gerrie van der Klei, Alexander von Borkmann, Heiner Müller and Leigh Landy.

The score of B follows below.