"Endless[ly] wandering through this nightmare of decrepit industry, like scattered lambs, the visitors randomly loose themselves in London installation artist CROW's twisted helter-skelter. Piles of clothes spoke in silence about the people who might have once inhabited them. Fish-heads were turning up everywhere, the liquid sucked out of them by the Australian heat."
--Stewart DAWES X-PRESS Magazine 525, 6 March 1997

Background

The music of Opening of the Mouth was begun in 1992, and completed at the beginning of 1997 to a commission from the The Festival of Perth. The score is dedicated to David BLENKINSOP.

`Opening of the Mouth´ is the name of a ritual performed in ancient Egypt during the process of mummification. The actual nature of this ritual is obscure, although it seems as if the dead person's mouth is touched by one or more amuletic objects. The main purpose of the ritual was to restore the powers of speech to the person, enabling them to plead their case, as having led a virtuous life, before the judges of the underworld, and subsequently `come forth´ to dwell with the gods.

The actual title of the texts generally known as the Egyptian Book of the Dead was in fact the Chapters of Coming Forth By Day; it consists largely of a `script´ which informs the dead `reader´ of what to say during the subterranean ordeal.

The `mouth´ of the poet Paul CELAN was opened by the holocaust; his complex constellations of images indeed include that of giving a voice to the dead, to those whose mouths were empty before being closed, the countless and the nameless. Celan's language itself is a language from beyond the destruction of the German language by the Nazis, the `thousand darknesses of deathbringing speech´ in Celan's own words, its `bearing witness´ also a witness to its own impossibility as, between 1945 and 1970 ( the year of Celan's suicide by drowning), the poems are distilled from lyric utterances to hard and opaque fragments: concretions of a need and an inability to articulate something which is both more and less than memory. The millions of people murdered and burned have been distributed throughout the atmosphere which enters and leaves our lungs.

The composition of the music began from a contemplation of these two strands of influence, resulting in a work which embeds settings of four Celan poems within a large musical structure as a kind of journey through an (inward) underworld, attempting to answer a question at the centre of Celan's life: how is art to respond to the atrocities of the death camps, indeed to the twentieth century with its many atrocities, without resorting to the anecdotal or the histrionic: the former is the material of history, while the latter usually fails to conceal its superficiality behind a barrage of lament.

It would have been an obvious ploy to attempt to wrench the emotions of the audience with some sort of pseudo-expressionist hysterics. However even the most casual reader of Celan will notice that he eschews the histrionic almost completely, and for this reason, as well as for reasons of my own (which bear at least some relationship to Celan's), the vocal parts in Opening of the Mouth achieve their impact by their distance (at the surface level) from the horrors. To my mind, there is no alternative: Celan has not `beautified´ the events to which he constantly refers; he proposes a poetry which transmutes the ashes of language into a medium capable of its own beauty.

Another point which might arise from Opening of the Mouth is that the texts are treated in such a way as to render them sometimes incomprehensible, even if sometimes a few words rise to the surface as if to remind listeners that some kind of semantic thread is spinning itself out through the music. My experience of reading Celan, is that the poems themselves might seem equally incomprehensible at the beginning, until indeed some glowing fragments of meaning push to the surface and eventually begin to illuminate the words around them. (Compare Celan's description of his poems as `messages in a bottle´, which might be picked up by someone or other who discovers a resonance therein with themselves.)

Opening of the Mouth is not `readily comprehensible´; nevertheless, for those who are willing to listen (since everyone with the requisite equipment is able to listen and comprehend), their experience of the music will I hope eventually resonate into clarity. Indeed the way the words are set (single syllables sometimes stretched out for over a minute) is at least partly intended to reflect the experience of reading this unprecedentedly compacted poetry, a process requiring time and the closest attention, even (or particularly) when the page is empty apart from a few words. For large stretches of the music, the voices provide a background, coloured by the phonemes of the text, for the (paradoxically?) more directly `expressive´ sounds of a succession of solo instruments.

The visual materials of the installation, are to be, in part, site specific; they counterpoint and complement the music, stemming as they do from the same dark constellation of ideas and obsessions, and also transmute the performing space into a `theatre´ in the widest sense, into an internal landscape, an ephemeral conjunction of the debris of the imagination. Obviously there is a relationship here with the concept of ritual, although ritual by definition is a denial of the imagination by means of an unquestioning acceptance of time-petrified actions and utterances (which is not to deny its fascinating aspect) like those of the Catholic mass or the Noh Theatre or even the parliamentary process.

Opening of the Mouth, in common, with all my compositions of recent years (and, in its own way, with the work of Paul Celan), attempts to concretise an elusive expressive energy by a constant and convulsive questioning of itself.

Opening of the Mouth has only been conceivable in terms of the capabilities and artistic priorities of ELISION, particularly the ensemble's concern (which I share completely) to find a means of compositional presentation beyond the production and compilation of the usual loosely-connected or unconnected concert programes. It seems apparent that, given the opportunity for a concert programme to be `composed´ in the same sense as its constitutional elements, even the most challenging music can create around itself a more dramatic and engaging context for its audience.

Apart from the members of ELISION Ensemble, I should also like to acknowledge the essential contributions made to the conception of this project by Anne La BERGE, Andrew SPARLING, Steven Kazuo TAKASUGI and Frances-Marie UITTI for instrumental techniques, Studio STEIM (Amsterdam) and the Institute for Sonolgy (Den Haag) for software and studio facilities.

--Richard BARRETT

"Theodore Adorno said that poetry after Auschwitz was impossible--that any art in the face of such abomination was simply hypocrisy, simply avoiding truth and hiding in manerism. This work aimed to reopen the poetic mouth."
--Peter McCALLUM Sydney Morning Herald 11 March 1997