Description

“che questo è stato” unites language, tape and vibraphone sounds into a soundscape for the performance of which the included accompanying CD is imperative. It contains the complete audio material except for the notated parts which are intended to be performed live.

The starting point for the compositional process were Hebraic inscriptions the composer found on old gravestones at the Hoechberg Jewish Cemetery. Until the pogrom night of 1938, the deceased of the Jewish faith, who for centuries had made up a substantial percent of the population of this village community bordering on the city of Wuerzburg, were buried here. The inscriptions tell of a life full of piousness and a fear of God which would violently end with the Nazi terror. For the CD, the inscriptions were read in Hebrew and German by young school children of the Israeli community in Wuerzburg.

These texts purport a spiritual bond to a verse by Yehuda Amichai, the great Israeli poet (born in 1924), in which he speaks of the “Jewish stones from Pleich”, alluding to the crumbling gracestones in his home town of Wuerzburg. “Prayers are for eternity” is an excerpt of a text that the author spoke into a microphone just months before his death. This poem is blended with recordings the composer made at the sea in Israel and results in a soundscape in which history and the present are interwoven with each other. In addition to the aforementioned texts from the gravestones and the poem, the soundtrack on the CD also contains a variety of textual and spoken sound bytes which all refer to the Holocaust: fragments of texts of survivors of the special units in the concentration camps and preyer excerpts of differing denominations from present-day Jerusalem in addition to audio documentation from the Third Reich.

These sound collages rise up like islands of recollection in a sea of forgetfulness. The auditory particles are integrated into the composition and held together by tonal material from train locomotives used in a musical fashion that compulsively remind us of the Jewish transport trains as well as the litany-like reading of the names of murdered children taken from the Yad Vashem Memorial. Remembrances of the past and a vibrant present-day mix in the sounds of Israeli street musicians and the captured audio scenes of people and playing children in the old part of Jerusalem.

The title of the composition comes from a poem by Primo Levi which prefaced his 1947 Auschwitz report “Se questo è un uomo” and in which he exhorted all survivors to a never-tiring vigil of remembrance: “Repeat it again and again for your children and grandchildren and remind yourselves; bury it in your hearts, che questo è stato – that it actually happened!”