Everything in PARIS
After the great response on the performances in Taiwan the large scale performance Everything That Happened And Would Happen can be seen in Europe again: June 18 to 20 @ La Villette
2025
Sound and Videoinstallation in South Korea
MOCA - Museum of Contemporary arts in Busan / South Korea opens a group exhibition on GREEN SHIVERING. including a new sound- and Videoinstallation by Heiner Goebbels on April 12th.
Everything @ Taipei Performing Arts Center
Everything That Happened And Would Happen has used the entire double stage at the new Taipei Performing Arts Center for the first time. Two performances, and a post performance talk with Heiner Goebbels on stage and before " A Dialogue on Music, Theater and History - Decoding Heiner Goebbels' Artistic Vision" were enthusiastically recieved by the Taiwanese audience.
Eine Orakelmaschine - neues Hörstück von Heiner Goebbels. SWR / DLF Kultur
Heiner Goebbels‘ Hörstück ist eine Komposition, die gleich der Poesie der Orakel den Fragenden einen Ort für Imagination und Reflexion bietet - keinen der gesicherten Antworten. Anstelle von Gewissheiten begegnen sich gleichsam fremd wie vertraut scheinende Musik-, Sprach- und Klangwelten. Sie erzählen von der Ahnung eines verborgenen Zusammenhangs alles Lebenden und Hergestellten, Maschinellen. Geräusche aus einem stillgelegten Stahlwerk treffen auf Stimmen heimischer wie fremder Fauna, historische Liedgutaufnahmen, auf elektroakustische Improvisationen der Band ‚The Mayfield‘ und Texte.
Heiner Goebbels' radio play is a composition that, like the poetry of the oracles, offers the questioner a place for imagination and reflection - not for certain answers. Instead of certainties, music, language and sound worlds that seem both strange and familiar meet. They tell of the intuition of a hidden connection between everything living and manufactured, everything mechanical. Sounds from a disused steelworks meet the voices of local and foreign fauna, historical song recordings, electro-acoustic improvisations by the band 'The Mayfield' and texts.
Eine Orakelmaschine Hörstück von Heiner Goebbels Produktion: SWR / DLR 2025
mit freundlicher Unterstützung des Weltkulturerbes Völklinger Hütte Ca. 52 Min.
Mit Originaltönen von Hannah Arendt, Helmut Heißenbüttel, Marguerite Duras u.v.a.
2024
2024 > 2025
This passing year 2024 has been very busy with many concerts, performances and lectures all over europe and it finished on the first weekend of december with a concert of The Mayfield in Switzerland and two performances of Songs of Wars I Have Seen in Vancouver / Canada.
For 2025 Heiner Goebbels announces a new radioplay called Eine Orakelmaschine (with SWR and DLF) besides more concerts of Surrogate Cities, The Mayfield a.o. (see calender), performances of Everything That Happened And Would Happen in Taipei and Paris and new installations in Asia.
Heiner Goebbels: Contre l'œuvre d'art totale
Translated by Isabelle Kranabetter and Aleksi Barriere for Collection : Écrits de compositeurs
Philharmonie de Paris, 432 pages
Le compositeur et metteur en scène allemand Heiner Goebbels (né en 1952) est une figure majeure de la création contemporaine. À l’intersection de la théâtralité de la musique et de la musicalité du théâtre, ses spectacles exaltent l’hétérogénéité des voix, des genres et des médiums. « Faire de la musique avec les moyens de la scène », comme l’imaginait Arnold Schönberg.
Depuis ses débuts de musicien et de créateur radiophonique, jusque dans ses rôles plus récents de curateur et d’enseignant, Heiner Goebbels est en dialogue constant avec les artistes et auteurs qui ont influencé son travail : Hanns Eisler, Heiner Müller, Elias Canetti, Gertrude Stein, mais aussi, côté francophone, Alain Robbe-Grillet, Maurice Blanchot ou Paul Valéry.
Ce recueil est la plus vaste anthologie de ses textes écrits au fil des quarante dernières années, et la première en français. Tour à tour carnet de bord, journal rétrospectif, espace de réflexion sur les pratiques artistiques, dont la sienne, Contre l’œuvre d’art totale
constitue un manifeste esthétique et politique : pour l’abolition des hiérarchies entre les arts, pour la liberté d’invention des spectateurs-auditeurs.
Intakt CD 426 / 2024
The instrumentalists of The Mayfield have together created the music to the large scale performance Everything that happened and would happen by Heiner Goebbels – a music theatre piece on Europe as a historical and contemporary ‘construction site’. The band is named after the Mayfield Depot, a vast disused railway station in Manchester, in which they rehearsed and created the work. It inspired the aesthetics of the music. The instrumentation is dedicated to a coexistence of acoustic and electronic sources, ranging from percussion, as the earliest and universal source of musical expression, to birdcalls, saxophones and prepared grand piano and to Ondes Martenot, one of the first electronic instruments. An invented electric guitar added with digital sensors bridges the gap between these different sonic universes. The Mayfield music results in soundscapes between controlled noise and ‘musique concrête instrumentale’. At La Muse en Circuit – the Parisian recording studio designed specifically for electro-acoustic music that Luc Ferrari established in 1982 – the musicians recorded 95 improvised pieces. Willi Bopp, who has worked closely with Goebbels for 35 years, subsequently created a collage of those selections, which were further winnowed and sequenced into the seamless 16-track selection featured on this remarkable album. „The collective’s brand of free improvisation is stunning, a liquid form of electro-acoustic music of uncommon physicality, depth, and dynamics that sounds like little else in the realm of contemporary experimental music“, writes Peter Margasak in the liner notes.
Coming up in the Fall
Heiner Goebbels succesfully returned to his practise as skillfull improviser on the grandpiano at the Monheim Triennale Prequel with several duos: with the Scotish bagpipe virtuoso Brighde Chaimbeul, the Palestinian electronic sound artist Muqata'a, the Indian / American Singer Ganavya Doraiswamy and with Peter Evans (NYC, trumpet).
Now many performances and concerts will follow in the second half of 2024: Songs of Wars I have seen at the BBC Proms in the Royal Albert Hall in London and during the Ensems Festival in Valencia, A House of Call during MITO Festival in Turino, Milano and during Festival d'Automne in Paris, and last not least Everything that happened and would happen during the Salzburger Festspiele as part of European Capital of Culture
After teaching in Genova during March and in Parma during June, he also continues with lectures in Düsseldorf and during the European Capital of Culture Salzkammergut.
GENOVA, DÜSSELDORF, MONHEIM AM RHEIN, LONDON, SALZBURG, TURINO, MILANO, PARIS
2024 started with a four week Visiting Professorship at the University of Genova in March for several interdisciplinary seminars/lectures/workshops - open for students in literature (DIRAAS), languages (DLCM) and Digital Humanisties (DIBRIS), PhD students and students at the conservatorium and of the university theatre Il Falcone. This invitation was an initiative in collaboration with the classes for electronic music and performing arts at Niccolò Paganini-Conservatorium.
From April until the end of November many major compositions by Heiner Goebbels are performed in Europe: the staged concert Songs Of Wars I have Seen, the orchestra cycles Surrogate Cities and A House of Call and the large scale performance Everything That Happened And Would Happen
A book with a French edition of Aesthetics of Absence will be announced together with a lecture at Philharmonie de Paris.
Please look for precise dates, times and locations at the Calender
2023 was a full year with a large number of new exhibitions and site specific installations: 7 Columns in Elefsina (Greece), The Comforter in Vilnius (Lithuania), The Last Painting at Museo Reina Sofia (Madrid), To see something to hear something at Musée du Luxembourg (Paris) and No 862 - an Oracle Machine at the World Heritage of Völklingen (Germany).
Further more there were concerts of Songs of Wars I Have Seen by various Ensembles in Scotland, Sweden, Switzerland, A House of Call performed by Orchestra Casa da Musica in Porto and by the London Philharmonics.
And at last - after the pandemic break - the large scale performance Everything That Happened And Would Happen was restaged and performed at the Theatre Olympics in Budapest - it can be seen again in 2024 at the Salzburger Festspiele.
More concerts of A House of Call are planned in 2024 - for the first time in France and Italy and the Opera in Düsseldorf will present Surrogate Cities in a choreography by Demis Volpi.
Heiner Goebbels is invited to join the Monheim Triennale July 4-6, he plans a visiting professorship in Italy, a new radio production and a CD release. More details about all that and more in the next weeks on this website.
2023
862 - premiere of an oracle machine
On the weekend September 1st - 3rd, a new performative installation has been successfully premiered in the ironworks at the border between France and south-west Germany - accompanied with TV reports on the news (ARD tagesschau) and followed by many reviews in daily newspapers.
Together with René Liebert (video), Marc Thein (light), Willi Bopp (sound) and Matthias Mohr (dramaturgy), Heiner Goebbels has conceived an intense and unique encounter with a former coal stamping machine - which speaks to us in a delicate balance of words, sounds and images.
Only six more performances of this site specific work can be attended until September 17th.