Commission to Genoël von Lilienstern

The unverifiable, the silence, the speculative has become the core of the debate about Kassel's involvement from NSU to the murder of Walter Lübcke, not documents that have been processed and can be read. People look the other way; files are kept secret. The composer Genoël von Lilienstern and the playwright Dirk Laucke document and process this way of dealing with right-wing extremist crimes, secrecy, and political scandals in their music theater work Operation Abendsonne for orchestra, ensemble of singers and AI electronic, which is dedicated to the specific sound of this great complex of silence.

Sonic monoliths are the core of the composition, along which the documentary materials are lined up: sonic documents that can be factual or speculative – and in addition, a co-composed visual layer that integrates light and projection. The focus is not on the objective gesture of the material, but on the aestheticizing, emotionalizing dimensions of, for example, a blackened protocol. The music itself becomes an actor, relates to the events, tries to create meaning, loses itself in detail – and also goes to sonic extremes with sound fields and drones up to infrasound. The singers slip into different roles, as it were, always playing through the possible backgrounds of the crimes. Following on from Lilienstern's experiments with artificial intelligence and neural networks, the linguistic and sonic documents of the political complex, such as politicians' speeches, are the starting point for the search for the sonic jargon, the singular sound of the complex and its actors – so that the sonic idiom of language remains and without a single word having to be identifiable. With the help of this technique, reality adds up as a sonic principle: Is it possible to hear here what is not spoken? What is the sound of a silent complex? The compositional commission Operation Abendsonne to Genoël von Lilienstern for the Staatstheater Kassel is made possible by the Ernst von Siemens Music Foundation.

Further information:
staatstheater-kassel.de

Dates

July 8, 2023
Staatstheater Kassel