To Stage The Music – Heiner Goebbels
by Giulio Boato
From the ‘Left Radical Wind Orchestra’ via ‘Cassiber’ and Heiner Müller to the Grand Doyen of international music theater
Giulio Boato | Italy, Germany, France | 2022 | 85′ | OmU
Heiner Goebbels is an eclectic composer, his approach almost impossible to grasp by the definitions that have been common to music and art since the later 20th century. Using his penultimate work to date from 2020 – “A House of Call” (according to Goebbels ‘an imaginary personal notebook’) – this film documents a three-year creative process around this composition for orchestra and its performance.
Starting from a camera that records individual concert parts in the midst of the large ensemble, TO STAGE THE MUSIC follows the most diverse threads of Goebbels’ artistic work biography: from the ‘Sogenannt Linksradikales Blasorchester’ (So-called Left-wing Radical Wind Orchestra) from 1976 to the avant-rock formation ‘Cassiber’ (including the British prog-rock band ‘The Cassiber’). with the British prog rock drummer Chris Cutler) from 1982 to 1992 and several collaborations with Heiner Müller from the mid-1980s to the quintessential “A House of Call,” which sums up how Goebbels works with cultural material and why, especially music, language and the space of the theater with its temporality, but also radio and installation art.
