[…] Ig Henneman has discovered a third route, a fusion of the Lied’s finesse with the straightforwardness of a jam session. Her Solo Songs for bassoon, bass clarinet, violin, viola and cello trace a semi-improvised road towards song, starting from an instrument. The musician plays, and plays on, till a tipping point is reached where text presents itself as an answer to the questions uttered by the notes as they were groping, searching, dancing, growling, whining. At this point, replete with climactic musical energy, the musician starts to sing, pressed by an urgency too strong for the voice to withhold: it must speak out. It is the turning point. The words of Ingeborg Bachmann, Anneke Brassinga, Emily Dickinson, Sarah Lawson and Nanao Sakaki provide first aid, in magical ambiguity. […] -Bas van Putten
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“For a perfect poem I have no use, said the composer Wolfgang Rihm. On the contrary, he searched for ruins of poetry, where the ghost of music might go wandering. The perfect poem does not exist; that’s another way to put it. Perfect poetry would embody silence — the space where everything that words could possibly express, is present. Each word wanders like a cloud through this expanse, and clings for support onto the next word, which is as unknowing as the first. A poem weaves a texture, a net of hooks finely wrought; meanings, allusions, are caught in it and stay suspended. So the reader will linger, haunted, getting lost beyond speech, or crossing the bridge of language, back to the source of indefinite, embryonic, unified sensations: substance that might take on any form. This is why the composer reaches out for the word and why the word seeks music. Together, they stand on more solid ground.
Richard Wagner, sensing this, developed the notion of Gesamtkunstwerk, a fusion of the separate forms of art, whereby, in the spirit of Greek tragedy, they would ripen to their own ‘truth’ on a higher level, a synthesis. It may be claimed, without blasphemy, that this lofty ideal has reincarnated in the song. Pop song and chanson, fado and tearjerker; they are short cuts to a Gesamtkunstwerk. Here are song and dance, gesture and theatrical emotion. All aspects of expression welded into one dynamic and unified whole. Song and choreography, image and sound, celebrate in video clips their eternal longing for each other. And what is caught in their nets is flimsy as a flirtation or has the depth of La Bohème or Götterdämmerung.
The song matured. It encompassed The Beatles and Brassens, Barbara and Joni Mitchell, Oum Kalthoum, Rosetta Tharpe and Michael Jackson. Meanwhile, in the world of ‘classical’ composers, it developed into a venerable institution, the ‘Lied’, based on texts by Goethe, Heine or Verlaine, a grand genre, rich in subtle interplay, written for voice and piano. Here, the division of roles implies a strict separation of authority. The composer composes, the interpreter interprets. That’s wonderful, but disastrous as well: song is, by nature, spontaneous. Somebody grabs a guitar and starts to sing.
Ig Henneman has discovered a third route, a fusion of the Lied’s finesse with the straightforwardness of a jam session. Her Solo Songs for bassoon, bass clarinet, violin, viola and cello trace a semi-improvised road towards song, starting from an instrument. The musician plays, and plays on, till a tipping point is reached where text presents itself as an answer to the questions uttered by the notes as they were groping, searching, dancing, growling, whining. At this point, replete with climactic musical energy, the musician starts to sing, pressed by an urgency too strong for the voice to withhold: it must speak out. It is the turning point. The words of Ingeborg Bachmann, Anneke Brassinga, Emily Dickinson, Sarah Lawson and Nanao Sakaki provide first aid, in magical ambiguity.
To lay such a bridge, one must be able to read with a musician’s mind. Ig Henneman analysed five poems for the musical elements within and behind the words. They are abundant. In the synaesthetic menace of Bachmann’s rose storm, Dickinson’s ‘sequence ravelled out of sound.’ In the ‘staccato tap dance cleats’ of Lawson’s Hans and Anneke’s Lakeland Terriers, in Brassinga’s invisible birds. On all sides the wind, storm, tempest blows, in the space between words and signs. Dickinson, in I felt a Cleaving in my Mind, describes a nuclear fission of the mind. The edifice collapses ‘like balls upon a floor’. It’s more than a metaphor, it’s the sound Dickinson heard. But in the piece by Henneman no falling balls are heard. Music echoing the text would act as filler, not as feeling. The balls are a metaphor of the despair that made them fall. The music guides the broken word of the shattered brain back to its origins, where it seeks to pick up the lost thread. A whole note and two quavers, as signs of distress, mark the beginning of the return to order; birth in Morse code. A low C sharp repeated five times in triple forte, glissandi and ascending 7ths, create a push, interrupted or extended by gestures of improvisation, embodying the search at the crossroads from nowhere to nowhere. ‘Improvisation to introduce the song’, is written in the score of In the Storm of Roses for violin, just before Bachmann’s text enters in alienated parallel movement with the instrument. The word is finder’s right. The bass clarinet surges up from a primordial soup of sound, indeterminate, yet on its way to an awareness that it is itself sound, the tone-of-voice emerging from the blown breath: ‘you call this wind …… but no proof is forthcoming’. With a minor third the voice becomes an instrument, humming. The paradox: all things come together on a breeze in all directions. The ‘wind for mind’, in Sakaki’s curious chanting poem, is the spiritual landscape of a composer’s nature, music blowing on the wind from all corners of the world; the fiddle style of the violin piece, the country vibe of the viola; in the bassoon we hear the rhythm of the first movement in Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony. On that pulse, the bassoon becomes an animal in a snarling, panting, barking, kicking dog-scherzo. An animal fired with the energy of the dance, the thumping rhythm of the Dutch ‘weet je niet? weet je niet?’ – don’t you know, don’t you know? Of course not. No knowing here, only strength of will. The will of the tone, the will of the mind, the longing for the word, the dream of man and his leap of faith.” -Bas van Putten, liner notes
all compositions Ig Henneman
buma stemra
publishing house Donemus
recordings
tr 1. November 28 and December 13 2019 Niels Brouwer Amsterdam NL
tr 2. June 9 2015, Niels Brouwer Studio Amsterdam NL
tr 3, 4, 5 November 13 2016, Mideka Music Recording/Micha de Kanter
November Music ‘s Hertogenbosch NL
mixing and editing 1. 2. Niels Brouwer Ig Henneman
mixing and editing 3. 4. 5. and the total CD Micha de Kanter Ig Henneman
mastering Mideka Music Recording/Micha de Kanter
design Francesca Patella
cover art Ab Baars
liner notes Bas van Putten English translation Anneke Brassinga
produced by Ig Henneman
with support of the Wig Foundation and private donations
