Loony Tunes and Silent moves; a re-evaluation of Pierrot Lunaire

This project is the first part of a process of creating a live performance around a reassessment and re-contextualising of a selection of the Pierrot Lunaire poems of Albert Giraud (published in 1884) and the way Arnold Schoenberg exploited a setting of some of these poems (in a translation by Otto Hartleben) for his melodrama created in 1912. Malcolm Atkins (musician) and Ana Barbour (dancer) have developed responses to these poems - mainly through collaborative improvisation ? and Peter Green has filmed and edited nine separate videos to document this process and the various results. Most of the filming was completed over two days in the Drama Studio of Oxford Brookes University.

Two sections (each section comprises a separate video) use pre-composed music to explore the sentiments of the first and last poems in Giraud’s set whilst simultaneously referencing the texts of the first and last poems in the set that Schoenberg chose from Hartleben’s translations. Within these settings the sprechstimme melodies that Schoenberg created are used in a different context that highlights their underlying expressionism. In contrast the more surreal and lighter lyrical content of Giraud?s original poems is highlighted by melodies written for them. The dance was created for these sections by a mixture of planning and improvisation.

The remaining seven sections were created from the exploration of resonant fragments of text from throughout the poems that Schoenberg used. They were entirely improvised. The music was often structured around English translation of the poem texts (or short extracts from them) and layered by the repetition of sound through using a ‘loop’ pedal which enabled the real time combination of voices, violin and keyboards. The dance was created in interpretation of the sentiment of the poems and in response to the music (whilst simultaneously informing the musical interpretation).

As explained in the original submission for Dispatx we chose the figure of Pierrot for the representation of a lost masculine role ? particularly relevant in contemporary society where the concept of masculinity is so confused in our questioning of traditional patriarchy. The fragility and confusion of male desire in the light of abstracted and falsified projections of the feminine has always been with us (especially at the start of the twentieth century) but is particularly striking in the world of the MTV generation. The fragmentary and surrealist nature of Giraud?s poems is an excellent basis for a contemporary exploration of this subject because further fragmentation and narrative layering seem a natural extension of his original endeavour (and of Schoenberg’s).

Malcolm Atkins:  Music (voice; violin; keyboards; sounds)

Ana Barbour:   Motion

Peter Green:   Film