Heiner Goebbels, Ensemble Modern Orchestra, Vimbayi Kaziboni

A House of Call. My Imaginary Notebook is Heiner Goebbels's cycle of invocations, prayers, poems and songs for large orchestra, about a hundred minutes long. Its raw material is a collection of recorded voices that Goebbels gathered over the years on travels, in archives and by chance. The orchestra answers them, supports them and argues with them, in what he calls a secular responsory. Some voices reach back to the early days of the phonograph, others he taped himself, and most of the speakers are long dead.

The Ensemble Modern Orchestra plays under Vimbayi Kaziboni, the Zimbabwe-born conductor, with Hermann Kretzschmar triggering the recordings from a sampler. Goebbels has worked with Ensemble Modern for some 35 years. The work was commissioned by Ensemble Modern, Musikfest Berlin, musica viva of Bayerischer Rundfunk and other European institutions. It was recorded in September 2021 at the Prinzregententheater in Munich, in a co-production of ECM, Ensemble Modern and BR. Goebbels mixed it with the engineers Clemens Deller and Gerhard Gruber.

The fifteen movements fall into four parts, Stein Schere Papier, Grain de la voix, Wax and Violence and When Words Gone. The opening Introitus, subtitled A Response to Répons, answers Pierre Boulez's Répons and draws on Goebbels's 1980s group Cassiber. The voices from the Caucasus include Georgian prisoners of war recorded in a German camp in 1916, and Krunk, an Armenian song by Komitas heard in recordings from 1914 and 1917. Other voices were recorded in Namibia in 1931 and in Amazonia in 1980. Around them the orchestra moves between pounding jazz-rock, Stravinskian rhythmic jolts and textures at the edge of silence. In What When Words Gone the players themselves sing passages from Samuel Beckett's Worstward Ho as a chorale-like finale.

In The Guardian, Andrew Clements gave the album five stars and called it “a fascinating, strikingly beautiful work”. He noted the moments of delicacy where a single instrument underpins a chant or a distant choir. Reviewing the premiere, the Financial Times wrote of “a magnificent new work”. In MusikTexte, Max Nyffeler heard an archaeology of the electroacoustic era, polemical in its use of the colonial recordings.

Two CDs on ECM New Series, catalogue number ECM New Series 2728/29, released in August 2022, with liner notes by Goebbels in German and English.