Voices of Help (2016-2917) is a three room documentary sound installation in the Jugend Museum Berlin. The piece explores concepts of help through interviews with community and social workers around a post socialist-communist area of Berlin. (Rote Insel.) The recording of each voice received and instrument that brought out the personal qualities of the interviewees. The first room was dedicated to hearing the stories about how helpers began. The second room explored the tools of professional social workers through collected narratives, the third room was dedicated to those expanding the system of help, mostly by volunteering to help refugees in ways meaningful to the helpers themselves.
The exhibit was inspired by a Studs Terkel curiosity for the neighbourhood where Brody lives, the knowledge that help is not as prominent American culture, and by the fact that people help Brody’s mother when she was put on the children’s transport as a thirteen year old girl escaping from Nazi Vienna.
Photo Documentary of Voices of Help by Dirk Hasskarl-Please Click on title or picture.
I admit, as a musician I have a bias towards sound. But when I think about Jewish culture, it seems to me that music and storytelling long played a critical role in transporting Jewish traditions. For one thing, visual culture encounters an ambivalence in Jewish teachings. Perhaps more telling, though, is the fact that Jews could squeeze their stories and voices into the most over-stuffed suitcase or bundle. And sling a violin or trumpet across a shoulder. After a concert at the Felix-Nussbaum-Haus, I noticed a saying painted on the wall: Trees have roots, Jews have feet.
Dani Levi (A film maker from a Swiss village settles in Berlin.)
Ann and Helmut (A French woman and a German man fall in in love in China then settle in Berlin.
While the Jewish Museum Berlin has typically showcased objects, the exhibit on the music of Radical Jewish Culture explored how to use aural, not visual media to delve into Jewish identity. Well before Five Easy Pieces, I’d conducted interviews during my first European tour, when I used cassette tapes to record why other US musicians had crossed the Atlantic. On recent travels I’ve conversed with children all over the world for radio shows about music and young people. For this installation, however, Iwanted to take the five oral histories as inspiration for musical compositions.
In Five Easy Pieces, I started with one-minute stories from five people living in Germany. I included myself. The time limit forced the speakers to recount only a few moments from the sweep of their lives as they considered how they saw themselves in Germany. We had all established “homes” in Germany, yet each voice refracted traces of different places visited or inhabited, age and gender, even the echo of a grandparent’s endearment or scolding. To me, the music of speaking, its staccato stutters and chaotic chortles, was as vibrant as the information conveyed.
Katharina Oguntoye (Afro-German identity and the name.)
I use music to throw images intothe world, but it feels awkward to tell people what makes my work meaningful. Certainly my music is filtered through ideas or values I hold close; in our human response to life, I believe that we are intuitive – stronger emotionally than rationally. The spontaneous voice, even a spoken fragment, reveals to me the depths of an individual, a real-time sound history framed in feelings, whether acknowledged or suppressed. The stories we tell about ourselves are accompanied by the melody of who we are.
Mini Kapur (Traditional Indian textiles and materials and German design.)
After I listened to the stories, I transcribed the melody of each voice note for note, and assigned an instrument to compliment its timbre. In Five Easy Pieces, the instrument first plays in unison with the voice, then moves on – like someone leaving home. The voice is stripped of its words, but the story remains in the essence of the sound.
Creating a piece of music through storytelling was a precious experiment. Now often relegated to a children’s activity, storytelling had been a vibrant part of Jewish culture up until the near destruction of European Jewry. In the postwar years, things like watching television displaced active storytelling – we’ve lost the storyteller reinventing the story for the moment and audience. I wanted to celebrate the music of the voice, to interweave the stories into collective musical portraits of experience and feeling.
For the Heimatkunde exhibition, the music of the voice belies the usual visual cues of identity. Assumptions about belonging and exclusion are often based on physical appearance, especially in this part of the world. In this piece, I wanted to probe our usual patterns of decision-making. After listening to Katharina, for example, her voice a mixture of Zwickau and Berlin, we discover that as an instrument she is bass clarinet. As we move through Five Easy Pieces, we see that Katharina is African-German.
When I walk into a Berlin cafe, I can pass as German. Once I order my coffee, I may need to explain that I grew up outside of San Francisco, studied in Boston, never learned proper German. Back in California, my family teases me about the odd inflections warping my English. Sometimes I forget a word. Our “homeland” we carry in our voices.
Mending clothes brought across an ocean, working endless hours in sweat shops, religious and group belonging, combining fabric from two continents, new fashions that start out of necessity in ghettos
Between 2007 and 2010 I produced a series of children’s shows by interviewing young musicians from around the world. My goal was to inspire young listeners to get enjoy culture and play their own music.
The David Marton group is a collective of musicians and actors who explore the intersection of music and theater. Currently the group has two productions at the Munich Kammerspiele,
Four Families Listening An Eavesdropping Installation Technical support by Daniel Dorch
Listening has become a dirty word, especially in Berlin. In the early 90’s, when I arrived here it was mostly used while describing East Germans who had been spying on their neighbors and Russians and Americans spying on each other. Today it’s possible to spy on someone through a mac. What if I whisper Snowden, Saudi, sword fight. Will those words trigger an alarm a thousand miles away? The next time I fly to the States will homeland security question me for hours in a smelly room in the back of Kennedy Airport? Will the cafe where I’m writing be raided?
Particularly because it claims to represent something it calls the free world, and because it claims to be friends with Germany, America, with the most advanced NSA technology, has pushed a potentially beautiful world, LISTEN, further into the dark ages.
Four Families Listening explores listening as one of the most intimate of human qualities. Multi language families have been selected because they enjoy even more levels of listening than single language families, each language having it’s syntax and vocabulary as well as melody of emotion. The families were recorded in the natural acoustics of where they congregate, the dining r
I use music to throw images intothe world, but it feels awkward to tell people what makes my work meaningful. Certainly my music is filtered through ideas or values I hold close; in our human response to life, I believe that we are intuitive – stronger emotionally than rationally. The spontaneous voice, even a spoken fragment, reveals to me the depths of an individual, a real-time sound history framed in feelings, whether acknowledged or suppressed. The stories we tell about ourselves are accompanied by the melody of who we are.