Hajnal Németh
Fear of Music, Trust in Twelve
13.11.–18.12.2022
Ebensperger Berlin
The exhibition’s central piece is a new work by Hajnal Németh, the video installation Dream Exchanges – Fear of Music, Trust in Twelve, which shows footage of a piece co-written and performed by a twelve-member youth chamber choir. In the prose parts, the choir members perform each other’s dreams as a result of the random redistribution of their dream notes. For the musical parts, the variable lyrics of the piece are constructed from a mathematical combination of two times twelve pairable linguistic elements.
The piece was constructed partly in the process of the performance based on pre-written compositional – linguistic and musical – elements, along with given rules and instructions. The fnal content and structure of the piece was determined by the innermost personal world of the performers on the one hand, and by chance placed on a mathematical basis on the other.
In the prose part of the piece, titled "Dream Exchanges", in roughly two-minute rounds, each member of the choir read out the dream of another choir member, the note of which was randomly assigned to them by digital redistribution. The content of this part was thus derived from absolutely personal inner psyches, which then became shared, or rather exchanged, worlds through identity exchanges.
The musical part of the piece is titled "Fear of Music, Trust in Twelve", and it comprises the performance of a minimal and repetitive composition, a song made up of 144 lines. Each of the two-word lines of the long random lyrics is one of the 144 possible combinations of pairing 2 sets of 12 words. Their order was also decided by an algorithm. The exhibition also includes the animated version Fear of Music, Trust in Twelve – Random Lyrics, a site specific, kinetic video of exactly these combinations. The dedicated lyrics rearranger is available online to anyone, and each version can be downloaded individually: www.ndr.hu/fear_of_music.
In the background of the piece performed, the privilege of the machine to rewrite man's poem and even to detach the trace of the innermost psychic world of one person and transmit it to another at random, is thus defnitely asserted. The film installation’s footage is comprised by documentations of the studio recording sessions.
A live version of the piece will be performed at the opening of the exhibition. The openness of the structure allows each performer to convey a rearranged, new textual content.
The third video piece presented is another premiere: Five Songs, One End was originally concevied as a performance for the Neuer Berliner Kunstverein (n.b.k) and its opening of the exhibition “Thomas Schmit Retrospektive” in 2021. Five Songs, One End is based on a brief instruction forming the score of Tomas Schmit’s piece Two Compositions to Justify a Performance (1964). This adaptation, however, departs significantly from the original concept. The original instruction reads as follows: At the beginning of a performance announce: “END!”, and at the end: “NOW IT STARTS AGAIN!” In Németh’s interpretation, the ending is an improvisatory process filling the duration of the performance, in which five singers repeat the last line of five songs continuously and in different variations.