MONOLOG / DIALOG

Musical-radiophonic collage on texts by Jorge Semprún and Samuel Beckett.

Text by Jorge Semprún (from »What a beautiful Sunday!«), Samuel Beckett (»Poème«) and Juan Allende-Blin. »They huddled together in the sleet, in the icy mist of that day. Not a sound escaped from their tumbling mass. Only sometimes the sound of a herd was heard. The sound of a herd penned in, clattering its hooves on the cobblestones of a marketplace.« This is how Jorge Semprún describes the arrival of a group of Polish Jews at Buchenwald concentration camp. Composer Juan Allende-Blin takes this simple and, for that very reason, poignant text as the starting point for his radio play «Monologue / Dialogue.« Allende-Blin processes Semprún's words in a composition for instruments and sounds. He combines them with his own voice and with a poem by Samuel Beckett. The result is a radiophonic sound collage in which all the elements stand on equal footing. „Perhaps the musical events generate a deeper understanding than the texts that are used. Music and sounds also possess semantics – only this leaves us speechless because we cannot render them in words. All the components sublimate, they become equal figures,“ the artist says about his project. Juan Allende-Blin, born in Santiago de Chile in 1928, came to Germany in 1951 and lives in Essen. He composes instrumental works, ballets and radiophonic collages. In his writings he deals especially with the music of exile.