In our age of technological advance, disenchanted skepticism, and smoldering conflicts that seem ever more deadlocked, the arts are heading toward a greater transversality. Not mere interdisciplinarity, but indisciplinarity is emerging from this confused but productive ferment.

Olga Neuwirth, born in 1968, is a child of this chaos and enjoys a special relationship to this dizzying artistic scene. Much of her work is multimedia, involving video, lighting, etc., in addition to sound. Musically, her sources of inspiration, reference points, and instrumentation cover a broad swathe of history, ranging from early music to the twentieth century — she cites Edgard Varèse and Luigi Nono as her two great models — not to mention contemporary trends and jazz (her father was a jazz pianist). But those sources of inspiration go well beyond music. Once you look past its surface — variously described as wild, corrosive, acerbic, exuberant, dazzling, abrasive — her sound has a labyrinthine richness achieved by transposing formal procedures from other art forms. It is within this approach that we find the keys to an intelligent listening experience.

The Rigor of Indiscipline

The milestones in Neuwirth’s journey to creative maturity and renown have largely come from outside the realm of music. Though often associated with film and the visual arts (which she studied in San Francisco in the 1980s), Neuwirth has a special affinity for literature. A glance at her catalogue comes across the names of Goethe (…morphologische Fragmente…), Baudelaire (Spleen), Melville, James Joyce and Michel Butor (!? dialogues suffisants !?), the Surrealists and especially Leonora Carrington (Bählamms Fest), Vilém Flusser (Vampyrotheone), Louis Bec (Akraote Hadal), Gertrude Stein (Five Daily Miniatures), William S. Burroughs (Nova Mob), Paul Auster (…ce qui arrive…), Georges Pérec (La Vie — …ulcérant(e)), along with the 2004 Nobel Prize winner Elfriede Jelinek, a close collaborator of Neuwirth’s since the 1980s. Literature is central to Neuwirth’s artistic world and equally essential to her music; hence her involvement in theater and musical theater, or, more precisely, multimedia musical theater. “I grew up with writers,” she told Frank Madlener in a 2004 interview. “Words have always been important for me. Musical theater brings together everything that interests me: language and music, electronics and space, live music and recorded music.”¹ Unlike contemporaries who question the nature of language, however, Neuwirth treats the text with great reverence. For her, language is not so much a site for deconstruction, a play of signs and sonorities, as a narrative framework, a guiding thread. It is also a voice that contributes its own sonic properties to the soundworld (…ce qui arrive…, for instance, involves Auster’s own recorded voice).

While a text might provide the basic material for her music — starting ideas, a scenario with associated images, or certain raw sound elements — it is the other arts that inspire its structure. Without necessarily supplying readymade forms, these arts offer a formidable reservoir of rhetorical techniques, evolutionary processes, and developmental systems that she can freely transpose into musical language in her own unique way. For instance, for torsion: transparent variation, Neuwirth took inspiration from the forms of Daniel Libeskind’s Holocaust Memorial in Berlin and Naum Gabo’s sculptures, while elsewhere she adapts procedures typical of the plastic and visual arts. She has also looked to natural phenomena, such as the proliferating growth of honeysuckle, which she evokes in Lonicera Caprifolium). In a 2008 interview with David Sanson, she explained how, in composing Hooloomooloo, she found inspiration in a triptych by Frank Stella:

“The paintings look three-dimensional. And what interests me in music is space. Not just architecture — space properly speaking — but also, within the score, this orchestral space that you find in, for example, Mahler. In [Stella’s] triptych, an impression of space that is illusory, not truly three-dimensional, develops out of a two-dimensional background. This interplay between foreground and background is key to [Hooloomooloo]. The sounds are not spatialized, distributed in space, but rather generated from a central point on the stage: this thin space between the tape recording and the three ensembles becomes a fictive space.”²

The artform from which she borrows the most, however, is film: she wrote a master’s thesis on it (“The Music of Alain Resnais’s L’Amour à mort”) and refers to it constantly, paying tribute to directors such as Federico Fellini, René Clair, Alfred Hitchcock, and David Lynch. “You have to think about cinema,” she told Madlener, “about movement, light. […] Just as in cinema, you can assemble several levels simultaneously. I grew up with that, I studied temporality in cinematic montage […].”³ This temporality radically disrupts what might be called (for lack of a better term) the narrative logic of her music. Not content with collage, more than just an editor, she takes on the roles of cinematographer, director of photography, and stage director, transposing cinematic techniques like zoom, close-up, tracking shot, panoramic view, dissolve, long take, and overexposure. She juxtaposes scenes drawn from vastly distant realms, like sudden changes in setting or lighting. This approach, far removed from classical notions of formal continuity, results in an impetuous succession of brief sonic moments: interruptions, abrupt breaks, objections, contradictions, and reversals. All of it carries forward the sonic perspective, giving the music a catastrophic quality — elusive and rich with singularities.

In her program notes for Lonicera Caprifolium, Neuwirth references Robert Bresson’s “Notes on the Cinematographer” (1975), including his insights on what composers can learn from the filmmaker’s art: “An image must transform in contact with other images, like a color in contact with other colors. A blue is not the same blue next to a green, a yellow, a red. There is no art without transformation.”⁴ Her montage choices therefore trigger specific processes within each independent sound cell.

The fragmented, contrast-driven nature of montage also represents a valuable addition to compositional discourse: As Bresson writes, “Fragmentation is essential if one is to avoid falling into representation. See beings and things in their separable parts. Isolate these parts. Make them independent to give them new independence.”⁵

Neuwirth goes beyond these cinematic basics. Whenever a filmmaker’s work captivates her, she tries to imagine how she might integrate its rhetorical processes into her music. This is what she did with Hitchcock in !? dialogues suffisants !? and with Lynch in Lost Highway, which she adapted for the stage with Jelinek, generating a masterpiece of musical theater. “In my opera,” she told Sanson,

I tried to translate the time loops of Lynch’s film Lost Highway into music. The question is what is true, what is false, where do the sounds come from. Often, the listeners are wondering if what they are hearing is a live instrument or pre-recorded: I tried to recreate on the acoustic plane Lynch’s way of handling these questions with images.⁶

Neuwirth’s contributions to film music itself further demonstrate the flexibility and intelligence of her approach.

Amphibiguity

The “catastrophic” formal aspect of Neuwirth’s music corresponds to its supremely disconcerting sonic nature — an aesthetic that draws on Varèse’s violent, biting, fulgurant sounds, Helmut Lachenmann’s noise, Adriana Holszky’s newly invented sonic vocabulary, and, more distantly, spectralism, encountered through Tristan Murail. Neuwirth puts very different sounds into collision. Combining a wide range of timbres with a diversity of sources and means of sound-production, she effects a kind of sonic anamorphosis; the musicologist Jean-Noël van der Weid coined the word “amphibiguité” for her work. She combines, often using electronics, an broad instrumental palette (ranging from Baroque instruments to the electric guitar and ondes Martenot) with everyday noises, creating what she calls “hypersounds” or “androgynous sounds” — a term especially apt given her frequent use of the countertenor, the quintessential androgynous tessitura.

This extraordinary voice, with its abnormally wide range (from baritone-bass to countertenor), was no doubt what fascinated her most about Klaus Nomi — above and beyond his artistic and media persona and his role in underground and queer culture in the 1970s and 1980s (Nomi died of AIDS in 1983 at the age of 39). Neuwirth writes:

Alongside the dark and pessimistic psychological states (not to mention the grim state of the world) evoked in Klaus Nomi’s extravagant songs, which can often seem absurd, there is also a sort of lightheartedness, even though, in my opinion, these two persons — Klaus Sperber [Nomi’s real name] and Klaus Nomi — sadly were never reconciled during his lifetime. His songs and his mask became a sort of Atlantis or utopia for him, the dream world of a child. Like Lewis Carroll, he was a master of disguise, skilled in speaking/singing through masks, in becoming and being someone else, hiding himself and even his voice. His shows become like a child’s dream, taking shape from riddles, clues, ironies, and nonsense: “a delight of wonderful stories and off we go with fresh series and new adventures.” Nomi invites us aboard his ship of fools to discover the world.⁷

The marginality of this character was, naturally, another draw for Neuwirth — and the score testifies to the eclectic origins of her borrowed sounds.

Instrumental acoustic sounds, noisy acoustics, tape recordings, electronically processed hybrid sounds all blend indistinguishably. Familiar timbres, pure and whole (as in acoustic instruments), are stripped of their historical referents, eroded, then destroyed. Listeners lose the ability to discern the origins of sounds: are they acoustic or electronic? Neuwirth refuses to distinguish between the two or to adjust them to each other: this degenerative hybridization gives rise to a novel form of functional and spatial tension within the musical fabric. Even though “the way of thinking about electronics that comes out of spectralism, as practiced at IRCAM, is not really [hers],”⁸ as she avows, she does not deny her debt to the spectralists. Referring to her trumpet concerto …miramondo multiplo…, for instance, she describes orchestration techniques similar to those developed by Grisey and company.

All these immediately challenging elements — the “hypersounds,” the labyrinths of abrupt detours and sudden interruptions that throw the listener off course — amount to a systematic project of deconstructing our listening habits. Cliché as the claim may sound, Neuwirth incontestably achieves such an effect with uncommon elegance and effectiveness. There is a definite Neuwirth Touch, like the “Lubitsch Touch,” or Hitchcock’s humor, or the Resnais style, or Lynchian surrealism. Hers is ironical and tender, a delicate balance of grotesque humor and noir, skepticism and detachment — all of it devoid of pathos.

The Neuwirth Touch is epitomized by Aello (2016-2017), a concerto for solo flute, two trumpets, strings, synthesizer, and typewriter. Commissioned for the tricentenary of Bach’s Brandenburg Concertos, the work dutifully references the Fourth Concerto, for violin, two “fiauti d’echo,” and strings. As so often for Neuwirth, constraint becomes an opportunity. The commission reminded her of the bon mot, attributed to the writer Colette, that Bach’s music is “a sublime sewing machine.” Accordingly, she added a real machine to the canonical harpsichord continuo (distorted with a synthesizer), as well as other mundane appliances and even a glass harmonica in the slow movement. This humorous reimagining of Baroque perpetual motion gave her the occasion to further explore mechanical music, including barrel organs (often deliberately mistuned), Conlon Nancarrow’s prodigious player pianos, which have influenced her treatment of the musical material, and even circus music. The subtitle says it all: “Ballet mécanomorphe.”

The solo flute is of course a nod to Bach’s “fiauti d’echo,” but it is the two muted trumpets that recapture the concertante character (inevitably disfigured). The flute, trumpets, and “ripieno” strike up a question-and-answer interplay, defamiliarizing familiar material through clever distortions of the tuning, timbres, playing techniques, accentuation, etc. For Neuwirth, every instrument is a toy with which to play on our memories and frustrations.

The Angry Artist

Neuwirth challenges our perceptions, subverting our expectations. She not only bewilders the senses but offers the listener no help: rather than dismantling piece by piece our listening mechanisms (and the sedimented layers of meaning that accumulate on sonic material to transform it into language), she furnishes the listener’s unconscious with a space of acoustic freedom in which to take on the task for oneself. She leaves no detail for the conscious mind to latch onto, no sound with a definite or constant meaning. She distorts sound to provoke new associations that, with any luck, will be freed from social or cultural assumptions. Like Jelinek, she caricatures and satirizes clichés, dissecting their banality until they are stripped of all ties to language. The listener is urged to come out of his or her shell and listen actively. The ultimate goal being to get people to think for themselves, she jostles their certitudes with a fierce humor.

Regarding her opera Bählamms Fest, Neuwirth writes:

“I was looking for material, with which one oscillates continually between laughter and crying. I find that one can merely laugh about the fact that one is a human being, but, on the other hand, life is also very sad and desolate. I just love both — slapstick and its opposite. In the story of Carrington there are both. It is funny on the one hand — André Breton called this drama ‘érotisme comique’. Laughter is the exception. It is outside the law, it reveals the state of the illicit. But laughing can also be an act to resist the horror. Laughing in this drama stands beyond the verbal order. On the other hand, there is this omnipresent level of inescapability and horror.”⁹

If laughter is a form of resistance against fear, then for Neuwirth (a self-proclaimed “Austrian Depressionist”), music is a weapon of resistance against the world’s descent into chaos, a finger pointed at the absurdity and irrationality of human existence.

I would like my listeners to be people who consciously think things over, who think for themselves, who regard music and art as a whole as a mirror of human searching, of people who want to grasp how things are, to cast off impositions, and to leap into the unknown — and thus become more open and tolerant toward their surroundings.¹⁰

Neuwirth spoke these words on 19 February 2000 during a protest against the formation of a coalition government to include Jörg Haider’s far-right party, the Freedom Party of Austria. They remind us that sociopolitical engagement permeates her body of work, sometimes subtly, sometimes overtly, like a nagging, painful message. “My music is not aggressive, though its sensory impact is very direct,” she clarifies in an interview. “Rather, it is full of anger. […] My music is a purely musical protest against what is happening.”¹¹

Given this deeply held engagement, Neuwirth was a natural choice for the Wiener Konzerthaus’s 2016 commission for music to accompany Die Stadt ohne Juden (The City without Jews), a silent film made in 1924 by Hans Karl Breslauer, now restored and completed with long-missing scenes found at a Paris flea market. This satire, a full-on polemic against anti-Semitism, based on a book by journalist Hugo Bettauer (who was murdered by a young Nazi not long after its first screening), still staggers today in its prophetic power. Neuwirth accompanies the narrative with sparing use of direct mimesis — what Hanns Eisler called “Mickey Mousing.” Her curated material and quotations make her score into a sendup of the hypocrisy and baseness of a certain postwar Austrian political class, rivaling the critique present in the film itself. “It was important to me,” she confides,

not to overly caricature the characters and to take them seriously, so that the audience could as well. Despite my feeling of paralysis at the realization of how little the situation has evolved, and so as to avoid clichés even as I often wink at them, I tried to maintain a certain vivacity, alternately touching and harsh, warm and open, amusing and angry, engaged and detached, humorous and sad — but it was very, very difficult for me. This is not only about the anti-Semitism so deeply rooted in the Austrian mind but also about identity and alterity, as well as feelings of home and exile.¹²

In Melville’s Wake

Xenophobia was already a central theme in The Outcast (2012). Following her groundbreaking collaboration with Jelinek to revitalize the opera genre, Neuwirth delves deeper into the form with this “musicstallation-theater,” reimagining Herman Melville’s Moby Dick in the context of today’s global, multifarious crises — political, social, and environmental. A faithful transposition of the novel into a modern setting, The Outcast also marked the beginning of Neuwirth’s explicit creative engagement with Melville, though his work had long interested her.

“It is precisely Herman Melville’s heterogeneity that is fascinating,” Neuwirth writes, “and that earned him so much hostility during his lifetime. In his writing, he evaded the obligation to excel in a single genre.” It is hard not to read this homage as also a self-portrait.

Melville resurfaces in Le Encantadas o le avventure nel mare delle meraviglie (The Enchanted Isles, or, Adventures in the Sea of Wonders), produced at IRCAM in 2015. His 1854 novella of that name is about the Galápagos Islands (also known at the time as the Encantadas), and Neuwirth evokes the idea of the archipelago by distributing performers around the space in six groups. But she also tries to unify this dispersal around a common acoustic structure. The inspiration for this spatial resource came to her from another island chain: Venice, and specifically the church of San Lorenzo, now closed to the public but in 1984 home to the premier of Prometeo by Nono, one of her all-time musical heroes. Neuwirth set about modeling and recreating this church’s unique acoustics, with help from the Acoustic and Cognitive Spaces team at IRCAM, using a three-dimensional technology known as a “spherical microphone array.” This “artificial” acoustic then infuses the instrumentals with colors that accompany the maritime voyage, while also imparting a semblance of coherence to this otherwise heterogeneous piece — each “island” in the archipelago offers its own soundscape, whether real or virtual, for the listener to navigate through.

Having worked in computer music for decades, Neuwirth acknowledges that

technology has its dark side. There’s an incredible ambiguity in it. At some point we started sliding toward an artificial universe, especially when it comes to the spoken word, which now comes to us through synthetic voices, with exclusively synthetic sounds. The musicians no longer play. The entire piece is a constant game of blurring the lines. You no longer know the source of any given sound.

Another way to push the composer’s cherished sonic ambiguity even further?

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^{1. Interview with Frank Madlener in the program of the 2004 Musica Festival (Strasbourg), p. 19-21 and 46.  ↩}

^{2. Interview with David Sanson in the program of the 2008 Festival d’Automne (Paris), p. 4. ↩}

^{3. See note 1. ↩}

^{4. Robert BRESSON, “Notes sur le cinématographe,” Nouvelle Revue française, 1975. ↩}

^{5. Ibid. ↩}

^{6. See note 2. ↩}

^{7. Olga NEUWIRTH, program note for Hommage à Klaus Nomi, trans. Martin Kaltenecker, in the program of the 2011 Festival d’Automne (Paris), p. 9. ↩}

^{8. Ibid. ↩}

^{9. Olga NEUWIRTH, liner note, trans. BrainStorm Translations & Interpretation, p. 9, in Bählamms Fest, recording by Klangforum Wien cond. Johannes Kalitzke, 2 CD KAIROS, 2003, 0012342 KAI, 1999. ↩}

^{10. Olga NEUWIRTH, “I Won’t Be Yodelled Out of Existence,” 19 February 2000, trans. Richard Toop. ↩}

^{11. See note 1. ↩}

^{12. Interview with the author, Oct. 2018. ↩}