Concert exam by Jieru Ma

Contributors

Jieru Ma → percussion

Program

Wen Deqing → Kung Fu
Georges Aperghis → Le corps à corps
Florian Magnus Maier → Soleá
Steven Snowden → Long Distance
Alberto Bernal → Impossible Translation #3

不可翻译的 Untranslatable

This concert includes works from different cultural and aesthetic contexts that transcend the boundaries of language, movement, technique and sound. They are created in the act of "translation" - and also get lost in misunderstandings. What remains when we translate between culture, body, language and rhythm - and is it possible that some experiences are simply untranslatable?

Wen Deqing's "Kung Fu" and Georges Aperghis' "Le corps à corps" originate from Chinese philosophy and a French textual context respectively. Both work with fragmented language, vocal rhythms and body movement:
"Kung Fu" attempts to trace the dynamics and cycle of yin and yang in music, while "Le corps à corps" presents something nightmarish - a visual and emotional landscape that depicts the psychological state of physical confrontation at the extreme limit. But how can yin and yang be translated in a non-Chinese context? How can music depict the mental state of a body? These are experiences that cannot be fully translated into music - and that is precisely why music is incessantly approaching them.

With "Soleá", Florian Magnus Maier attempts to transfer the rhythmic vocabulary of flamenco from the guitar to the marimba. This cross-cultural and cross-instrumental "translation" is inevitably an incomplete process: it loses the guitar timbre, but at the same time opens up a new language for the percussion.

Steven Snowden's "Long Distance" runs through the concert in three sections - like a telephone line that links the individual pieces together. The material comes from recordings of telephone hacking activities in the 1970s in the USA. By manipulating payphones, designing small devices or repeatedly whistling tones at specific frequencies, the hackers were able to communicate over long distances and listen to the crackling, clicking and buzzing of the machinery of distant networks. It is analog noise from the age of long-distance communication - full of enthusiasm, risk and the desire to translate and understand the unknown.

In Alberto Bernal's "Impossible Translation #3", image is translated into sound: Everyday scenes from developing countries, protests, stock market events - all of this is transferred to the vocabulary of percussion. The video clips used are each linked to a specific sound, creating a forced and yet always misguided connection. But this is not a true translation. The sound does not do justice to the social complexity of the image. Image and sound remain incompatible - like two speakers who cannot understand each other.

Not every sound is audible, not every meaning is transferable - but I dare to try.

Text by Jieru Ma (特别感谢) and Leon Neudert (对翻译工作的支持）