The creators of Earthrise in conversation
Musician interview 16.10.2024
A COLLECTIVE MONTAGE
The creators of Earthrise in conversation
Aleksi Barrière: Juha, how did the idea of making a music theatre piece based on Johannes Kepler’s Dream come to you? And why precisely with these artists?
Juha T. Koskinen: The Renaissance is a key era that has always intrigued me; first through visual arts, but then especially how its protagonists have moved between different arts, and sciences. For instance Leonardo da Vinci’s and Giordano Bruno’s interest in the cosmos, and specifically the Moon, have inspired my work in the past. Of the many texts of the time, to me Kepler’s Dream is the one that opens up the fantasy dimension that makes a stage work possible.
It did demand to be placed in the context of our time, where we actually can contemplate the Earth not just from a bird’s-eye view but from the Moon, creating literal new perspectives. It was clear then that the endeavor would require a team as multifaceted as possible.
We were planning a collaboration with Marianna Henriksson, who is an expert on the music of Kepler’s time of course. We had worked together on the Superborea project in 2017, where my music was already in conversation with baroque scores (in that case, Jean-Philippe Rameau’s), and we decided to continue along the same lines.
For the libretto, it was natural to ask you, Aleksi, because we share a common interest in these Renaissance figures. Our previous work together Ophelia/Tiefsee was also multilingual and multilayered, and written for the actor Thomas Kellner, who also appears in Earthrise. The formal ideas of the previous work were extended through the multiplicity of composers, and the more extensive vocal parts. Anni Elif Egecioglu was a natural fit for developing the latter, being herself a kind of Renaissance figure as a vocal artist.
How did you approach these elements I suggested, to weave them into a libretto?
Aleksi Barrière: The starting point is Kepler’s intuition that if a particular issue is difficult to solve (for example, a scientific problem or a truth about ourselves or the world that we don’t want to face), dream logic may suggest a different and possibly decisive way of looking at it. So we built a work made up of many dreams or displacements centered on Kepler’s own dream-story of an astronomer traveling to the Moon with his witch mother. The dream turns into a nightmare when Kepler’s real mother Katharina is accused of witchcraft.
What’s fascinating about Kepler is his interest in inter- and multidisciplinary approaches, scientifically and artistically; he knew that things had to be approached from many angles, and he sought to explain the orbits of planets, for example, using arithmetics, geometry, and eventually music theory. His language, even in a scientific context, is very metaphorical, and he always put special care in the illustrations of his books.
It was important for our form to allow for heterogeneity of material. There is a wide range of musical works, intended for different contexts, and the text is conceived in a same way, as if it contained different textual objects: dramatized monologues, but also songs and historical documents, almost straight out of the archives. The macroform puts everything on a certain ‘orbit’, but it is extremely important to me that the audience is actively involved in putting the pieces together, without the content being overcooked into a ready-made porridge. Unlike opera, music theatre has the opportunity to make you explore things in each scene through the lens of a completely different form.
Marianna, in the selection of early music, a natural starting point was the life of Johannes Kepler himself, pointing to the early German baroque. Could you tell us more about the works that were selected?
Marianna Henriksson: Indeed, the first thing we looked for is music contemporaneous with Kepler’s life, from the geographical areas he lived in, and especially his main workplace, the imperial court in Prague. In the end, the pieces found their place mostly on the basis of their musical appropriateness to the work we were doing, rather than strict temporal and/or geographical compatibility. After all, our performance is playing with the superposition of different temporal layers.
Among the composers, Kryštof Harant and Philippe de Monte had a relationship with the Prague court. The first performance of the Bohemian musician-soldier Harant’s Sanctus from his Missa quinis vocibus super Dolorosi martir, 1602, could have been heard by Kepler in Prague. The Flemish-born Philippe de Monte worked in Prague from 1583 to 1603, so Kepler might have encountered him too. Samuel Scheidt, on the other hand, represents the early Baroque music of northern Germany, which, like all music of the German-speaking world in the 17th century, often bears Italian influences. We were impressed by Scheidt’s profound string pieces from the Ludi musici collection (1612). In February, Juha wrote me in our Messenger chat: “I am already crazy about Scheidt’s Ludi musici pieces, I could listen to them forever...” Some of their ingredients thus found their way into Juha’s music. Also Michael Praetorius’ 2-voice chorale (1610) merges with Juha’s version of the same church hymn melody. Luther’s hymns were hits of their time in Protestant areas.
Romanus Weichlein, who lived in what is now Austria, one of Kepler’s home regions, is already well into the post-Keplerian era. His planet-sized passacaglia in his third sonata, 1695, found a place in our performance.
Aleksi Barrière: Weichlein’s passacaglia forms the final climax of our work, and from Kepler’s point of view it is indeed futuristic. It exemplifies full-blown baroque in all its complexity. Kepler is one of the thinkers who made those aesthetics possible, by saying: look, the universe is not symmetrical, it doesn’t follow equal temperament, it’s complex, layered, even the planets move as ellipses and not in perfect circles... Let’s make art that mirrors that.
Marianna Henriksson: In the end, we also left many delicious pieces of early music from Kepler’s lifetime in the drawer. For example, we did not use Kepler’s own inter- vallic materials from his Harmonices mundi (according to which each planet’s orbit corresponds to its own interval), which have already inspired many contemporary composers. Perhaps through our musical montage, glimpses of the music-making of Kepler’s contemporaries will seep out, mingling with our present music-making, permeated by the sounds of our time, to form a world, a planet, or a moon of its own.
Juha T. Koskinen, Aleksi Barrière, Lucia Schmidt, Marianna Henriksson, Thomas Kellner, Anni Elif Egeciouglu. Photo: Juhana Salminen
Aleksi Barrière: Anni, your role grew around the songs you were composing, but you also have other kinds of vocal interventions. Your part connects with female characters who are not part of the official historical narrative of which Kepler himself is a protagonist. How would you describe it?
Anni Elif Egecioglu: Yes, I would say that the core of the female characters I embody in Earthrise lies in the expressions of the songs and the improvisational contributions, that first appear in the background and then grow through text. These vocalizations work as tiny shooting stars here and there throughout the piece. What permeates the characters I play is motherhood, deep self-awareness, and some kind of out-of-body consciousness that is linked to a wider understanding of how the Earth, and therefore all life, is connected to the universe. What is touching about the real-life story of Johannes Kepler is that he was raised by a woman who held these believes and lived by them, but then he rejected them partly as he became a mathematician, evolved in scientific spheres, and helped found modern science; and yet he later integrated this ancient wisdom back into his work, as becomes clear in our closing song, which is inspired by his late writings.
Women like Katharina Kepler possessed knowledge in the arts of natural medicine, and since they were isolated widows they were easier to target and accuse of being witches. They are represented by an amount of lore and also musical traditions that were all lost to time, as they were mostly unwritten. My musical interventions try to bring those lost voices to life.
Aleksi Barrière: In the work, we also try to experience how these different worlds might have been interconnected in Kepler’s time and in Kepler himself. This is most visible in music: Baroque composers also drew from folk material...
Marianna Henriksson: Yes, in the 17th century there was not the same distinction between “folk music”and “art music” as in, say, the 20th century. Of course, only some of the music that was being made was fixed into notation and survived: improvised or unscored practices abounded. Sometimes old melodic materials, such as psalm melodies or folk song tunes, ended up as composers’ materials, leaving notated traces.
In our project, different contemporary practices enter a neat dialogue, I think, because for us early music professionals, improvisation and the approach to sheet music as a starting point/material is natural, as seems to be the case also in Anni’s music. And in Juha’s music there is room for early music performance practices, such as a form of continuo.
I also find it nice that in our project the boundaries of the compositional posture are tested: musical materials flow into each other, Anni’s music is transformed into arrangements by Juha, Juha’s music contains elements of the 16th century, the music of the 16th century is transformed into material for improvisational sound design, which is created and developed from the work of the performers...
Aleksi Barrière: Juha, one of the key challenges of your music was to build a continuum from all these ingredients...
Juha T. Koskinen: Indeed, my main contribution has been the composition of bridges between materials, which we called interpolations. A large part was also orchestrating both Anni’s songs and early music. When you’re dealing with someone else’s material, in a baroque fashion the boundaries of the compositional posture have to be dissolved, so you might dare take someone else’s work and make something original out of it. It is also a matter of expanding and transforming one’s own identity, which takes time and commitment.
In the end, the continuum is really built in workshops where all the pieces are put together. Our way of working does not involve one person taking control of the music as a whole. For example, the attitude of a baroque orchestra is an active relationship with the parts, something that is not part of symphonic culture. Similarly, texts and music only fall into place during rehearsals.
Aleksi Barrière: Thomas, this is your second collaboration with Juha in Alminsali. How is this similar to and different from Violences (2019)?
Thomas Kellner: In that collaboration, I knew the literary material very well. It combined Juha’s piece based on rewritings of the Hamlet and Ophelia story with Katharina Blum, a very well-known German novel by Heinrich Böll, adapted by composer H.W. Henze. I was also more confident linguistically, acting in German, English and French, languages I was very familiar with.
This time around, as with his Ophelia/Tiefsee, it was important for Juha to hear me speak various monologues and dialogues together with Anni, so that he could draw inspiration from them in his composition. As a first step, we met with Aleksi and Juha in Berlin for a short workshop to transform Aleksi’s and Kepler’s texts into a living language, and that’s harder than with familiar classics.
Most notably, there is a large and important middle section that is spoken entirely in Latin, inspired by Kepler’s Dream, which was written in that language. What was difficult in the first rehearsal process was to use this “dead language” like a language of communication, emotion, and humour, which it was for Kepler.
I’m very excited about Anni’s live improvisations, which are interwoven with the baroque music and Juha’s composition. In Violences, the improvisations came exclusively from me, including vocal ones, as the orchestra and solo violist were tied to Juha’s and Henze’s compositions. This free component really appeals to me. I am a little intimidated by Katharina’s song (set in this version to a tune by Johann Hermann Schein), which I am to sing with baroque accompaniment. As a cabaret and chanson singer, I’m no stranger to a free-handed relation to song, but I am by no means a classically trained singer. Mixing those practices will be exciting.
I am also curious to see how we bring to life the complex narrative structure, based among others on language changes. This was also the case in Ophelia/Tiefsee, and a lot of Aleksi’s work, but there the story was familiar to me, whereas in Earthrise there is a lot for the audience to discover about Kepler, his imagination and philosophy, as well as his contemporary significance. Its secrets lies of course in this polyphony itself, its levels of confusion and pleasure.
Anni Elif Egecioglu: The most obvious reason for this multilingualism is simply that the different characters used these languages or that a certain event occurred in that particular place on Earth, but to me this also creates a sense of a deeper universal understanding and timelessness. The basic human behaviours and needs are pretty much the same all over the globe and language is in a way just one form of communication. The fact that the language is changing so much in this show somehow erases the lines between languages, cultures and borders. It’s been very inspiring and also a challenge to write, and to sing, songs in languages that are totally foreign to me. I’m looking forward to creating this multifaceted piece with such an interesting and talented bunch of artists.
Aleksi Barrière: Lucia, what can we expect from elements of visual storytelling in this show?
Lucia Schmidt: Because of the many storytelling levels and heterogeneous source materials in the text and music, it felt important to find a unifying language for the projected visuals, that fill and define the space throughout the piece. Kepler’s time was one of mass-production of images through the industrialization of woodcuts: the world was flooded with cheaply produced images more than ever before, for political and religious purposes, like nowadays spreading both facts and exaggerations, superstitions. It was a tool of indoctrination, but Kepler also felt it was an incredible opportunity to spread knowledge and make science more concrete to a broader audience. He consumed that kind of material himself, such as modern maps of the world, and sought to produce strong visuals in his own work. We are using a lot of historical source material to bring his world closer to us, but also finding a freer inspiration to create an original visual language that feels like the piece itself: not a museum but a living collage, that allows for new associations to be born.
September 2024
Aleksi Barrière, Lucia Schmidt, Thomas Kellner, Marianna Henriksson, Juha T. Koskinen, Anni Elif Egeciouglu. Photo: Juhana Salminen