Hummus

Synopsis :

“Andreas is coming back from the country at war. He is unable to express what he has felt and unable to talk about the violence he has encountered. His friends, the whole community, insist and push him far into his entrenchments. Mocking him and becoming more and more sarcastic, they end up turning him into a murderer who will eliminate them one after the other.
But did they really exist or are were they only his own inner ghosts and demons? ”

Notes
The “country at war” refers to the massacre of Sabra and Shatila, perpetrated in 1982 by Christian Lebanese militias, under the control of the Israeli army, in Palestinian refugee camps.

The text, written in German by the composer, is a dialogue between Andreas and his memory, the ghosts of a bruised memory haunting more and more that it has become nearly inaccessible.

Andreas and the ghosts of his memory: the device of the piece and its spatial arrangement derive from it.
6 singers form a circle that encloses Andreas.

The characters, protagonists are nommés : Adreas, Sarah, Suzanne, Truike, Daniel, Martin, and Guillermo.

The didascalia appear in the score and stimulate dynamically. “Andreas turns around himself while watching the singers”; “Andreas does not look at Susanne. He is a little distressed, he does not want to speak “; “Hysterical laughter”; “Stomp while walking like a soldier,” etc.
Requisition

The play begins with a question whispered by the group: “What did you see? “. The answer takes place under the sign of the obsession: the hummus. Andreas’ memory is confused inside the hummus. Gradually, appears, intermittently, and more or less vaguely, a few flashes of lucidity in relation to what Andreas experienced and saw during the war.

Music makes the space sensitive:

First, there is hardly a musical way to express the space confinement, as effective as the determination of the obsession: a stubborn repetition. This is the predominant formal aspect in the work. From the beginning, the group continues to unroll stubbornly repeated motifs: two-double and one-eighth notes, or double-dotted-eighth notes, or simply a repeated quilted note; as it can be, a little more consistent, a dancing rhythm, like that of a 7/8 aksak.

The expression of the obsession by determination is also expressed through the text, as, for example, when the round of singers takes hold of what Andreas had just uttered and repeats it in an annoying manner, as a sort of echo that refuses to move away: it can be a set of sentences, but often isolated words as “Hummus” or “Kinder”, as it can be a single syllable that the group extends.

The group of circle singers can act as a single body – in homodythmia, even in homophony – as it can act in a more dynamic, circular and alternative way. It is the intermittent or even unpredictable nature of memory that, if possible, is becoming sensitive. These are flashes or harassing memories that tug at Andreas in every way. The shape in the round takes here all its meaning of movement as dynamic as always so close to the center. The most significant example in this respect is that towards the end, when the group poses to Andreas this ironic and provocative question “what did you see”, when he had just said that he was “for four days in a barrel “; the question is then scattered, dotted, between the circle of the singers: like a kind of sarcastic titillation (19’55).

Also, the pressure of the round is of a variable intensity. Sometimes it grows, and then the grip tightens around Andreas, as when, in homorythmie, accelerando and crescendo, the group intones names that are progressively discernible as such, a memory which becomes more overwhelming to lucid (16’04).

Sometimes, the group withdraws, the memory moves away: it is given by whispering, by notes with not precise (parlando or sprechgesang …).
In the same way, in order to resist, Andreas gets to raise his voice a lot.

But there are also other ways, less “physical”, by which the distance or the proximity are becoming sensitive. These are moments in which memory elucidates a few images that, suddenly, bring out a sort of tenderness of the memory. This is the case where Andreas remembers certain names: Farid, Bassam, but especially Maryam (7’39). Then, the music invokes the maqām ṣabā, known for its strong introverted and gloomy character, at the same time that the voice abandons the mechanical rhythm of the repetition and becomes more lyrical, oscillatory, eminently vocal and intimate. In another place, the nostalgic exaltation is rendered by the falsetto voice, by its airy character.

Moreover, this aesthetic withdrawal of Andreas often coincides with the fact that the group, at the same time, withdraws: either in the bass, in a discrete way, or by emitting this virtual sonority that gives the hissing (9’31) or by keeping quiet.

Similarly, when Andreas remembers when he was in a barrel for 4 days, the group retreats into the whisper; moves away as if to express Andreas’ isolation in the barrel, without loosening the grip of his confinement.

According to Anis Fariji

set
2S/2°/T/B/B
7 small podiums for the singers, 6 bass drums, 1 micro installed under the podium of Andreas, 1 system of diffusion and 1 reverberation to transform the sound of the feet of Andreas in extremely violent bombs, filling the space of the concert. 7 light sources in shower on each of the singers