Carola Bauckholt
Program Notes by Tim Munro
Miller Theatre commissioned the acclaimed writer (and musician) Tim Munro to write profiles of the creators featured onstage this season, with the goal of connecting listeners to both the creator and their music.
Treibstoff
Sounds gather. Perhaps a machine, long ignored, lurches to puffing, whirring life. Perhaps a schoolyard, filled with bright chaos.
“Some people need art,” says Carola Bauckholt. “They have an ‘artistic stomach,’ let’s say.” Carola counts herself among this group. “When I was in school I noticed that my schoolmates didn’t need art. Why did I seem to need it, and others did not?
The title Treibstoff translates literally as “fuel”, and more poetically as “driving substance”. While writing this piece, Carola was asking herself, “What drives us forward to produce art?”
She imagined a menagerie. Each animal motivated by the impulse for action. Each animal exploring its own way of moving. Walk, waddle, swim. “A dog or duck or fish or human,” says Carola. “Every being has a different rhythm in movement.”
Inner tube
Before my chat with Carola, I was replacing the inner tube of my bicycle tire. As we hop onto a Zoom call, I mention to Carola the sounds I noticed during this process. Her face lights up.
“Normally you use the pump and don’t think about,” she says. “But when you are aware, it makes you think. We are rolling on air—we are not conscious of how amazing this is. And how does it sound when we ride on a street? In fact, this is could be a whole opera!”
Carola zooms out. “What is not music? To find sounds in my environment, in my daily life, is a form of enjoying life. Because I found my sense. To wake up and have the day in listening and thinking.”
I ask if she spends the day present, attentive. “In the general way of living,” she says, “maybe I feel always a bit outside. I have a bit of a view from a distance. I’m always listening to sounds around me—not to use them, but to observe them.”
Carola gives an example. “If you miss a bus, then you are suddenly outside your normal routine. What happens? You open your ears, your eyes, and your brain.” For Carola, “these are the moments where we are really alive.”
“What is not music? To find sounds in my environment, in my daily life, is a form of enjoying life.”
Schlammflocke II
An ensemble sits onstage. Musicians at their instruments. A bird calls across the hall. A gibbon answers. Acoustic instruments taken over by inhabitants of a zoo. Birds, frogs, foxes, sea lions, and chimpanzees call to each other.
Schlammflocke literally translates as “Sludge flake.” The term refers to the living and dead microorganisms that are used to purify water in a sewage treatment plant. For Carola, the title captured a certain biological, organic quality, as well as the idea of purification.
“When I listen to gibbons, it sort of cleans my ears.” Carola flushes out the cliches of musical composition, returning music to a more basic state. "These sounds are super complex, but usually we don’t pay attention to them.”
Carola has referred to animal sounds as “the first music. When I am looking for noises to use in my music, I am searching for something archaic, fundamental.”
Bolt from the blue
“Perhaps I have remained as a child—exploring the world,” she says. Carola has two children of her own, and celebrates their state of wonder. “They don't know the function of things, and their brain starts: What could this be? For what is the reason?”
As a child, Carola was unhappily seated at a piano. “I never practiced,” she says. “I was not a good pianist, because I was super bored.” She found this “bourgeois” upbringing unchallenging. “I would just reproduce without understanding why—without knowing that these composers were living humans.”
As a teenager, there was a bolt from the blue. Performing a John Cage work for the first time, she thought, “Wow, this makes sense.” She felt at home. “Playing on a bottle, I had to discover the sounds for myself. I knew then that exploring things would be much more interesting than being safe.”
“When I am looking for noises to use in my music, I am searching for something archaic, fundamental.”
Performance instructions
Carola’s ear is meticulous, and her music is exacting. Early on, she worried that performances would not be possible without her involvement. That she needed to be on hand to specify sounds, tools, approach.
In this concert, musicians are asked to play “like a horse,” “like coughing,” with “teeth tone,” with a “crackling slap.” A violin “should sound like a scream,” a cello like “galloping dog paws,” a flute “like panting.”
In one piece, a percussionist plays on sleeping-bag nylon: “Draw a plectrum quickly and lightly across the surface giving a clear bright sound. The gesture is as if wiping something away.”
In another, the pitch, rhythm, color, dynamics, and expression should imitate a sound file as accurately as possible. “The notation is only to be understood as a framework.”
In another, players make vocal utterances on single vowels that should communicate the tone of the following conversation: “What do you want?” “What is this supposed to mean?” “Nonsense.” “Are you crazy?” “No.”
Membran
A grand piano. At its keys, a pianist. Under its body, a professional singer, lying down. Both performers hold their own spiral hose, winding from mouth to piano. The soundboard forms the membrane between the performers.
Membran was written for a festival of lieder—songs for voice and piano. “They asked me if it was possible for me to write a lied,” says Carola. She began experimenting, singing through a tube into the body of the piano. She found the resonance haunting.
During the piece, the two performers sing a German children’s folksong to each other. In the song, a brother repeatedly asks his sister when they will go home. Each time, the sister says they will go home in time. In the end, it becomes clear that both have died:
Sister, little sister,
Why are you so pale?
That is the morning light
Shining on my cheeks,
Brother, little brother,
All wet with the dew.
Here, the piano acts as a wall, a barrier, a membrane. “There is a connection, but the two can't see each other.” This inability to contact each other is desperately, heartbreakingly sad. “The sadness was maybe not the beginning of writing.”
“How close to death these folksongs are!” says Carola. “And kids sing it!”
Exploration
When Carola starts work on a new piece, she feels like a beginner. “Every time, I think I can’t—I feel completely incompetent. It’s a bit weird that I’m a composer…and a teacher!” But this vulnerability opens doors. “It gives me the freedom to just try something. To surprise myself.”
Carola develops a new language for each new work. Then once she has completed the piece, it is time to move on. “I feel bad if I feel comfortable. Maybe it's a bit German. I'm not a person who can stay sitting in a cafe and enjoy the day.”
A key mentor and teacher was composer Maurizio Kagel. Kagel’s approach was similarly open. Few elements of contemporary life escaped his pen: from early music to colonialism, from circus performance to totalitarianism.
“He didn’t teach us how to make music,” says Carola. He gave students space and time to pursue their own paths. “The intensity was amazing. These experiences gave me a kind of freedom. A freedom not to fulfill any expectations.
A different view
Carola is often asked about humor in music. Specifically, whether her music is funny. “I say that I have my fun writing it and listening to it,” she says. “But fun is a result. It’s not an aim.”
She likes to give an example. “When you put hair under a microscope, you laugh because you see this huge, ugly thing, full of dirt. It is a shock to remember that you have thousands of these on your head! It’s not a joke. It’s a different view. But, this, you still feel it’s funny.”
Oh, I see.
In this work, Carola’s most popular, she set herself a problem to solve. “How can I make a video projection that is useful, sensible.” Her music, at its most basic level, “is about communication.” Here, she wanted the visual elements to truly connect with the aural.
The ah-ha moment was when she identified an object that could be both a video screen as well as an instrument. A balloon. Then the question became: What should be projected onto a white ball? “Well,” she laughs. “An eye, of course.”
While writing the work, Carola stumbled on a memory. Of watching a bandoneon player (an Argentinian accordion) who was playing a waltz. “He played by heart, so he was able to look deeply into my eyes. There’s something intense in this communication.”
She compares it to looking into the face of an animal. “We don’t understand what they’re communicating to us. So it’s like the situation of an audience, when confronted with the face of the performer.”
Carola is surprised at how often Oh, I see. is performed. “It’s amazing because it’s so difficult. It's complicated technically. I even have to bring the balloons because they’re apparently so special, these latex balloons!”
The score directions for the hands of the balloon players are typically detailed. “Lift hand (this release sound should be loud) and put it back softly(!). The release sound is what I am interested in. Put apple nectar where the hands are playing to create a gluey surface which makes release sounds audible.”
Virtuoso sound-seeker
“I love musicians,” says Carola, “because they are so able and aware with their senses. If you are playing the flute, you must go deeply into the sound. I noticed that percussionists are kind of my partner because they are so committed to let simple material really sound.”
“I often need to work together with the musicians,” she says, “to go with them into a discovery of the unusual material and the sound. Performers really need to connect with my material. They need to discover a new instrument.”
The music world often holds a narrow view of “virtuosity”. Carola seeks a different kind of virtuosity: sonic virtuosity. Other matters can be left to the side. “If they can play the rhythm and pitches correctly,” Carola adds, “that is a plus.”
Tim Munro is a Brisbane-based, triple-Grammy-winning musician. He is currently Associate Professor of Music at the Queensland Conservatorium Griffith University