sprechbohrer – Biography of an Ensemble Since its inception in 2004, the Cologne based speech art trio sprechbohrer (Sigrid Sachse, Harald Muenz, Georg Sachse) have dedicated themselves intensively to the border areas between music, phonetics, and literature. All three members are trained musicians; Georg and Harald have also been research active at university level in the field. The broad experience of the ensemble's members in the areas of composition, interpretation, literature, and phonetics come together in the work of sprechbohrer coalescing ... weiterlesen

sprechbohrer – Biography of an Ensemble

Since its inception in 2004, the Cologne based speech art trio sprechbohrer (Sigrid Sachse, Harald Muenz, Georg Sachse) have dedicated themselves intensively to the border areas between music, phonetics, and literature. All three members are trained musicians; Georg and Harald have also been research active at university level in the field. The broad experience of the ensemble's members in the areas of composition, interpretation, literature, and phonetics come together in the work of sprechbohrer coalescing into a unique boundary-crossing and multilingual approach.

The sprechbohrer repertoire includes, on the one hand, "classical" works by Kurt Schwitters, Dieter Schnebel, Gerhard Rühm, Oskar Pastior, Tom Johnson, John Cage, in addition to their own compositions. On the other hand, the ensemble is particularly interested in personal cooperation with authors from experimental music and experimental literature. So far (2019) the sprechbohrer have realised newly composed speech works by Peter Behrendsen, Crauss., Elfriede Czurda, Christian Filips, Stefan Fricke, Georg Heike, Christoph Herndler, Neo Hülcker, hans w. koch, Barbara Köhler, Swantje Lichtenstein, Julia Mihály, Florian Neuner, Roman Pfeifer, Hans Peter Reutter, Karin Spielhofer, Robert Stähr, Christian Steinbacher, Stefan Streich, Mathias Traxler, and Elisabeth Wandeler-Deck. Some of these compositions were documented by Hessischer Rundfunk (editor: Stefan Fricke).

Right from the beginning Helms’s epoch-making work Fa:m’ Ahniesgwow (1959) was a special concern to sprechbohrer. In 2004, the trio presented their version of Structure IV to an enthusiastic audience at the Musikfest of Kölner Gesellschaft für Neue Musik (KGNM), which the author himself had considered to be not performable because of its idiosyncratic text disposition. Over the succeeding years, the eight-layered first chapter, then subsequently Structures III and V were worked out and performed. Finally, on 20 February 2010, the first worldwide performance of the complete 90-minute work took place, in the presence of Hans G Helms who also authorised the sprechbohrer's version of the piece. In 2009 this was followed by the premiere recording of the entire book for radio Hessischer Rundfunk in Frankfurt (hr2-kultur, producer: Stefan Fricke), with support by the Arts Foundation of the German state of North Rhine Westphalia (Kunststiftung NRW). In 2011, the CD release of this first complete recording (Wergo) was awarded a Prize of the German Record Critics (Preis der deutschen Schallplattenkritik); the London cult magazine The Wire listed the recording among their "Top 10 picks 2011". The second sprechbohrer CD (Wergo) is dedicated to Kurt Schwitters' complete "Consequent Poetry" and also received praise in professional circles and in various reviews.

In 2019, the online release of their third album "drei" featured a selection of compositions by the ensemble members from the 15 years of existence so far. Also in 2019 they published the volume "Autorenmusik. Erkundungen im Zwischenreich von Sprache und Musik" (Leipzig: Reinecke & Voß, in German), edited by Harald Muenz and Florian Neuner, in which the eponymous sprechbohrer projects of 2017 and 2018 are documented; an enclosed CD brings together works created for the ensemble by Christian Filips, Neo Hülcker, Barbara Köhler, Swantje Lichtenstein, Florian Neuner and Roman Pfeiffer. weniger