Studium. The Sense of Hearing
Audiobook
2017

for voice, trombone, percussion and field recordings


The piece is a stereo mix of a multi-channel sound projection which was part of a performance for sound, light and architecture commissioned and premiered in Nowy Teatr, Warsaw.

* It is stronly recommended to listen to the album with no pauses between the tracks. If you purchase the album, please send me a nudge and I will happily deliver a one-piece edit.

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Let's say that here, in a stereo version, "Studium" is nothing but an audiobook. However, it is an audiobook of a text that had never been written. It was planned to be written - carefully and meticulously - by the main character of Thomas Bernhard's "Kalkwerk". It was imagined as a great dissertation about the sense of hearing, "the most philosophical of all the senses" (Bernhard). Yet, taken at face value, it remained unwritten; the writing had been continuously distracted and endlessly postponed, and that very failure in writing eventually paved the way to degenerate crime. There might be an existential touch to it, certainly. In it, hearing turns out to be a mere narrative as well as anecdotal background to a grand metaphysical drama. Bernhard is easily and widely interpreted in this way. However, there might be a different perspective too - more sensual, literal maybe, or simply more naive. According to it, hearing is not an incidental alibi to examine more profound realms of human existence. Quite the contrary. There is no drama in Bernhard beyond hearing. Drama IS the hearing.

Is it not because of this that the book is made of voices rather than characters? "Kalkwerk" is overheard and misheard requests, unconfirmed gossip, unreliable rumours, misleading echoes and contradictory hearsays; "Kalkwerk" is not a book to read but a book to listen to. And if this is the case, how could the main protagonist of "Kalkwerk" simply w r i t e his treatise on hearing? Perhaps he was looking for a way to make it audible rather than readable? And if this is the case then... maybe he actually did complete "Studium" but in an audible form? Maybe he encrypted audible "Studium" in readable "Kalkwerk"? "Studium" would then be an auditory ricochet or subtext of "Kalkwerk" and the only way to depict it, would be to follow its sonic features: Kalkwerk's acoustics and soundscapes, main character's hallucinations, anonymous and mixed voices and last but not least – the sounds of Urbantschitsch method, with which he tortured his wife.

Libretto consists of Bernhard's text exclusively.

"[...] This book of his was divided into nine parts or sections [...] The first section is an introduction to all the others, the ninth section is an elucidation of all the preceding ones, Konrad is supposed to have said to the inspector, the second section naturally deals with the brain and the ear, the ear and the brain and so forth, the sixth section is entitled “The Sub-auditory Sense,” a lengthy treatise primarily on the so called dysarthria of the ear, the seventh section dealt with hearing and seeing [...]"

Fragment of "The Lime Works" by Thomas Bernhard, trans. Sophie Wilkins, published by Vintage Books