“Grant peace, Lord, grant peace.” While Europe was being torn apart by the Thirty Years’ War, Heinrich Schütz set his urgent plea to equally poignant music. We sing the noble polyphony of the psalms by him and his contemporaries, to songs of lament and jubilation, but also songs that describe everyday life in the midst of battle. Music that speaks of life in times of conflict mirrors the absurdity of reality: that four centuries later, no breach has yet been made in the vicious circle called the violence of war.
The Baroque music will find its place in soundscapes created by Inne Eysermans (composer, sound artist, performer) and Katherina Lindekens (dramaturge, audio producer, field recordist). They zoom out: how do natural environments regenerate after periods of human conflict? When the last blasts and cries have died out, how does nature live on? How does it restore or reinvent itself? These questions inspire a series of soundscapes based on field recordings from places in Belgium and Europe where traces of past wars remind us not to take peace for granted.
The history of the recorded places will be evoked through sparse, poetic phrases drawn from interviews with people whose personal history creates a link between then and now. One example: Bernadette Rogalle, whose mother and grandfather were ‘passeurs’ in the French Pyrenees and who on 5 December 1942 helped 9 Jewish people escape deportation across the mountains into Spain. Woven into the soundscapes, these interview fragments form associative, reflective audio poems.
The work of Katherina Lindekens and Inne Eysermans is supported by a grant from EFFEA, an initiative of the European Festivals Association.
This production is realized with the support of the Tax Shelter measure of the Belgian Federal Government through Flanders Tax Shelter.
