Körper; body – it’s kind of surprising that it took German composer Enno Poppe until 2021 to give that title to one of his compositions. In the course of his career, Poppe has established himself as the ensemble composer par excellence; a composer for whom the ensemble, the group, the body of performers isn’t just the means for the music, it’s the music itself. Body music. Perhaps that’s why so many of his compositions sounds like siblings of each other; different species, perhaps, but stemming from the same fertile genetic pool. Körper, the latest album of Poppe’s music, explores two distinct species – one instrumental, one vocal – considering their make-up, how their component parts operate both individually and as part of the corpus, and what emerges when their respective bodies assemble, start to move forward, begin to sing.
That’s literally the case in the second of the two pieces. Composed in 2006 (partially revised in 2013), and performed here by SWR Vokalensemble conducted by Marcus Creed, Gold is a choral work that turns to poet Arno Holz for inspiration, resulting in three contrasting movements that each explore some aspect of group behaviour and dynamics. Another quality that typifies Poppe’s work is a balance between formal rigour and a willingness to go far and long into hinterlands of extremes. The opening movement, ‘Moderne Walpurgisnacht’, does just this, taking words from Holz’s experimental text Die Blechschmiede and fashioning from it something like the ultimate stream of consciousness. The voices enunciate together, controlled, measured, planned even, yet the tone is heightened, they surge and shout. A stream it may be – a fast-flowing one at that – yet there’s ever the sense that every word is important. It’s perpetually liminal: a gushing torrent yet one laden with a myriad motes of information; unity in the voices, yet with a nimbleness to their movement, moving quickly through the lengthy text, navigating it with ease. And, of course, the body politic, at once a mass organism of voices and also many individual points of origin, working together, fragmenting into polyphony but never deviating from the central need to enunciate the same, shared litany.
As in many other Poppe works, it’s less about what is happening than how it’s happening, picked up in the tiny central interlude ‘Silber’. Holz’s brief text (from Phantasus) is rendered a network of small upward glissandi, in a new sequence of calls and responses, swoops and slides flying back and forth as this particular species sings its own genetically programmed song. It’s mesmerising, and in barely two minutes it’s over. ‘Notturno’ completes Gold with its lengthiest movement, and another long, dense text. Again there’s the continual sense of everyone in it together, a context, system, situation affecting everyone the same, working and responding together without internal friction. Where ‘Moderne Walpurgisnacht’ felt like an almost out of control maelstrom of words and sentiments, ‘Notturno’ – perhaps after the reset of ‘Silber’ – is calm, smooth, careful, allowing for a much more fluid treatment of the vocal body. Individuals spin off, groups divide in parallel, yet all are united by small motivic movement that gives rise to and underpins almost everything they sing.
It exhibits another recurring trait in Poppe’s music, the obsessive streak, a deeply entrenched, determined modus operandi that makes the music have a kind of inevitability, despite so often seeming to arise from pure spontaneity. There’s huge dynamic contrast as ‘Notturno’ continues, reducing down to an undulating core with halting chords around it, yet never pulling apart, the music and singers always bound together. There’s a moment shortly before the end which is just exquisite, arriving unexpectedly at a pair of gorgeously rich chords like an askew memory of an ‘amen’, though the choir passes beyond, makes it seem innocuous, accidental even, as they arrive on their unison final note.
i said before how different works by Poppe often sound related, and that extends too to individual movements within a single piece. Variations on a behavioural theme. The four parts of the ensemble work Körper, composed in 2021, operate in this way, as well as demonstrating another characteristic of Poppe’s music, a flexing sense of momentum where the body slowly grows, builds, accumulates, expands, pushes on, only to be pulled back, rebooted, and begin again.
Körper, as its name suggests, is in some respects a paradigmatic example of this group behaviour and dynamic. A strict drum kit pulse holds all the numerous melodic strands together; at first, it’s not remotely convincing that the instruments are aligned (or even inclined to align) to its pulse, but it acts as a metric reference nonetheless, signalling order like a steady heartbeat in an otherwise chaotic lifeform. Over time, though, they do seem to come into a kind of generalised alignment, such that the subsequent climax is a wildly uproarious celebration in which everyone is actively involved.
The gentler second part takes shape from a solo sax, its line slowly acquiring doublings and spin-offs. Trombones take over, things shimmer, there’s a low tolling from somewhere, everything pauses. The sax restarts, and as others join once again they attain a strong, blurry unity. They rise, they sink, and in so doing tap into an almost David Lynchian level of dark, brooding lyricism. It ends up, echoing another well-known recent Poppe work, in an obliquely jazz-inflected procession, yet what makes this part of Körper so compelling is the extent of its fluidity, more so than in much of Poppe’s output, sounding highly organic and spontaneous.
Part 3 turns everything on its side, a weird, bleepy game of call and response. Chatty solos emerge above, an amusing little bassline chirps below, and again the music grows into a messy near-unison with a slow sense of processional. Things move out of step, the brass riff, the group somehow gains weight and manages to just about fit together. As one might have expected, Poppe pulls them back at this point, and as they regrow the emphasis on melody becomes abundantly clear, now featuring a touch of flamboyance. They’re pulled back again, practically cancelled this time, though this seems to have the effect of inducing a rush of energy. All the same, it seems clear here and elsewhere that Korper is less about ‘achieving’ a certain end or even getting from A to B but about the pure, simple act of performing together, the body at work, the body at play.
The piece concludes with its strangest sequence so far. A texture of tiny staccato notes acts akin to a steady state, its behaviour consistent yet always changing and involving. There’s a palpable sense of not just gentleness, but carefulness, taking real time, focusing on each wavering melodic tendril or light percussive flurry. Tiny swells become larger surges, knocked out by individual pitches that protrude, in turn replaced by little group spurts. Yet the perception that everything could let rip is proved false; big notes get thrown out and for a time things get busy, but as previously, the body falls back. Longer sustained threads move through an otherwise broken contrapuntal landscape, ending up as a dense, blurred kind of lyrical line. A final acceleration only proves the point: the group sags and dies away in what feels like a laboured series of final exhalations. An unpredictable end, perhaps, though it seems in keeping with the underlying urge to keep things in check in order to let them grow again into new formations (like sonic gardening). As such, this ostensibly strange end of Körper doesn’t really sound like an absolute end at all, but simply the latest pause before something else begins. Endless variation and evolution, as necessary and fundamental to Poppe’s musical bodies as to organic ones.
Performed by Ensemble Modern conducted by Poppe himself (Körper) and SWR Vokalensemble conducted by Marcus Creed (Gold), and released by Wergo, Körper is available on CD and download.
