The MiraculousOctober 2023Music
49. 1968-1970, Paris; Norvenich, Germany
Word count: 284
Paragraphs: 3
Not long after the “events of May,” two old friends, who first met while studying avant-garde music in Darmstadt, rendezvous in Paris. One of them has been teaching in New York, the other, who is accompanied by his wife, plays keyboards in an experimental group currently setting up a studio in a large villa outside of Cologne. They are joined by a friend of the New Yorker’s, an American artist returning from a trip to India and in no rush to get back to the U.S. where he fears being drafted to fight in Vietnam. The two Germans take an instant liking to the artist and invite him to visit the palatial studio space where they work. Because his German isn’t very good, the artist misunderstands them, believing the creative center they are describing is a visual-art studio rather than a recording studio. On the basis of that misunderstanding, and his liking for the German couple, he turns up not long after at the Schloss Norvenich. Despite their backgrounds in avant-garde classical music and free jazz, the band has been edging closer to a rock sound, but their engrained suspicion of popular music still holds them back. When the American shows up, the keyboardist says, “Come with me to the studio, we are making music there.” Nonplussed by the discovery of his error, the American, who has never sung in his life, walks into the studio, grabs a microphone and begins to improvise lyrics. “This was like the ignition,” the keyboard player recalls decades later, “this gave the last kick toward rock.”
(Serge Tcherepnin, Irmin Schmidt, Hildegard Schmidt, Malcolm Mooney, Holger Czukay, Michael Karoli, Jaki Liebezeit)
Raphael Rubinstein is the New York-based author of The Miraculous (Paper Monument, 2014) and A Geniza (Granary Books, 2015). Excerpts from his recently completed book Libraries of Sand about the Jewish-Egyptian writer Edmond Jabès have appeared in Bomb, The Fortnightly Review and 3:AM Magazine. In January 2023, Bloomsbury Academic will publish a collection of his writing titled Negative Work: The Turn to Provisionality in Contemporary Art. Since 2008 he has been Professor of Critical Studies at the University of Houston School of Art.