“Who the hell is Gerty?” is not only based on an excerpt from James Joyce’s Ulysses, but the musical realisation also follows the linguistic principle of Joyce’s “expressive form”.
What strikes you immediately when listening is the amount of text, which is actually unusual for a musical theatre. The combination of spoken text and music is decidedly tricky – the danger of the sections stealing each other’s credentials lurks in every word, in every sound. Expressive form in language means that the structural order determines the work not only formally but also in a certain way “content-wise” and thus becomes message and declaration.
I have transferred this very model to music and to the musicians. They are assigned special roles, roles with a meaning, with a content, with a context. In the first part, the musicians and their instruments could be described as objects of sexual desire, in the second part as bearers of insecurity and needs that don’t exist any longer, whereby the roles between ensemble and singer also change, interchange, contradict each other in terms of content. In this way, it is not only avoided that music or sounds create a mood, but by means of moods that are created, the music is created in the first place.
I have been dealing with levels of meaning or, to be more precise, with the semantic content of music for some years now, because I am firmly convinced that this exists and that is the reason why the general understanding of music has become possible in the first place (at least in the western world). In “Who the hell is Gerty?”, these phrases from language (gesture,tone, connotations, desires) are translated into musical language or existing musical phrases (a familiar gesture, a certain kind of music, something that is familiar to us from another context) are contextualised in relation to the roles. (Brigitta Muntendorf)
Who the hell is Gerty?
Music theatre for ensemble, two singers and two actors
Text after James Joyce Ulysses, 13th chapter
Commissioned work for the 2011 Pocket Opera Festival Salzburg
Music Brigitta Muntendorf
Director Thierry Bruehl
Gerty Constanze Passin
Gerty Katharina Schwarz
Leopold Thomas Hupfer
Leopold Alexey Kokhanov
