HELMUT OEHRING IN CONVERSATION
WITH SUSANNE STÄHR
SS Helmut Oehring, you are the child of deaf parents.
For those of us who grew up in the hearing world, it is very difficult
to imagine your childhood, so I hope you will allow me to start with some
very basic questions. When children learn to speak they begin by initiating
the sounds they hear in their immediate environment, starting with simple
words like 'Mama'. In your immediate family there was no speech for you to imitate.
Did you learn to communicate by signs and gestures before you learned to speak?
HO Yes I did. In his book Dumb Voices, Oliver Sacks points out that a
four-month old baby is able to sign 'milk' with gestures. Of course, I can't
actually remember whether I did this, but I presume that I did. To an outsider,
it may sound fascinating, but in reality these are awful experiences. For example,
nobody comes if you scream . My mother couldn't watch me all the time to see if
I was asleep, awake, hungry or whatever, although she certainly looked at me
more often than other mothers do. So there must have been times when I cried and
no-one heard me. There was one occasion when I almost drowned. My father was sitting
in a rowing boat, reading the newspaper, with his back to me, and I fell into
the water. I screamed but he didn't hear me. Screams like that run through my life
like a thread ... So there are more than enough reasons for me to have left the world
of people who can't hear. Almost from the beginning I stood between the world of
the deaf and the world of the hearing. I had to develop a strategy to be myself.
SS Despite this, do you still feel that signed language is your native language?
HO Absolutely. This other language that we are conversing in now is strange to me.
I still find it difficult to communicate in and with this language, to make myself
properly understood.
SS How old were you when you first began to speak?
HO Four and a half or five, very late. I remember numerous painful and
difficult experiences in kindergarten and at primary school that really all pointed
to the same thing, that I didn't belong. In fact my teachers were as helpless as
I was, and my parents couldn't help because they had nothing to do with the world of
those who can hear. I always felt that in order to survive I had to act independently.
SS You once said that you hear music as a sequence of gestures. How does this
work?
HO For me, the starting point of every sound is a corresponding movement.
Gestural language is a language of the body and of space, and vision is essential
to interpret it. In a sense, all the music I compose is film music, a soundtrack for
a film that isn't shown. My music always has this hybrid quality; it is far closer to
cinema, theater, radio drama or even books than it is to written music.
SS Is it easier for you to write music for the stage, for a medium with a visual
dimension?
HO My music always has a visual dimension because I always have a film running
before my inner eye. The starting point is always movement, whether I am writing
chamber music, an orchestral work, or an opera.
SS Does that mean that people who can hear are also handicapped in a sense
because the language of movement, for which deaf people have developed a
particular affinity, is unclear to them?
HO I think that's something of a distortion. Naturally, deaf people consider
themselves to be the equals of people with hearing, and rightly so. lt is also a
fact that visually, they perceive more than hearing people. They frequently see
what one wants to say before one has said anything. Moreover, they have an acute
sensitivity to the subtext, that which goes beyond what is actually uttered.
Body language and mimic gestures are the decisive factors here, and they give a
comprehensive impression of the person who is speaking. However, the handicap
remains, because the deaf have no relationship to an essential part of life and
will never be able to develop one.
SS How would you describe your musical language? What does your music sound
like?
HO I am very happy with my music, I love it. But how can I describe it
in the abstract? I love rock music and jazz so the mixing of 'popular' and 'serious'
music is important to me - it's not something I do consciously, it just slips in
all the time. And what does my music sound like? Dark, operatic, dramatic, hard,
schizoid, morbid, sick, broken, yearning, androgynous, nightmarish. I use a kind
of melodramatic documentary style that is more usually associated with film.
For example, I have borrowed the cutting technique from Fassbinder's films.
This formal approach, the cutting and the lighting, the constellations of characters,
are all part of my music. lt may sound absurd but it's the way I work. That's why I
think it's so fascinating when filmmakers like Maxim Dessau direct my operas.
Spoleteo
