Beyond the bar table?

Max E. Keller's works for tape are of course political music, radical music at that. Clearly insistent speaking voices in Sicher sein refer to Swiss banks that were already maximizing their profits in the mid-1970s while unemployment was rapidly increasing. The hymns, written in 1979, include an authentic account of a Chilean who was tortured. The cruelty is countered by phrases that could have come from a tourist brochure, while the self-confident anthems of various countries play in the background. The Marsellaise comes to the fore, equality and brotherhood - at the same time there is talk of electric shocks, kicks, pools of blood and people bleeding to death.

Such a direct reflection of the world is and always has been an aesthetic problem. What is the point of contemplating durations, pitch organization or compositional quality when torture, death and oppression are deliberately reported in a realistic manner? These are certainly questions that Arnold Schönberg's A survivor from Warsaw concern. With these four audio pieces, the question arises again. Unfortunately, there is also the realization that many things have hardly improved since the 70s, from which all the works originate - with the difference that only a few still criticize it the way Keller did 40 years ago.

Max E. Keller: Four political compositions for tape, Tochnit Aleph TA 134