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Hans Werner Henze: “The Electric Cop”

From the album Voices (1973)

Setting contemporary leftist poetry in German, English, Italian, and Spanish, Hans Werner Henze’s Voices presents a devastating musical summation of the political outrages of the 1960s (Vietnam, Latin America, the struggle for civil rights in the U.S.A.).

Generally, Henze’s songs are more effective when he’s working with an ironic text, such as “Recht und billig” (“It’s only fair”), which sets a poem by Erich Fried about the American policy of paying the families of civilians killed in the Vietnam War.  The text is accompanied by banjo and double bass in the manner of a light-hearted folk tune.  Where the poetry is of a more sincere and accusatory nature, however, as for example “Screams” by the African-American poet Walton Smith, the music often seems to be trying too hard to match the intensity of the words.

Henze’s setting of “The Electric Cop,” after a poem by Victor Hernandez Cruz (and dedicated to New Left philosopher-rockstar Herbert Marcuse) is a tour de force critique of media-saturated modern culture.  The text of the poem, itself semantically fragmented and full of sensational imagery, is accompanied by a cacophonous assemblage of instruments and prerecorded sounds, including a baseball game and a presidential address.  As a hilarious non sequitur, the piece ends with a brief and utterly sincere passage for mambo band.


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July 20, 2009, 11:39am

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