What in Berlin is Paul Brody up to? besides selling Becky's Violin Purses?
News from my brother, Paul Brody, on the other side of the World
(about the Spoken Word and Melody)
My brother, Paul has been hired by...Well, I asked my brother to tell us about his new project for the Pierre Boulez Auditorium (Artistic Director: Daniel Barenboim) where he is hired to be a feature sound installation artist, and got an earful as follows! (For specifics about Boulez work click HERE.)Trumpeting and Composing through Stories When Paul Brody was struggling to get a grade higher than a D in his high school English class he hardly imagined that would have a job experimenting with language. Words were something that were difficult, and generally brought a lot of red marks when the teacher returned his essays and tests.Now Brody is 56 years old. He still feels Californian although he’s lived in Berlin, Germany for almost a quarter of a century. Brody is an internationally acclaimed composer, radio producer, and sound installation artist. To most people these three actively seem wildly different. But Brody puts them all under one category, which is his self proclaimed ‘sub-genre.’ That is the world between spoken word and melody.The red marks from his high school English teachers have changed into notes, frequencies, vocal gestures, and melodies. And the mistakes Brody might have made on his tests have even been assigned an artistic value which Brody calls, the aesthetic of misunderstanding. His latest projects have included composing for a theater piece based on the people who worked as interpreters for the Nuremberg Trials. What was it like to be the interpreter who had to translate during those long weeks? The through-composed composition functioned as another translation that left the words and embraced the speechlessness of it’s unfathomable tragedy. The state theater, Munich Kammerspiele housed the documentary music theater piece.Brody has extensively explored using the voice as a compositional base. His work at the Jewish Museum Berlin uses interviews with people about how they see their place in their chosen home of Berlin. Brody’s special composition technique shows that along with words, the voices-melody both accompanies what we say but also carries it’s own independent narration.Brody is currently working on a sound installation based on Yiddish blessings and curses for the Candian Language Museum. In April he will also be guest artist speaker at the University of Rhode Island and Artist in Residence at the University of Virginia.Back in Berlin he will be a feature sound installation artist at the Pierre Boulez Auditorium (Artistic Director: Daniel Barenboim). (For specifics about Boulez work click HERE.)He is also developing a sound installation for the Anton Webern festival.Brody has also toured extensively as a trumpeter and played and recorded with such greats as John Zorn and Jelena Kuljic.For more information and exciting listening examples please check out his website: www.paulbrody.net