Schubert and Schumann Falling Apart
One of the more innovative attempts at taking possession of historic material and giving it new and more personal connotations, is the American singer Josephine Foster. On her 2006 album A Wolf in Sheep’s Clothing, released on the Chicago avantgarde label Locust Music, Josephine Foster transforms the German lieder tradition, turning it into a completely contemporary expression. Foster brings out an experimental mode very seldomly heard in more ”normal” interpretations of the songs of Franz Schubert and Robert Schumann. Suddenly the music talks. It becomes full of dangerous longings, revolutionary ambivalences, contradictory feelings.
Her juxtapositions of the intimate sweetness and the deep insecurities hiding in the material are far away from what the French theorist and writer Roland Barthes originally intended with his important and provocative essay ”The Grain of the Voice”, published in 1972 (in this text Barthes explains why the Swiss baryton Charles Panzéra’s lyrical way of performing Schumann is to preferred, compared to the expressive but emotionally empty interpretations of Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau). But what is important is the way Josephine Foster brings the listener in close contact with the poetic dimensions of the songs. The music starts to revolve from inside, becomes an inner vibration, very much in correspondance with Barthes’ description: ”The ’grain’ of the voice is not – or not only – its timbre; the signifying it affords cannot be better defined than by the friction between music and something else, which is the language (and not the message at all). The song must speak, or better still, must write.”
Josephine Foster belongs to a new generation of American folk singers and singer-songwriters that has been described in certain media as ”Weird Folk” or ”New Weird America”. These artists approach older folk traditions as though they were expressions of alternative, gothic states of mind (other similar singers and artists are for example Joanna Newsom, Animal Collective, Devandra Banhart and Marissa Nadler). The strangeness and otherwordly dimensions of Josephine Foster’s singing come through the strongest on her latest full length album The Coming Gladness, released last summer on Bo’Weavil Recordings. In these slowmotion ballads her voice works like a theremin: ether set in vibration, full of supernatural glidings.
But bringing a psychedelic sensibility to the 19th century tradition personified by Schubert and Schumann, Johannes Brahms and Hugo Wolf, doesn’t it destroy the music? Not at all, even if the result is shocking (and for some listeners even disasterous). In the ruins of a former completeness, in the shattered landscape of chords sounding like cavities and melodic fragments on the brink of falling apart, the words of Goethe, Eichendorff and Mörike start to send their Romantic messages into the future, instead of being locked inside the museum of protected beauty.