Hartmut Geerken Requiem For The Snake Of Maidan

towards the end of the 1970s, a film about me and my work was made in kabul for the south german tv program. the director was arpad bondy. in order to find a venue for my music that is typical for afghanistan, it was agreed that my “percussion environment”, a tubular cube of 2x2x2 meters including the associated instruments, would be transported on a barren, stony ridge in the hindukush mountains. the people called the place “maidan”, which means nothing but “place”. while a couple of men dragged the frame pipes and the instruments up the hill, I decided to carry my large wuhan gong (100 cm diameter) up the mountain, in a kind of ritual. michael ranta sent me this gong from wuhan/china to kabul. – with slow and careful steps, carrying the heavy gong like an umbrella on my head, I walked over the difficult rocky terrain without a path up. suddenly a snake about two meters long came out of the rocks towards me and hissed aggressively at me. I could only take the gong off my head and put it like a shield in front of my legs. as I later discovered, it was a very venomous snake! since I couldn’t go on or back without her attacking me, I had to bring myself to kill the beautiful animal. I managed to smash her skull with a rock that I threw at her while standing behind my gong. finally I hung the lifeless body around my neck, put the gong back on my head and continued my way up, with a pounding heart. when the percussion environment was set up, I hung the dead snake between my instruments and spontaneously decided to name my solo performance “requiem for the snake of maidan”.

since I was able to reach an orbit between heaven and earth while playing in such an unique and very privileged place, I definitely didn’t want to be disturbed or interrupted by a film team and made the following parameter a condition: I will play six hours continuously, and the filmmakers can do what they want, but are not allowed to interfere with or talk to me. - while I was playing I only had one musician with me: the wind. sun ra entitled one of his records “my brother the wind”. I hung my metallophones on the linkage so that the wind could touch them and create sounds. the recording captured a few parts where I didn’t have to lift a finger and the wind did everything that was necessary. the room was a wide landscape without any echo. if an echo can be heard in the recording, it is the reverberation from the big gong. only a few noises came, apart from the wind, from outside. flying insects passed near the microphone from time to time, few shouts of the film team from a nearby hill or you could hear a jet at a great height. sometimes, if you listen carefully, you can hear steps on loose rock: I was not sitting all the time within the cube but also played on my percussion environment from outside, for example throwing small stones or clods of earth onto the big gong from a greater distance. the big gong and the boo chals (tibetan cymbals) produced a whole series of overtones. the string instruments, the metallo- and lithophones dominate the recording.

in addition to the acoustic environment of my instruments, in some parts of my improvisation I used a battery-powered tape recorder (uher 4400 report stereo IC) with a pre-recorded feeding tape that I had pre-recorded before alone or together with michael ranta in kabul. the stones of the lithophone were collected by ranta and myself in the valley of goldara around an old collapsed buddhist stupa. almost each of the hundred stone plate we had lifted was ringing.

(hartmut geerken)