Vinko Globokar

“If you ask a composer their opinion of me, they’ll tell you I’m a good trombone player. If you ask a trombone player, they’ll tell you I’m a decent composer. Things always get tricky when you can’t categorize someone.”¹

As Vinko Globokar’s quip about himself suggests, his music and his career as a trombonist performing jazz and contemporary music were deeply intertwined. Globokar was a member of New Phonic Art, one of Europe’s most important free music ensembles (along with Nuova Consonanza in Italy), and played with some of the most influential composers of his generation, including Karlheinz Stockhausen, Luciano Berio, and Mauricio Kagel. In fact, it was through collaborating with Berio as he was working on Sequenza V for trombone, that Globokar began writing Plan for four participants and a tombak player (1965). From this piece onward, his interests in unusual instrumentation and theatricality were clear.

In Globokar’s eyes, music’s fundamental location was the stage, where he could express ideas and communicate with audiences and performers — a metaphor for the world. This base belief was a wellspring of inspiration for scores with multilingual texts that could be performed directly in the language where the concert was taking place, and works with universal themes.

For Globokar, music should be “an implementation of truth.” It is never pure, does not “refer to itself anymore.”² To the contrary, it is built on extra-musical reflections and needs to connect to human, political, and social questions. Globokar does not hesitate to use his works to address difficult themes such as emigration or xenophobia (Les émigrés; L’Exil No. 1, 2, and 3), the Yugoslav Wars (Élégie Balkanique), imprisonment and torture (Un jour comme un autre for soprano and five instruments, 1975; La prison for eight instrumentalists, 2001; Les otages for orchestra and sampler, 2003), and power relations. Social pressure on individuals is the central subject of his Masse Macht und Individuum for four solo instruments and two orchestras (1995), while in Dos à dos for two instrumentalists (1988), individual power struggles are represented by a musical combat between two performers.

The search for freedom in Globokar’s music is not present only in his social messaging. It can also be found in a technical commitment, from composer to performer. It is from this angle that we will explore his musical aesthetic.

The composer, the instrument, and the performer

For Globokar, composition is a chain of communication linking the composer to the public. The performer is one link in this chain — and Globokar knows firsthand the crucial role played by the performer in the transmission of contemporary music. In Globokar’s view, communication between composer and audience ought to be as clear and direct as possible, without the performer becoming a barrier between them. Indeed, to the contrary, it is the duty of performers to perform what composers ask of them as meticulously as possible — they should follow the music’s design and invest themselves in it both personally and artistically. To this end, one must seek, try, and explore.

Laboratorium (1973-1985) is a set of fifty-five short instrumental pieces ranging from solo compositions to ensembles of up to ten, a kind of experimental laboratory through which Globokar could test themes to be expanded upon later in larger-scale scores. The score, dedicated to Kagel, pays tribute to his early work in which the most important instrument was the performer’s body. In a similar vein, the pieces in Laboratorium were written to demonstrate that it is possible to play a traditional instrument unconventionally, in particular through fresh approaches to the relationship between the body and the instrumentalist.

The order in which the pieces are to be performed is free: the entire score can be played as a whole (lasting a total of four to five hours) or in part. What is of special interest about Laboratorium is that each piece can be played alone or simultaneously with another one, because the compositional material is identical. As Globokar specified, “the point is no longer the finished work, but the different events of work, a kind of operating table from where the workings of musical practice are unveiled.”³

Laboratorium was originally composed for members of the Ensemble Musique Vivante, directed by Diego Masson. The performers for whom it was intended were virtuosos such as Heinz Holliger (oboe), Michel Portal (clarinet), Jean-Pierre Drouet and Gaston Sylvestre⁴ (percussion), Michael Rissler (bass clarinet), and Jacques Di Donato (saxophone). The work explores “the psychological relationships among the performers and the problem of an individual musician’s capacity for creation,” a harbinger of other, later works that mixed improvisation and composition. As a result, Laboratorium is a musical but also a human laboratory; as the composer explained, it is

music that is located at the outer edges of the instruments’ capacities. And there are even certain pieces that are utopian pieces; that is, the information is so complicated that the musician, depending on their personal capabilities, has to make up their own version, because the version that is proposed to them is practically impossible to play.⁵

Globokar’s musical message at times seems so complex that the distance between the written text and what is actually possible to perform obliges the performer to engage bodily with the work, seeking out solutions, improvising, exploring. Here, we see that Globokar became interested early on in the relationship between language and music, and, more specifically, in the way in which phonetics could inject new life into instrumental techniques. He expanded on this theme over time and was able to explore it even more closely in the early days of IRCAM, when Pierre Boulez invited him to head a department called “Instruments and Voice.”

Globokar’s Discours (Speeches) — composed between 1968 and 1993 — are a series of eight scores, each written for a specific instrument or family of instruments. The point of departure in each score is the same: “the speech being performed must give the impression that it is being spoken.” Within this, however, Globokar used different approaches to explore the relationship between voice and instrument. Discours II (1967-1968) for five trombones is built on the analogy between the sound made by a musical instrument and speech. The piece stresses the interior quality of the sound and the phonetic transposition of vowels and consonants by the instrument. Discours III (1969) for five oboes phonetically transforms a text, specifying that “the soloist must try to reproduce words: their articulation, accentuation, the color of the syllables, vowels, or consonants, as well as the rhythm of diction.”⁶ The score alternates between rigorous composition and more indeterminate writing. Discours VI (1981-1982) for string quartet possesses the extra dimension of theatricality, with a text used not only for its sound quality but also for its theatrical potential. In this, it can be compared to Toucher (1973) for solo percussion, which also explores the theme of the interrelationship of voice, language, and instrumental performance, during continuous narration. For Toucher, Globokar used excerpts from Bertolt Brecht’s Life of Galileo, while in Discours VI he drew on Traumdeutung (“The Interpretation of Dreams”), a psychodrama for four voices written by Edoardo Sanguineti in 1964.⁷ The text is built in a highly musical way, alternating solo and polyphony-inflected tutti passages; what initially sparked Globokar’s interest, though, were the stage directions: “The actors should behave as a quartet.” Globokar decided to inverse this idea and propose a score in which “the four musicians were to behave as actors.”⁸ To this end, he stipulated that the performers’ gestures be subject to musical logic, performing the score using their instruments, voices, and bodies. He preserved the analogy between language and instrumental play: vowels in words are translated into notes (for example, the vowel “a” is the note G for the first violin, a C for the second violin, etc.) and their consonants are translated into an instrumental articulation that produces an effect similar to that of the consonant (for example, “r” is a tremolo, “t” is a pizzicato).

Musical theater that showcases solo performers

Globokar’s theatrical aesthetic was close to the one developed by Berio in works such as Circles and Sequenza. It was also influenced by Kagel’s “instrumental theater,” which Kagel described as “linked to the individual, exploring, analyzing, and revealing them in ways that are simple technically, but demanding in that they require them to commit completely to the performance, to which they are so very necessary.”⁹

Injecting music with theatricality frees the performer from being shut into a passive role, creating situations on stage that make it possible to push beyond their “musical and psychological capacities” and evolve musically. Performers’ gestures thus became a way for Globokar to enrich the discourse and add a theatrical dimension to his music — according to him, this was a primordial element: “one can make gestures without producing sounds, but the inverse is impossible, producing a sound without the necessary gesture.”¹⁰ Here, again, the performer is at the heart of the music. Indeed, Globokar was thinking about and defining theater through the performer.

?Corporel (1984) for a percussionist and their body is one of Globokar’s most emblematic works,

a musical and theatrical drama where man is both subject and object […]. He can express himself in his entirety and, through the situation in which he finds himself, do an introspection of his body, in the end, of what he is as a person. Is it music, is it theater? Faced with a work like this, the performer becomes a ‘percussionist of his body’! to express the different situations being staged and ultimately become an actor.¹¹

The piece thus fits the definition of instrumental theater discussed above: a means of exploring and analyzing human beings — or, put another way, a means of introspection. Introspection, or the inward gaze, recurs as an explicit theme in Globokar’s work, for example, in Introspection d’un tubiste for tuba, electronics, tape, lighting, and stage movements (1983); Pensée écartelée for solo percussion (1997); and Airs de voyages vers l'intérieur for eight voices, clarinet, trombone, and electronics (1978). Introspection is also a constant in contemporary theater, where it appears in the form of monologue. Monologues open a window into the inner life of the protagonist, while also allowing for “a breaching of the border of a dramatic universe in an actual theatrical situation,”¹² as the frontal, direct positioning of the performer in the performance space resembles a real-life situation.

The performance space of ?Corporel was a response to developments in contemporary theater, in that it was built on this frontal position. At no moment in the piece does the performer turn their back on the audience as they change positions, sit or lie down, kneel, or curl up. Rather than simply taking their places to listen to a musical work, the audience of ?Corporel was intended by Globokar to have “an immediate experience of reality (time, space, body),” similar to in experimental theater or performance and improvisational art.¹³

Individual or collective? Between composition and improvisation

Improvisation is another underlying theme in Globokar’s repertoire, a response to his own need for freedom that is at the same time a highly effective teaching tool.

As a performer, Globokar played with the free improvisation group New Phonic Art, founded in 1969 with Carlos Roqué Alsina (piano), Portal (clarinet and saxophone), and Drouet (percussion). The group’s initial goal was to play contemporary pieces composed by Globokar and Roqué Alsina, and to create a space in which each musician could improvise in his own language. This space of freedom that New Phonic Art provided was critical for Globokar, who evolved musically in significant ways during the thirteen years he played with them. After a “period of fear — fear of being myself, fear of being banal, fear of silence or inaction,”¹⁴ free improvisation offered Globokar the openness and the courage to embrace his own musical language.

Over time, his pieces opened up to less structured writing, leaving more and more space for improvisation. This evolution stands out in Correspondences for four soloists (1969), La Ronde for a flexible ensemble of instruments (1972), Concerto grosso for five instruments, choir, and orchestra (1969-1975), and Der Käfig for a thirty-six player orchestra with no conductor and an improvising soloist (1980).

At the same time, as a trombone teacher and performer, Globokar was aware that improvisation was often taught to young instrumentalists in a very controlled way, with no space for learning or practicing free improvisation. This inspired him to write a book of improvisation exercises, Individuum collectivum, using graphic notation and verbal instructions to help performers step outside of the usual conventions in their improvisations and offer them ideas for developing their own language. The project was structured in three volumes, each of which discussed a specific musical parameter — sound, lines of communication, interdependence among performers — in order to foster relationships that would allow for deeper engagement by the participants. Beyond the purely musical aspect of individual and group improvisation, Globokar found improvisation crucial in that it allowed performers to “learn to listen to what is around them, to take in and then to transmit information, to propose ideas, to accept those of others.”¹⁵ Even more than music, this was a life lesson.

The close of the 1970s found Globokar progressively composing music based on more personal themes. By now, his aesthetic and formal considerations, which before had focused on questions of language, were shifting to include elements linked to events in contemporary history. This evolution expressed mainly in his symphonic compositions. Influenced by his reading of Elias Canetti and Theodor Adorno — who in his 1962 Introduction to the Sociology of Music wrote, “the conductor and orchestra in themselves constitute a kind of microcosm in which social tensions recur and can be concretely studied”¹⁶ — Globokar began thinking about the orchestra as a social group. From Das Orchester, composed in 1975, to L’Exil No. 3 (Das Leben des Emigranten Edvard), composed in 2014, one sees the three most salient features of his symphonic writing slowly falling into place: the use of a sizeable orchestra (sometimes several orchestral groups, with the addition of a choir and electroacoustics); orchestration choices that were frequently eclectic, using folk instruments (accordion, mandolin, cimbalom); and a theatrical use of space.

Les chemins de la liberté (2003-2004), for example, is at once about the communication problems that can crop up in the daily lives of professional musicians and about how social dynamics change in an orchestra with no conductor. Globokar’s idea of abolishing the power figure of the orchestra conductor was drawn directly from his reading of Canetti’s Crowds and Power¹⁷ and had already been touched on in Das Orchester and Masse Macht und Individuum. Beyond a social — or even political — view of music, the idea of having musicians play under their own authority requires the composer to rethink the way pieces are written: his works explore different ways to synchronize performers, by using a metronome or a prerecorded track, for example, or by dividing the orchestra into several smaller groups located in different parts of the performance space.

Splitting up the orchestra or its arrangement on the stage was not always the result of technical necessity — it could also be a symbolic gesture. For example, the military situation in the former Yugoslavia was the point of departure for Globokar’s orchestral triptych Der Engel der Geschichte — which includes Zerfall (2000), Mars (2001-2002), and Hoffnung (2004). For its premiere in 2000 in Donaueschingen, Katalin Moldvay chose a spatial arrangement of the orchestra that cut it into two groups, seated facing each other and separated by barbed wire. The intent of this scenographic approach was to provide “associative material that helped the audience to understand the extra-musical idea of ‘war’.”¹⁸ The public was seated between the two orchestras, placing them not only at the center of the work, but, more important, at the center of the conflict.

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Globokar’s repertoire may seem eclectic at first, in that he abandoned “pure” composition in favor of incorporating a theatrical aesthetic and extra-musical elements, yet his music converged around a social dimension. In this sense, the trajectory of his work might best be represented as a musical journey from “I” to “we.” Through his practice as a trombonist, orchestra conductor, teacher, and improvisor, Globokar gained the capacity to see music from all its sides. As he composed, the figure of the lone creator slowly gave way to a utopian, hopeful “we.” A “we” that “implies that collective creation projects a vision of life in which we could trust the invention of others to create something that we could never imagine alone.”¹⁹

1. ^{Interview with Sabine BECK, in Vinko Globokar. Komponist und Improvisator, Tectum Verlag, Margburg, 2012, p. 18.↩}
2. ^{Globokar VINKO, Position dans une situation, Typescript available at the CDMC.↩}
3. ^{Globokar VINKO, Composer-Décomposer, Typescript available at the CDMC.↩}
4. ^{?Corporel is dedicated to Gaston Sylvestre.↩}
5. ^{Globokar VINKO, op. cit.↩}
6. ^{Libretto for Discours III, Peters, nº EP 8110.↩}
7. ^{Sanguineti EDOARDO, “Traumdeutung,” in Menabò, No. 8, 1965, pp. 37-49.↩}
8. ^{Libretto for Discours VI, Peters, nº EP 8589.↩}
9. ^{Globokar VINKO, Le théâtre instrumental, typescript available at the CDMC.↩}
10. ^{Globokar VINKO, Antibadabum, typescript available at the CDMC.↩}
11. ^{Globokar VINKO, Le théâtre instrumental, op.cit.↩}
12. ^{Lehmann HANS-THIÈS, Le théâtre postdramatique. Paris: L’Arche, 2002.↩}
13. ^Ibid.↩
14. ^{Globokar VINKO, Le concert commence quand il n’y a plus de musique, typescript available at the CDMC.↩}
15. ^{Globokar VINKO, L’improvisation en cage, typescript available at the CDMC.↩}
16. ^{Théodor ADORNO, “Chef et orchestre,” in Introduction à la sociologie de la musique [1962], Geneva, Éditions Contrechamps, 1994, pp. 109-22.↩}
17. ^{Elias CANETTI, “Le chef d’orchestre,” in Masse et puissance, translated by Robert Rovini, Paris, Gallimard, 1998.↩}
18. ^{Konrad SIGRID, “De la musique pour les tortues,” in Vinko Globokar [brochure published on the occasion of Globokar’s 75th birthday], Ricordi-Universal, p. 68.↩}
19. ^{Globokar VINKO, “Réalité et espérance,” text written for a lecture titled “The Future of Music” at the University of California, La Jolla, 2002. From Globokar’s personal archives.↩}