Heiner Goebbels
Surrogate Cities

Junge Deutsche Philharmonie

voices: Jocelyn B. Smith, David Moss
conductor: Peter Rundel

with words by Heiner Müller, Hugo Hamilton and Paul Auster


“Surrogate Cities” is the German composer Heiner Goebbel’s ambitious attempt to translate modern urban architecture and feeling into music. The piece, which can be described as a collage of melody, text and samplings, has struck like a bombshell in many of the world’s major cities.


1. Chaconne - Canterloops
2. Allemande - Les ruines
3. Gigue
4. Sarabande - N-Touch
5. Bourrée - Wildcard
6. Passacaglia
7. Courante
8. Menuett - L'ingénieur
9. Gavotte - N-Touch Remix
10. Air - Compression
11. The Horatian - Three Songs: Rome and Alba
12. The Horatian - Three Songs: So That The Blood Dropped To The Earth
13. The Horatian - Three Songs: Dwell Where The Dogs Dwell
14. D & C
15. Surrogate
16. In The Country Of Last Things 


total playing time: 70:10


"Surrogate Cities" is an attempt to approach the phenomenon of the city from various sides, to tell stories of cities, expose oneself to them, observe them, it is material about metropolises that has accumulated over the course of time. The work was inspired partly by texts, but also by drawings, structures and sounds, the juxtaposition of orchestra and sampler playing a considerable role because of the latter's ability to store sounds and noises ordinarily alien to orchestral sonorities. The associations I have are with a realistic, certainly contradictory, but ultimately positive image of the modern city. My intention was not to produce a close-up but to try and read the city as a text and then to translate something of its mechanics and architecture into music...
When it comes to the power dynamics of the city, the individual is always the more vulnerable party. Art rebels against this overpowering structure by strengthening the subjective element. Music, too, is composed from a highly subjective perspective, for composers usually justify what they write by saying that they "need to get it out of their system". That is only partly true for me. I try to gain a bit more distance. I construct something that confronts the audience and the audience reacts to it, discovering in the music a space they can enter complete with their associations and ideas.
(From a conversation with Heiner Goebbels)


The opening “Suite for Sampler and Orchestra” incorporates ambient urban sounds of Berlin, New York, Tokyo, Lyon and St Petersburg, and mixes industrial sounds with baroque quotations, and emotionally engaging cantorial singing from the Jewish tradition.

As ever with Goebbels, literary quotations and text-setting have an important role to play in this music. “The Horatian - Three Songs” features words (adaptations of Livy’s account of the struggle be-tween Rome and Alba ) by the late East German dramatist and fierce social critic Heiner Müller, who was Goebbels’ most frequent artistic collaborator for 15 years. Müller on Goebbels’ work: “With illiteracy on the rise, with books being printed faster than they are written and bought more than they are read, with the theatre increasingly inundating texts with images, robbing them of their subversive quality as it flails blindly to defend itself against television, with reality increasingly being replaced by more or less manipulated or manipulative reproductions of reality, Heiner Goebbels proposes a new form of reading, a different, no longer touristic approach to the landscape of a text.”

“In The Country of Last Things” takes its text from author Paul Auster’s apocalyptic novel which describes a city “in a terminal state of collapse”, where “death has replaced the business of life”. “D & C”, for orchestra, is in part inspired by Franz Kafka’s story “The City Coat of Arms”. (“All the legends and songs that came to birth in that city are filled with longing for a prophesied day when the city would be destroyed by five successive blows from a gigantic fist. It is for that reason too that the city has a closed fist on its coat of arms.”)

And “Surrogate” has words by Hugo Hamilton, the Irish-German writer of Goebbels’ generation who similarly carves a path between high art and popular forms. Indeed “Surrogate Cities” has the curious distinction of being one of the most experimental of Goebbels’ works and also – at least in parts – his most accessible project to date, with sections clearly destined for multi-format radio play. “The Horatian” and “In the Country of Last Things” feature the voice of soul-jazz singer Jocelyn B. Smith, well known for her contributions to the soundtracks of “The Lion King” and “Hotel Shanghai”, and for her hit album “Blue Lights and Nylons”. Free improviser David Moss, whose numerous credits include work with Bill Laswell’s Material and Carla Bley’s revived “Escalator Over The Hill”, is the singer on “Surrogate” and also adds his idiosyncratic vocals to “In the Country of Last Things”