MEDIATHEK

Beef Kohlrabi Cantata – an electroacoustic cantata for soprano and electronics – was composed as a comission for the European Summer Field School titled Narratives of Memory, Migration and Xenophobia taking place in Budapest, Berlin, Aix-en-Provence and Victoria, Canada.

The inspiration for the new piece Beef Kohlrabi Cantata came from a field recording made by Andrea Szigetvári at the Keleti Railway Station in Budapest on the 2nd of September of 2015, when hundreds of refugees were camping out on a metro underpass of the station. The recording captured a conversation of two Hungarian men, who were expressing their dissatisfaction about helping the refugees by some volunteers. At the most dramatic part of the conversation a man said he wanted to shot those people, throw them on a truck and burn them, if he had some power. He called the refugees „funnily” marhakaralábé (beef kohlrabi).

To develop the recording and to put its content into wider context the composer collected recordings of interviews with refugees and of speeches by different contemporary leaders about finding solutions for the migration crisis.

The suprasegmental parameters or prosody of the vocal communication, it is the emotional and musical aspects of the speeches serve as source material for the composition of both the acoustic and the electroacoustic parts together with soundscapes reflecting on the location of the recordings and meanings emerging from the spoken texts.