Uwe Rasch: KinderStücke

KinderStücke is a tribute to unsorted children, who embark on the »march through the institutions« and learn (or must learn) to carry their burdens: their difficulties, their vulnerabilities, and their–modestly put–domestic impairments.

 

It is also a tribute to those who dedicate themselves to them, who support them, and whose immense work often goes unnoticed. The spoken texts are taken from school reports about three primary school children and alternate in such a way that they only gradually unfold, making it possible to orient oneself only slowly–this mirrors the situation of those who devote themselves to these children with patience, intuition, and decisive action.

 

The children do not tell us in their own words what it’s about, but in the words of an adult: the challenge of recognising children’s problems in the first place, finding sensitisation to their particularities, seeking solutions, and protecting the helpers through professional distance in order to (if possible) offer assistance–the familiar difference between sympathy and empathy.

 

For this, a nesting of the narrated and the narrator seemed appropriate rather than the supposed authenticity of pity-inducing childhood fates: the written text of an adult, read aloud by a child, whose voice is synchronised with an adult’s, »giving them the words.« Interventions in the text were limited to working with tempo, without destroying the meaning of what was being said.

 

The sounds are almost entirely based on filtering the name sound and the hoverboard noise. Three interludes focus on a single name, the sound of which rises and falls through dynamic interventions. The second part is musically based on three children’s songs: one describes the problems of a mother-child relationship, the difficulties of separation, and the transformation of their relationship. The second relies on medication to help a child recover. And in the third, we learn of a »fairy-tale« resilience, nowadays referred to as resilience (psychological strength; the ability to endure difficult life situations without lasting impairment). In other words, the musical foundation consists of the three songs »Hänschen klein«, »Häschen in der Grube«, and »Auf einem Baum ein Kuckuck saß«.

 

The still undeveloped, unselected primary school children and their stories are contrasted in the second part with three professionally trained, highly specialised sound performers who have undergone many selection and support measures, showcasing their abilities. These voices hum in a glissando–simple and heavy at once.

(Uwe Rasch)