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Reflektionen IV
on Gertrude Stein's text Reflections on the Atom Bomb

Gertrude Stein's Reflections on the Atom Bomb were written a few weeks before her death and may seem provocative to those, who in Germany demonstrated against Pershing and Co. some decades ago – perhaps to be dismissed as the thoughts of a woman, who knew that she would not have long to live anyway.
However, what at first glance appears to be a lack of commitment („I'm not interested”), turns out, on further reflection, to be a deeply meaningful criticism, and I'm ready to sign her conclusion that it makes much more sense to deal with the living instead of killing them with more and more efficient methods. That is why this sentence also marks the end of my reflections.

Gertrude Stein's sentences form one layer of my composition – spoken by myself, „distanced” in timbre and inculcated, only the final sentence is presented in my „original” voice color for the reasons just mentioned.
Repetitions and looping are an important element of the design, they are motivated by the text – thirteen times alone we hear a derivation of the word „interest” – and always have a reference as regards content, one example is the loop „so you see the atomic bomb”, oscillating hypnotizingly between left and right. Moreover, Gertrude Stein herself liked to play with loops in her texts, as shows her famous sentence „A rose is a rose is a rose is a rose”.

A second layer deals acoustically with the subject of the text – the bomb. At the beginning an atomic bomb explosion sounds „as original”, later on also several times as a distant rumble; from a single impulse cut out of the explosion noise a kind of musical (controlled) chain reaction develops via a feedback circuit of resonating filters, producing „elementary” sine tones that increase in density and volume, and thus hint at the process of approaching the critical mass.

Two number systems form a third – abstract – level of the composition (math again!): exponential growth describes the process of the nuclear chain reaction during the explosion of an atomic bomb, and the Fibonacci series stands for the growth of organic life („it's the living that are interesting”), here it is used as a formal and rhythmic generator.


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