Details

Prof. J.U. Lensing and Tobias Beieseke | Germany | 2016 | 86 m

Time of Fun together is a documentary about a production by the well known artist and composer Heiner Goebbels in the context of the Ruhrtriennale 2013, where he restaged the main work of exceptional artist Harry Partch, „Delusion of the Fury“, together with the Ensemble Musikfabrik from Cologne, Germany. Since the instruments, on which the piece is meant to be played, are all self-produced uniques, they had to be specially made. Furthermore, the musicians of Ensemble Musikfabrik had to learn the instruments as well as Partch’s own tonal system from scratch without a teacher, since they were unknown to them. Because the piece is meant to be performed without a conductor, the musicians have to know which note to play at which point in time. We follow the production process and documented it with our camera. We meet Heiner Goebbels and his musicians and caught a glimpse of Harry Partch´s cryptic and genius harmonic world of sound. We watch instrument manufacturer Thomas Meixner at work and learn details about the uniqueness of the instruments and their production process. Recordings of the staging show the challenges of coordination and technical conversion. The musicians are in conflict with their own potential, which leads them to places in music they have never been to before. The main piece of the documentary are excerpts from the staging of „Delusion of the fury“, which were performed with the help of a special sound system, reflecting every single instrument in a 5.1 mix. This historical piece of work lets the viewer understand Harry Partch, opening a gate to his musical genius with the help of the componist Heiner Goebbels.