My Heart - Interview with Danaë Killian

Please tell us about yourself, what type of artist you are and how long you’ve been involved with Forest Collective.

My involvement with Forest Collective began when I saw Forest’s artistic director Evan Lawson conducting a couple of performances and I decided I wanted to play the Schoenberg Piano Concerto with Evan conducting. That project has never come to light unfortunately, as it's a little bit too big and too expensive for our resources, but that's how I met up with Evan.

Evan approached me in late 2015 to do Schoenberg’s Pierrot Lunaire, I said yes, and started working with Forest Collective in 2016 through that. The Expressionist composer Schoenberg has been the conduit for my involvement with Forest, which of course extends well beyond Schoenberg and is indeed focussed largely on contemporary musicians and artists. But it’s interesting, I think that while I’ve been working with Forest, I've come to see myself more and more as being an actual, real live, 21st century Expressionist Pianist, as distinct from being a pianist who plays music from the expressionist period (even though such music is my heartland). I can be an expressionist pianist playing Bach’s Goldberg Variations; I can be an expressionist pianist playing Evan J Lawson’s Labyrinth. I am an expressionist pianist in my own performative art. This forthcoming program My Heart at The Eleventh Hour is an example of that.

When you play, it seems like the piano is an extension of yourself, how do you manage that with such a large instrument?

Sometimes it honestly feels like a fight with the instrument! As a pianist, it’s not like you can take your instrument with you, so you have to figure out how to connect with new pianos all the time. An instrument that’s comfortable and easy to play is not necessarily the best instrument for revealing complexities of tone colour and contour, so I don’t mind the battle, but it can be scary when you go to a dress rehearsal and have the experience that the piano ‘isn’t listening’ to what you are trying to say—that it has its own mechanical will, which is overcoming and/or distorting my human voice. I think that’s how I’d describe it. A few weeks ago, I played a concert of the complete Schoenberg piano works on the Stuart piano at Tempo Rubato, which is an amazing instrument, but it's physical and expressive scale can be overwhelming as it’s so different from the water-like neutrality of the Yamaha tone palette, which is what I work with at home. My solution on that occasion was to only practise silently on the three days from dress rehearsal to performance, and through that silently listening and imagining process, the instrument and I were able to resolve our battle. A lot of that silent listening was listening to my body, to its tensions and relaxations as it engaged in the curves of my piano technique (my technique is mainly based on curved movements). I think that the pianist’s kinaesthetic immersion in the act of piano playing contributes immensely to the sense of the piano being an extension of themselves.

Danaë Killian. Image by Kate J Baker.

Your performance with Forest Collective in October is My Heart, which is your album, correct?

It's going to be my album. I started recording it in 2021 and then had to go into hospital for ages and there were lockdowns, I think, still in 2021. By the time I was ready to recommence recording, I didn't have any money left, which is why this October performance with Forest is an album fundraiser.

If we're successful in raising enough funds, I'd like to have it finalised so that it could be a launch on January 22nd next year, which is both my own birthday and the death of Else Lasker-Schüler whose story is featured throughout My Heart.

We share this little date connection, star connection and as I'm not that fond of my own birthday, I like that that date interacts with Lasker-Schüler.

Is part of the reason why you're drawn to Elsie Lasker-Schüler, because of this date connection? Which came first, your interest in their work or you finding out about that?

That's a good question to ask someone like me, because it does often work that way! I can be a bit obsessive about date synchronicity, and I tend to remember not only my friends’ birthdays but also the positions of the planets at the hour of their birth. But no, no, in this case it wasn’t the date connection that drew me to Else Lasker-Schüler. I found out about her work via Schoenberg, you know, as part of that circle in Berlin.

Like many artists, Lasker-Schüler was very, very poor. Before and after her marriage to Herwarth Walden, Lasker-Schüler was a sole parent trying to survive on poems, drawings and coffee, and at one point Karl Kraus sent out a petition to raise funds for Else Lasker-Schüler. A lot of people signed it and contributed their money, and Arnold Schoenberg was one of those people. I was just reading today about a petition that was sent out by Schoenberg's friends and admirers on his behalf when he needed money. That's how the social security system seemed to operate back then, which is sort of nice compared to the soul-destroying bureaucracy of Centrelink.

I also feel connected with Else Lasker-Schüler because she had a very fantastical relationship with language. This meant that when she wrote poetry, she would use extremely vivid imagery, and she would move the language in a musical direction. In English, too, I think you find that the more experimental a poet gets, the closer they get to other art forms. Sometimes it's the musical element that they list towards, sometimes the visual, the sculptural. I'm keenly sensitive to the musicality of Lasker-Schüler’s use of language. I'm not a native German speaker, but I do speak German, so I can experience something of her poetry in the original language.

German has a certain like tempo to it, doesn't it? There's a certain cadence and it can feel like you're riding a horse. There’s the rhythm there, underneath the words.

Yes, exactly, Else Lasker-Schüler would love that characterisation of the German language! She was so connected with Franz Marc and the Blaue Reiter—you know, those brilliant blue-flanked horses of Franz Marc. The idea of riding was very, very strong with Else Lasker-Schüler. She invented different personae for herself in her poetry and drawings, such as Prinz Jussuf, and often these ‘alters’ were mounted on horses, or camels, and she gave her own poetry reading performances, in which she inhabited these fantasy personae. She really tried to perform rather than read her poetry at literary gatherings.

Else Lasker Schüler dressed as her persona Prinz Jussuf

Although Lasker-Schüler wasn't really a musician, she'd grown up in the middle-class Jewish household in which there was a piano. She had some basic keyboard skills, and she could draw on her amateur music knowledge to supplement her poetry performances with simple instrumental sounds. Incidentally, Lasker-Schüler’s second husband, Herwarth Walden (born Georg Levin—Lasker-Schüler renamed him) was in fact a pianist and minor composer.

I'm truly inspired by Else Lasker-Schüler, but in my own performance, I'm not going to pretend to be her or anything like that. I’m also not an actor. It's just a performance of my own—a piano performance—that is inspired by some sort of imaginative quality that I feel from her.

Would you say that all the pieces speak to you and that you also find some relation to Else Lasker-Schüler within these pieces?

Definitely - I have called it My Heart after the title of a novel that is in the form of letters that Lasker-Schüler wrote. She was such an affectionate person. So many of her poems are just written to friends that she adored. The novel My Heart is similar. It’s a series of letters, to her husband Herwarth Walden, who was touring, and during the course of that journey, their marriage actually started to fall apart. The letters were published ‘in real time’ in Der Sturm, the magazine founded by Walden in 1910. While this literary project was underway, Else Lasker-Schüler discovered that her husband was unfaithful to her. But she kept the letters going; she kept writing them and letting them be published. There was an ever-growing tension that you can feel through the letters as their author’s heart was actually shattering. What began as a concept called My Heart meaning a heart that was completely intact and joyful, became a really living heart that was broken and exposed.

Wow, that sounds fascinating. Does the program of your performance follow that idea of wholeness to shattered within the pieces that you're playing?

What I've tried to do is frame the program with three movements of my own composition, which is called My Prussian Blue Heart, and in that piece the shattering happens in the middle and then there's an emergence, an optimism, on the way out. That path is followed (somewhat) in the trajectory of the other composers’ pieces. The middle three pieces in the program are like the very still kernel of a heart, what's left when everything else is broken, and then kind of a thread is spun out of that into what might be a new heart. So maybe the program runs inverse to Lasker-Schüler’s novel.

I think shock is such a protective mechanism to keep a heart from breaking in the immediate moment. I try to convey that feeling of shocked unreality, this kind of frozen disbelief, which gradually thaws and burns into the question: “Where can I go to find my heart? I’ve lost something in this grief. I've lost my heart, literally.” That was the creatively motivating picture for me. It was this idea of just wandering all over the world, looking in different places, because of course that novel in letters by Else Lasker-Schüler was written while her husband was wandering away going around the world. But now she’s going on her own journey to find her heart and maybe it's just, you know, in a dustbin in New York, or maybe it's here in Naarm-Melbourne.

Danaë Killian, Evan J Lawson and ensemble. Image by Kate J Baker.

I’m interested in your piece My Prussian Blue Heart, it says for pianist, tarot cards and piano. Where do the tarot cards come into it?

One of my teachers, Dr Donna Coleman, loves to do tarot and she introduced me to tarot. I mean, it's just one of the things Donna shared with me that go esoterically beyond ‘studying piano,’ but which are profoundly part of Donna’s musical philosophy of openness and attunement. So, yes, after studying with Donna for many years, I have completed a PhD on Virginia Woolf (again, a subject that doesn’t fit squarely within the keyboard curriculum), and I do tarot. And I think I just realised one day that the kind of intuitive feeling-into-things knowing-through-movement-and-touch-and-sound, which we do with our hands as pianists at the piano, we can also do with our hands with cards that are magnified in their meaning by that universe of symbols belonging to the tarot. I really liked the idea that the pianist doesn't have be at the piano to still be active in a pianistic way, in this case with the system of meaning. Not the notes of the keyboard, but the cards of the tarot—they are sort of metaphorically the same, and it also in a way expresses yearning: “I've lost all faith, but maybe in this moment the universe will give me an answer.”

I like how you've brought the similarity of tarot and piano together. Will you have a deck physically there with you for your piece? Will you be shuffling?

There will be one physically there that I shuffle. I'm very clumsy so it’s written into my score, because it's written for me, that the shuffling will be clumsy. That's part of it. Please don't judge me on that. It's meant to be clumsy.

There's an aleatoric dimension to my composition, which means the music will change slightly, depending on what cards do jump out. There is spoken word text in the piece too, and the tarot cards of the moment influence the spoken word text as well. The deck that's used in the performance—again it’s part of the written-out instructions for the composition—this deck of cards has to be passed onto a friend who's in the audience, or to a “lost person,” at the end of the piece.

I hope this playful use of tarot cards to structure the music might be interesting for any other pianist who might want to play my composition.

Is there anything else we should know about My Heart?

I wanted to be clear that this performance exists in our time and in our city rather than in Berlin at the time before First World War. I'm not putting on a play that recreates the past. Historical reenactment is quite hideously antithetical to the non-representative spiritual immediacy of the expressionist impulse, which is the impulse and idea that bleed through time from pre-WWI Berlin into our own timeline in My Heart. Hence the predominance in the program of music by composers whose time and place I share, just as Lasker-Schüler’s poems are richly populated by “really living people,” as the subtitle of her novel Mein Herz says. My own My Heart is an intertwining of Lasker-Schüler’s life with mine—a loosely woven tapestry of tatty and shining fibres that might, in certain lights, look like the filaments of a heart.

My Heart will be held on Oct 19th, 7:30pm at the 11th Hour Theatre in Fitzroy.