Let me begin with the clarification that this music is exciting, enjoyable, downright hilarious at times. This said, the following investigation of the content won’t scare anyone off. In the end it is the listening experience that is important, but the implications of the contents of this CD are so far-reaching that I am forced to dwell on them for a while.

As I listen causally to this CD, without thinking so much, and without studying the German – and only German (it ought to have been printed in English too, because it is very interesting!) – introductory text of the booklet, I connect the impression faintly to earlier German talk-singing ventures by, for example, Berthold Brecht, Hanns Eisler etcetera. We have the ensemble – and not just any ensemble, for it’s the Ensemble Modern, and two giants on pianos; Steffen Schleiermacher and Philipp Vandre! – and we have the voice – not Lotte Lenya, but Maria de Alvear, and the way in which she talk-sings, recites, reflects back on older traditions of the cabaret songs of earlier DDR heroes and beyond. However, as the work unwinds, the vocals are extended well beyond the DDR cabaret song idiom, far into a ritual, shamanistic realm of expression, where the physical vibrations of the vocal cords transform into piercing spiritual timbres of the natural bardo of this life.

The way de Alvear changes language along the line is tempting, adding an extra flavor to the atmosphere, and further strengthens this feeling of soaring through a spiritual realm where language is just a happenstance quality of thoughts and impulses that rise and fall along their unexplainable trajectories through the timelessness.

What she really gets at seems – at the outset – to be some kind of femininity, some kind of womanhood out of girlhood, and the natural magic of that process, but it develops well beyond that concept.

In the introduction to the CD de Alvear states (my makeshift translation from the German):

“Vagina is the craving for the man. This simple statement harbors enormous secrets […]”.

She then continues with the observation that this not only refers to a sexual context per se, but also a psychological one, and a spiritual one. She says that the human existence basically appears in three definable states (even though, of course, these are interrelated and only separated as a result of our grammar, our mirror-like language, which tends to define a wholeness into partials): as body, soul and spirit. De Alvear makes the statement that these three states of being seldom evolve in synchrony with each other, but that rather the one or the other stretches on while the others or one of the others lag behind or stray aside.
The perception, she says, is totally transformed when you are traveling in the spiritual realm, in spiritual time. The brain displays visual occurrences, sprung out of different situations. De Alvear explains that the Indians here talk about places. You might for example stop at a sad place or a joyous place, instead of looking at it the way you do when you say that you are sad or happy. This way, de Alvear points out, you distance the immediate feeling from your Self, more perceiving the sadness and also the happiness as restricted in space, as any place, town, city you might travel to and leave. This may be a more sober way of feeling sadness or happiness than the somewhat unbound and limitless feeling that the words sadness or happiness otherwise may convey in our Western thinking, sometimes completely stifling you, halting you in your development.

De Alvear lets on that Vagina is a direct consequence of her earlier work Sexo, in which she explored the taboos, advantages and disadvantages of sexuality, taking the listener into a pure, cosmic awareness of love and sexuality, wherein even the atom vibrates with love, where a tree is alive and full of cosmic love.

Maria de Alvear explains that Vagina describes an experience she had with the Iroquois in North America, a pure merger with Spirit. (Here I must refer to my on-going studies of Tibetan Buddhism, where the same thing is explained as the enlightened realization of true mind, of our real selves, our underlying Buddha nature).

In the work Vagina the texts, presented as a continuation of fable-like glimpses, open a realm, where different spiritual levels, associated with sexual chains of thought, can be trodden.

De Alvear’s Vagina texts are divided into several so-called landscapes. I’ll reprint three of these landscapes here to give the reader an idea of the content:

The feeling of an all-encompassing mystical tour-de-force through layer after layer of soaring experiences, wherein body and mind, matter and spirit, take hold of each other in a dance of the gods inside our elementary particles, in a dance which have change guises life after life, seeing existence out of all those numerous positions in time and space and spirit, and we are life itself looking at itself.

De Alvear comes across very serious at times, and extremely humorous at other times. She sometimes sounds like a witch, sometimes like a wise old woman and sometimes like a nagging bitch, all to the translucent accompaniment of Ensemble Modern! It’s great to follow!

If there is a word of criticism to deliver, it has to do with the proofreading of the English language in the texts of the Landscapes. Much remains to be done there. However, that is not important for the listening experience, for the transforming experience of hearing, at work here intense as ever in Maria de Alvear’s works. When she announces the Landscapes in a melodramatic manner, it feels like entering a new space in an old theater, the lights suddenly going on, changing the feelings, the perception, the time… until lights go down into darkness, only for the next Landscape to be announced, and the ensemble floats, sometimes, like thin smoke from a campfire over the trees in Montana and Wyoming.