Rebuilding Babel: On Fragility and The Palimpsest in Jakob Ullmann’s voice, books and FIRE

This article serves as an overview of Jakob Ullmann's voice, books and FIRE series, providing an examination of the cycle's scores, and the fragmented memories contained within. voice, books and FIRE stands monolithically in the composer's catalogue. The music – Ullmann refers to it as an ‘imaginary folklore’ – is presented through an elaborate notational system: partly effaced by layers of religious iconography, abstract imagery and fragments of religious texts and lists of names. The series (currently unfinished) serves as an elaborate memorial to the victims of Stalinist persecution as well as the demise of religious and cultural traditions across European history. In Ullmann's most ambitious and striking body of work to date, the score is encountered as a palimpsest – an overlaying and effacement of memory. The notion of the palimpsest is also traced through the music's performance and subsequent recording, assessing Ullmann's use of extreme quietness – a partial erasure – as a destabilising force for the performers, which ultimately renders the work fragile.