Tim Benjamin

There is nothing here is a song for soprano and orchestra. It is based on The Interrogators, a short story by Christopher Middleton.

The piece depicts the arrival of a war crimes investigator at a remote village, somewhere in a frozen Europe, some time after a war has concluded. The text is at once highly descriptive, yet vague: it's a classic case of a first-person telling of a story through an interior, emotional perspective, precise yet still ambiguous on details, coloured and even distorted by personal feeling and bias. The investigator is due to meet someone who seems to have been a high-ranking officer in a defeated regime; it's believed that something terrible (yet unstated) took place nearby, but she's met with flat, cold denial: "there is nothing here."

Approaching the original story by Christopher Middleton (which is even more ambiguous, but tells a somewhat different story to my adaptation), I wanted to focus on the phenomenon of those living in small towns near Nazi concentration camps during the latter part of World War II, who learned not to be too curious, to pretend that they were unware what was happening. In my piece, I have depicted (entirely through the emotional perceptions of the nameless protagonist) the coldness and denial of the village, and the cold hostility of the commandant who she's sent to question. Ultimately, she leaves the place empty-handed; perhaps one day truth will out - but not this day. The music in the orchestra figuratively "paints" every detail of the soprano's richly-described encounter.

The subject of this story has an uncomfortable echo today, with many young people unaware of the Holocaust, or if aware, then unaware of the scale, or ignorant of the truth. Wilfully ignorant and incurious, like the residents of the unnamed village of There is nothing here? Perhaps. But with war crimes still an ever-present factor in conflict, even and especially today, truth is itself all too often another corpse we are unwilling to admit. I hope that my piece will prompt the incurious to become curious, to start to ask questions, and to refuse denial or shameless pretence as acceptable answers.

There is another reading of the text that I address in the music. This links to the the similarity or roots of the piece in works such as Schoenberg's Erwärtung - that the apparent "action" in the scene actually takes place not in reality but in the protagonist's mind. In that sense, the investigator is not seeking the truth about a crime in a real place, but seeking truth in her own mind. Perhaps the aristocratic commandant I portray is not real, but a figment of her imagination - something blocking access to an inner truth, something she knows but subconciously (or even conciously) denies. Or perhaps the aloof officer represents someone real, someone in her earlier life, who still extends a malign influence over her innermost self, which she is struggling to confront.

The choice of interpretation is left to the listener, as is the choice of whether to make a choice at all. Both interpretaions work for me (naturally!) and I enjoy hearing the piece in two ways simultaneously - external and internal worlds combining to heighten the dramatic effect. For this construction I am indebted to Schoenberg in Erwärtung and the Romantic writers of the 19th century such as Jacob Grimm in his 1835 (and much earlier writers and stories too - Grendel / Beowulf, Tacitus' descriptions of Germania, and even back to the story of Cain) for whom dark, mysterious, primordial forests were frequently the keepers of the darkest of secrets, or the home of the Faustian soul.

Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita mi ritrovai per una selva oscura, ché la diritta via era smarrita...

In the middle of the path of our life I found myself in a dark forest, having lost the right path...

— Dante, Divine Comedy

There is nothing here was composed for Oulu Sinfonia, at the encouragement of their chief conductor Rumon Gamba, so support his idea for a companion piece to Sibelius' Luonnotar.