Felix Maria Woschek
Felix Maria Woschek is a true world-musician. He has managed to interpret afresh the most beautiful Spirituals in the world, for European ears. When he sings Indian bhajans or the mantra songs of Jews and Sufis, listeners cannot help but open their hearts and join in the singing. This unusual musician places his music in the service of religious spirituality, but without favouring any one religion in the process. Woschek carries his listeners away into the spheres of Indian religiosity with mantra-like singing. He aims to create a mood jointly with his audience so that they can absorb the depths of his melodies of the heart, as he calls his songs, and can allow them to continue to resonate within them in tranquillity and in the musical pauses. Woschek invokes these notes as if from other spheres, as if they were being created not in his vocal chords but from the space surrounding him. He allows gentle sounds to swell up and mingle with other sounds so that he can send them back into the space they came from and listen to them reverberating away. He allows sound to be sound, and does not falsify it with too many complex surrounding sound formations. Their quality, in his view, comes from their being so light and so simple. For all their simplicity, his songs are full of variety, ranging from Gregorian chant in the pentatonic scale to Jewish songs and Islamic hymns. Old Testament psalms also form part of his wide-ranging repertoire. This artist succeeds in creating understanding between religions, and in opening people's hearts towards other cultures. In his songs, every note lives its own life and at the same time lives for the piece as a whole. Woschek takes time and allows a note to swell up slowly, and then die away again. His music thus takes on a very spatial effect, so that the listener genuinely feels surrounded by gentle sounds. He himself seems to tremble, in body, mind, and spirit, in harmony with his music while he is singing or playing his many different instruments. With Woschek, even the silence into which he releases the notes - and which is never interrupted by applause - takes on a special significance. He believes that it is an integral and elemental part of the music. "The divine reveals itself in silence," he explains. He brings the various world religions together in his music, and believes that they all exist together as one entity. His repertoire thus includes Buddhist mantras, Gregorian chant, and Indian and Jewish folk music. Despite his spiritual subject, Woschek remains very free, so that his guests can easily be carried along in the joy of joining in the singing.