The term music installation is an oxymoron. He combines ideas that are usually mutually exclusive: music and installation, a performative art of sound passages of time and a post-media art of spatial gestures. The attempt to unite contradictory art forms enters the field of paradox. Below we will distinguish three paradoxes that characterize this field: the paradox of the created situation, the paradox of static sound and the paradox of musical performance. These paradoxes characterize contemporary music and art in general. Some considerations.
With "Invisible Playground" Sebastian Quack, Daniel Boy and Josa Gerhard founded a transdisciplinary collective for the gamification of public space in 2009. In her projects, music meets game design, scenography, psychology, urban research and urbanization. Even though the collective is no longer active, their participatory approaches show how music can become immersive and tangible in contexts far away from the concert hall.
To untrained ears, the music of the Noh theater probably sounds just as foreign as compositions from the European avant-garde after 1950. The singer and actress Ryoko Aoki is interested in precisely this area of tension between the old, traditional tradition of Noh and the facets of contemporary composition. Based on the Japanese theater form, which is one of the oldest in the world, she takes singing into new contexts. There are now over fifty works composed for Aoki, including compositions by Peter Eatvos, Toshio Hosokawa and Stefano Gervasoni. Portrait of an exceptional singer.
Luigi Nono's work concepts from the 1960s onwards were increasingly concerned with breaking down the hierarchy between composer and performer and involving the latter more closely in the creation of the work. In the wake of Nono's increasing political activism in these years, this tendency has an unmistakably political dimension. It is synonymous with a democratization of work processes and was an essential part of the composer's work and artistic research in the years leading up to his death, even beyond music theater. In a process of mutual learning, Nono placed himself on the same level as the performers, assigning them sometimes unprintable positions within the work. What consequences does this have for the composition itself? On the relationship between interpreter and work, body and instrument, openness to the work and fixation on the work in Luigi Nono.
Aminai Claudine Myers, Henry Threadgill, Nicole Mitchell and George E. Lewis belong to a generation of black composers who had to work hard to become recognized artists. In the environment of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM) they found, on the one hand, a forum to develop their own positions and aesthetic attitudes, but on the other hand, they saw and still see themselves confronted with racism, sexism and prejudices that always affect their own artistic actions also give it a political dimension. Four points of view.
The legends that depart from the earth, From the spirit that has been and returns, They turn to mankind, and much we learn We learn from the time that hastens to consume itself.
Not only aesthetic innovation, series technology and informality, but also deep empathy determine Luigi Nono's aesthetic practice. His examination of the fates of politically persecuted people and subdi-doctors shows that it was not just plays like Al gran sole carico d'amore, La fabbrica illuminate and Ricorda cosa ti hanno fatto in Auschwitz that took part in social and political events and tried to give expression to the suffering and to present the extent of political violence musically in order to stimulate the public and inspire them to take better action. But (how) can the political dimension of the Holocaust or the uprising of workers in the steelworks be processed aesthetically? Are there any principles of Nono that are still relevant today? A consideration of the work.
When Luigi Nono entered the Freiburg experimental studio for the first time in 1980, it was not yet foreseeable how the technical possibilities of this studio would shape Nono's compositional style and, conversely, how the studio would further develop in collaboration with Nono. A new approach to live electronics began here, which developed from Nono's studies on movement, (in) stability and distance of sounds and which continues to inspire the work in the studio today. Aesthetic considerations from practice.
