Konzert I: Swaras

In three workshops, a panel discussion, a rehearsal phase and three concerts, three ensembles will present music that integrates various new playing techniques across cultural sound boundaries. The concerts will consist of new works by various composers alongside some short pieces of classical music from the Arabic, Turkish and Indian traditions.

Contemporary music owes a great deal to non-European traditions in the 20th and 21st centuries on a theoretical level, but we can also learn much more from these traditions in terms of basic playing techniques, sound production, melodic ornamentation and phraseology. Sound production, vocal and instrumental techniques are still largely unexplored in Western musical practice because of the immutability of our concept of notes (on paper) in this respect. Most non-European classical traditions are characterized by a more fluid, ornate and flexible sound of voices, instruments and rhythm. In Indian, Turkish and Arabic music, sound production is based less on the concept of notes on a page and more on, for example, swaras (region of sound), or naghmas (originally referring to both »modulation« and »singing«)

So the sound that marks each culture as distinctive is a matter of difference in the way these small individuals, our notes, swaras, perdes or naghmas are heard. It is a difference in the way they are discussed in music lessons, in the halls of conservatories, in all our cultural environments, that shapes our notion of the smallest structures of musical sound from birth, which for musicians are also a mirror of our own selves. Therefore, the question of listening to notes, of the fundamental production of sound, is a highly charged and even political question. It must be treated with the utmost care. »Decolonization« is not a question of simple programming etc., but rather of attentive listening, the attempt to perceive beyond the imprinting that has taken place (including indoctrination) and to learn anew again and again by listening.

sponsored by the Initiative Neue Musik and Musikfonds