SPOR 2015 festival program

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STAGING THE SOUND Welcome to SPOR festival 2015!

With a history of 10 courageous years, SPOR festival now celebrates its anniversary as one of Europe’s most original festivals of contemporary music and sound art.

This year, SPOR festival is all about allowing artists to rethink and update opera, musical theatre and the history of music. To dig into the musical works, the well-know genres and narratives from the past and not be afraid of reinterpreting and updating these for the present day. All the works, concerts, performances, exhibitions and seminars have been created as an expression of this year’s theme: STAGING THE SOUND. We are delighted to present a festival where music and art meet and clash collide in new ways, where both Danish and international artists challenge and interpret the traditional practices found within opera and performance.

To celebrate the 10th SPOR festival, we have invited one of the most successful artists of the Danish music scene, the composer Simon SteenAndersen, to be this year’s guest curator. We are extremely pleased to be able to collaborate with Steen-Andersen. Artistically, he is one of a kind, and his way of challenging the customarily right way to think and make music will be noticeable at several levels throughout the festival. The collaboration between SPOR and Steen-Andersen has led to an extravaganza of a festival programme, one where the audience will discover new scenographic instruments, rewritings of the musical history we might think we know – as well as a great many other forms of expression and original works.

2015 is also the year when, with great pleasure and excitement, SPOR is launching SPOR New Music School – a new project where children and young people acquire skills within composing and new music and are also integrated into the festival. With SNMS we want to contribute to our future art life: if we want variety and room for experiments, it is crucial to give our coming generations the best possibility to create and make music themselves.

We hope you will enjoy all the different aspects of SPOR festival 2015.

And that you take a closer look at this publication, which features a special section on the issues of curating new music.

We wish you a great SPOR festival 2015!

Anne Marqvardsen and Anna Berit Asp Christensen Festival and Artistic Directors.

Jennifer Walshe and GrĂşpat

GRÙPAT Exhibition

by Grúpat and Jennifer Walshe Guest curator for last year’s SPOR festival, composer and multi artist Jennifer Walshe is once again presented at SPOR festival. The work she has brought to the festival this year is a large exhibition about the international art collective Grúpat based in Dublin, Ireland. The nine members of the art collective all have various ways of expression, which range from silent movies to sound poetry, collections of mirrors taken from haunted houses, graphic scores, sonic reliquaries and drag queen costumes.

Walshe is known for her many-faceted ways of expression, and the exhibition at SPOR pushes this up another level. For Grúpat is in fact a fictional collective, and it’s members are all Walshe’s own alter egos.

PLEASE NOTE The exhibition can be experienced during and after the festival at three different venues: Women’s Museum, Rum46 and Exhibition Space Spanien 19C In collaboration with Women’s Museum, Rum46 and Exhibition Space Spanien 19C

OPENING WITH EXHIBITION TOUR 7 MAY 16.00 Spanien 19C 17.00 Womens’ Museum 18.00 Rum46 7 8 9 10 MAY 10.00/13.00-17.00 Women’s Museum, Rum46 & Spanien 19C

SERIOUS IMMOBILLITIES Sound installation

by Kaj Duncan David (2011) Serious Immobilities by the composer and artist Kaj Duncan David is an installation for piano frame, vibration speakers and video. The soundboard of an old piano acts as both a loudspeaker – by way of the vibration speakers – and a screen onto which video is projected. This video uses found footage in order to thematize the notion of repetition and boredom through a slogan from the May 1968 uprisings that started in Paris, ”Metro Boulot Dodo” (Metro, Work, Sleep).

Serious Immobilities is an interpretation of Erik Satie’s enigmatic Vexations.

This unpublished piece, of which little is known, is said to have been found in the composer’s coat pocket after his death. The manuscript consists of a short bass theme and accompanying chords, written in an eccentric and highly impractical enharmonic notation. Above this music, a cryptic note states: “In order to play the theme 840 times in succession, it would be advisable to prepare oneself beforehand, and in the deepest silence, by serious immobilities”. The first known performance of Satie’s Vexations (organized by John Cage in NYC in 1963) took well over 18 hours and required a relay team of 12 pianists.

OPENING 7 MAY 16.00-17.00 7 8 9 10 MAY 13.00-17.00 Spanien 19B

MARIONETTE PIECE Opening concert and world premiere

by Simon Løffler, World Premiere (2015), ca. 40’’ To open SPOR festival 2015 the Danish composer Simon Løffler created a brand new piece called Marionette Piece. The intention with this music is to create a world where everything is connected, almost everything at least.

The musicians are both puppets and puppeteers in a network of connecting strings.

Performed by ensemble SCENATET Mina Fred / David Hildebrandt / Sven Micha Slot / Matias Seibæk Commissioned and produced by SCENATET Supported by The Danish Arts Foundation, Danish Composers’ Society’s Production Pool and Koda’s Cultural Funds and The Danish Conductors Association Supported by Nordic Culture Fund and A.P. Møller og Hustru Chastine Mc-Kinney Møllers Fond til almene Formaal as part of the project ‘Staging New Nordic Music at SPOR 2015’

OPENING CONCERT 7 MAY 20.00 Granhøj Dans

SCHUBERT LOUNGE Concert in homely surroundings with Schubert as a singersongwriter

By Eivind Buene Schubert Lounge is the Norwegian composer Eivind Buene’s interpretation of works by the famous Franz Schubert (1797-1828), who during his short lifetime composed about 600 lieder (“songs”). Buene has taken some of Schubert’s 1800 century lieder with loving care and given them an honest singer-songwriter sound, and together with Peter Tinning Transatlantic Trio he will perform Schubert Lounge in proper Schurbertiade style as a peaceful and socializing house concert.

Eivind Buene explains “The human voice has been a theme in both of my novels. In Enmanns­ orkester, one of the characters, a student of history, has a breakdown related to Schubert’s Winterreise (I know it sounds strange, but it makes sense in the book!) Parallel with writing this, I started experimenting a little with Schubert songs myself, recasting them in the shape and posture of popular music. Schubert used to sing and play his songs to his friends in Vienna, and I tried to imagine what it would sound like if Schubert were a singer/ songwriter in the seventies. I am not a singer nor a pianist, but I wanted to try out this theory, so I bought an old Fender Rhodes electric piano – the grand piano of the singer/songwriter – translated some songs to the esperanto of pop music, English, and started to sing. I took huge liberties with Schubert’s songs; some of them are partially recomposed, while others are close to the original. The result has been a series of performances, mostly house concerts, in keeping with Schuberts spirit. It has also resulted in an EP, and a second volume is in the works.”

In addition Peter Tinning Transatlantic Trio will also perform a set of their own music Performed by Eivind Buene, vocal and Fender Rhodes & Peter Tinning Transatlantic Trio: Peter Tinning, guitar / Thorgrímur Jónsson, bass / Scott McLemore, drums Supported by Royal Norwegian Embassy in Copenhagen, Nordic Culture Fund and A.P. Møller og Hustru Chastine Mc-Kinney Møllers Fond til almene Formaal as part of the project ‘Staging New Nordic Music at SPOR 2015’

7 MAY 22.00 Granhøj Dans

SEMINAR: STAGING THE SOUND Seminar about the aesthetic practice of staging sound, tones and music At this international symposium the discussion of new musical drama, opera and staging is considered the main topic. As SPOR festival’s theme for 2015 the goal is to create a dialogue about those traditions and practices, which so often set the limits for how opera and musical dramas are performed and staged today. Because opera and musical drama have a very strong tradition to preserve an authentic and historically based performance practice, where it is allowed to change and modify anything but the music itself - the score is considered holy! So the question is, can we bring these traditions and institutions to life anno 2015?

Program 13.00-13.15 Introduction

Simon Steen-Andersen, composer and curator SPOR 2015 13.15

Keynote Eyvind Buene, PhD, composer and writer

14.00-14.15 Pause 14.15-15.15 Panel discussion Moderator

Anne Middelboe Christensen, cand.mag., theatre critic

Panel

François Sarhan, composer / Astrid Steffensen, PhD-fellow, cand.mag, Aarhus University / Gry Worre Hallberg, curator, performance artist and co-founder of Sisters Hope / Jennifer Walshe, performance artist and composer

15.15-16.00 Staging the Classics

Karl Aage Rasmussen, composer and writer /

Simon Steen-Andersen, composer, performer and installation artist The seminar is organized in collaboration with SNYK and Aarhus University

8 MAY 13.00-16.00 Remisen, Godsbanen

Niklas Seidl, Come you home, you Slut; and when your Fellow is hang’d, hang yourself

SOUNDS IN ACTION Works selected from SPOR – Call for Proposals 2015

Jamie Hamilton, Daguerreotypes, World Premiere (2010-2015), 13.30’’ Kammerelektronik, To freeze the sound in action, World Premiere (2015), 15’’ Niklas Seidl, Come you home, you Slut; and when your Fellow is hang’d, hang yourself, World Premiere (2015), 20’’ Each year SPOR festival invites composers and sound artists from all over the world to submit proposals for the upcoming festival, and each year SPOR receives a wide range of interesting projects, from works for ensemble and music theatre pieces to sound installations. This year SPOR received 84 proposals, representing in total 26 different nationalities.

The 2015 jury has selected five very different works to be realized at SPOR 2015 and three of them will be presented at this concert: Daguerreotypes by Jamie Hamilton is one of a series of music theatre works based around the premise of listening as a theatrical experience.

It is inspired by situations in which the absence of sound – including the sudden removal of a sound, or the obscuring of one sound with another – creates a heightened aural experience. Framed through the lens of a forensic investigation, it is extrapolating a range of different sonic experiences – such as one side of a phone conversation, attempts to convey music through language, amateur language dictation tapes, and the obsessive forensic analysis of lost and damaged audio – into a fragmented montage of images.

To freeze the sound in action by Roman Pfeifer (Kammerelektronik) is a piece consisting of various modules, a hyper-consonant drone, instrumental parts for melody and percussion instruments, as well as various movement sequences and a light drawing. The composition will be performed by Kammerelektronik: Roman Pfeifer, composer / Linda Nordström, dance / Niklas Seidl, violoncello / Rie Watanabe, percussion.

Come you home, you Slut; and when your Fellow is hang’d, hang yourself

by Niklas Seidl is a short history of bad language with examples from “The Beggar’s Opera”, Molly’s Monologue from “Ulysses” and US-Rappers from the 1990’s. Three performers will perform a combination of word and music within a very poor stage setting, relating to The Beggar’s Opera.

Performed by ensemble Ning Amund Sjølie Sveen, percussion / Erik Dæhlin, percussion / Silje Aker Johnsen, vocal and dance PLEASE NOTE After the concert there’s arranged a Q&A moderated by Simon Steen-Andersen Call for Proposals 2015 jury consisted of Francois Sarhan (FR, composer), Line Tjørnhøj (DK, composer), Rainer Nonnenmann (DE, writer, editor, music researcher), Erik Dæhlin (NO, representative for Call ensemble 2015), Yannis Kyriakides (CY, composer), Anna Berit Asp Christensen and Anne Marqvardsen (DK, festival directors, SPOR) Co-produced with Ning and supported by Arts Council Norway Supported by Royal Norwegian Embassy in Copenhagen, Nordic Culture Fund and A.P. Møller og Hustru Chastine Mc-Kinney Møllers Fond til almene Formaal as part of the project ‘Staging New Nordic Music at SPOR 2015’

8 MAY 20.00 Granhøj Dans

Kammerelektronik, To freeze the sound in action

MIHÁLY SOLO One performer, three composers

Julia Mihály, If you liked my posts I wouldn’t need to express myself in real life, Danish Premiere (2014) Iris ter Schiphorst, Vergiß Salome, Danish Premiere (2012), 6.30’’ Ole Hübner, Der sinn und das aussehen, World Premiere (2015), 8’’ If you liked my posts I wouldn’t need to express myself in real life by Julia Mihály is a performance and a metaphor for the overwhelming flow of information that we are to exposed in everyday life. The performed text consists of Facebook posts pulled from various discourses about the “Alltags” aesthetic movement in German contemporary music. The contextualization of material leads to an interference of aesthetic perception: Brian Ferneyhough’s beats form a symbiosis with musical quotations of Helmut Lachenmann and 1980’s porn-music, while Wolfgang Rihm’s harmony gets a glossy make over courtesy of DJ Bobo.

Vergiss Salome by Iris ter Shiphorst focuses on the body of the performer.

Originally it was commissioned by the soprano Sarah Maria Sun and the NDR Radio. It is a short solo piece with a reference to a ‘classical’ female character from the drama repertoire and takes its starting point in a more theatrical setting. All movements, gestures and actions are composed meticulously in this piece. The timeline provides a German text (Karin Spielhofer) from tape in which a fictitious female figure skater speaks of her desire (in contrast to the classical Salome stories in which mainly the male desire is negotiated). Electronic sounds surround the voice of the singer and create an additional acoustic space.

Der sinn und das aussehen by Ole Hübner is a one-person music theatre written for Julia Mihály with lyrics by Rick Reuther. Ole Hübner explains: “Rick told me his text is a “libretto from an old people’s home”, so for me the piece is particularly about human abyss, loss of control, abstraction of human life, seclusion and confusion – but also their humor.”

Performed by Julia Mihály In collaboration with BGNM – Berliner Gesellschaft für Neue Musik

8 MAY 22.00 Granhøj Dans

COSA DI TUTTI Five small pocket-operattles performed in public spaces, selected from SPOR – Call for Proposals 2015

by Christina Cordelia Messner, World Premiere (2015), 5 x 3’’ 225 years after the first performance of Mozart’s well‐known opera Cosi fan tutte Christina Messner creates Cosa di Tutti (Everyday Occurence) – five really small pocket-operattles, for soprano and 2 percussionists designed for the public space, called: I human-being II love III battle IV emotion V from laugh to death Following the question, if it’s possible to distill a kind of essence of the genre, what is relevant today, Messner deprived this “venerable lady of great pomp” and tried to restrict her to the basics of her existence.

Christina Messner has plucked small melodic or rhythmic motives, snippets and noises from existing masterpieces and stuck them together to small miniatures (comparable to the technique of cut-up in literature, like the poems of Hertha Müller). They are built so handy, that it is possible to “fit them into a purse“.

There exists only the rest of a costume, an accessory, there is no technology, and everything is reduced to the purest.

Dealing with the opera genre also means dealing with an area of reality versus artificiality. Therefore Cosa di Tutti will be performed in public space. The musicians will open their purses, and maybe we will experience imperceptibility, magic and splashes of opera. And in the middle of our everyday life we may meet one of the greatest emotions – but the condition is transient ...

Performed by ensemble Ning Amund Sjølie Sveen, percussion / Erik Dæhlin, percussion / Silje Aker Johnsen, vocal Co-produced with Ning and supported by Arts Council Norway Supported by Royal Norwegian Embassy in Copenhagen, Nordic Culture Fund and A.P. Møller og Hustru Chastine Mc-Kinney Møllers Fond til almene Formaal as part of the project ‘Staging New Nordic Music at SPOR 2015’

9 MAY 12.00 Bridge between Immervad and Frederiksgade, Aarhus City

Wayne Siegel

TRIO Robot-controlled pipe organ, motion-tracking and live percussion

by Wayne Siegel, World Premiere (2015), 40’’ Wayne Siegel has composed the work Trio for percussion, a motion-tracking performance system and a robot-controlled pipe organ combining two ideas: Gestural control of electronic sounds in space and generative music for pipe organ. Although there are some through-composed sections, much of the work is improvised. The organ part is played directly by a computer programmed to compose organ music in real time, a sort of composing/ improvising robot. The piece consists of 18 overlapping sections.

The percussion part is performed “unplugged”, where the electronic part is performed using a motion-tracking system that allows the performer to control sounds and their placement in space using a 12-channel sound system. At times the human composer interacts directly with the robot composer by means of hand gestures or a conventional keyboard.

Generally speaking, the human performers have an idea of how the robotcontrolled organ might perform in each section, but they cannot predict exactly what the robot will play. In turn the human performers are free to interact with each other and with the robot performer. Unexpected occurrences are part of the game.

Performed by Henrik Knarborg Larsen, percussion / Wayne Siegel, electronics Work and performance supported by the Royal Academy of Music in Aarhus as part of the academy’s artistic research program

9 MAY 14.00 Symfonisk Sal, Musikhuset

ARTIST TALK WITH JENNIFER WALSHE The artist talk between Jennifer Walshe and Christian Skovbjerg Jensen (Inter Arts Center) will focus on Walshe’s use of alter egos in her Grúpat projects and exhibitions, discussing both the opportunities and difficulties of working with fictional characters in contemporary music.

In addition the discussion will also address the synergies and differences between performing and exhibiting sound, and talk about what happens when conceptual and performative artistic approaches are applied to contemporary music.

In collaboration with Inter Arts Center, Malmö and Rum46

9 MAY 16.00 Rum46

PHILL NIBLOCK CONCERT Three different works – several more sounds

Phill Niblock, V&LSG, World Premiere (2015), 22” Frédéric Acquaviva, Loré Ipsum, Danish Premiere (2011-2012), 27” Phill Niblock, Sethwork, Danish Premiere (2013), 22” Start the Saturday evening in company with a true master of minimalistic music, a mezzo soprano and a Belgian on guitar.

V&LSG is a new piece by Phill Niblock, composed for voice (by Loré Lixenberg) and lap steel guitar (by Guy De Bièvre). The piece will be performed using the sounds of the two instruments as a source of materials to make a nuanced, microtonal drone, which has a constantly changing surface.

Loré Ipsum by Frédéric Acquaviva has a live part with Loré Lixenberg reading the cultural news of the day in the language of the country hosting the performance along with the spatialisation from computer of both natural and electronic distortions of many of Lixenbergs voices.

Sethwork by Phill Niblock for laptop and guitar Performed by Phill Niblock, electronics / Loré Lixemberg, voice / Guy De Biévre, guitar / Frédéric Acquaviva, electronics

9 MAY 19.00 Granhøj Dans

SISTERS IN GLASS A night of human specific art performance

by Sisters Hope (2015), 12 hours Just outside the venue Godsbanen you will find a container made of glass. It will be completely filled with plants. And inside you’ll find The Sister waiting for you.

In Sisters In Glass you are invited to an intimate encounter with The Sister in her bedroom-in-between. She will ask you to donate your dream in a poetic landscape that lies somewhere between the homely and the un-homely, glass and planting, day and night, dream and reality. The dreams will be donated to the Sisters’ Archive.

PLEASE NOTE Only one person at a time can visit the glass container. The performance can though also be experienced from outside the container for an unlimited number of audiences.

If you wish to enter the container you can either wait for the next free session or you can sign up on a waiting list, to be found outside the container In collaboration with Godsbanen, Aarhus Billedkunstcenter

9 MAY 21.00-9.00 Glascontaineren, Godsbanen

Sisters Hope

EPHÉMÈRE ENCHAINÉ A night of music, video and text

by François Sarhan, World Premiere (2015), 12 hours Ephémère enchainé by François Sarhan is a long term project which will be premiered by the Danish ensemble SCENATET and SPOR 2015. It is a theater concert, an installation, an opera, a night, a performance, an experience, a story, an Opera Mundi, a story of a life, a life of thousands of people, a combination of music, voice, video, performances, sound design, an overlay and a mix of everything together, a Teatro del Mondo, an attempt to find a unity through the chaos. The night is divided in chapters where the musicians and the narrator are active. Between these chapters, interludes will allow the audience to wake up and take fresh air. Each chapter is dedicated to a specific topic, and illustrated with music, video and scenic action.

The stage will be centered in the room of an overwhelming scenography; Paper cuttings will be hanging in a way that makes them seem floating, which makes a ‘heimlich/unheimlich’ environment, with common things put in an uncommon context. Some of the materials are cut photocopies; others are transformed by addition of paint or deformation by non-realistic gluing and cutting: The audience is surrounded by loudspeakers and the musicians are loosely spread in the room.

The audience can lie down, sit or stand and are free to move and experience the sound in space. Each member of the audience is invited to listen, to rest, to watch, to meditate, to eat and drink, and to sleep again, leave the room and come back.

Feel free to bring our own sleeping bag! (but don’t forget your toothbrush).

Performed by François Sarhan, narrator and ensemble SCENATET Jakob Bloch Jespersen, baritone / Signe Asmussen, soprano / Kirsten Riis-Jensen, violin /Andras Olsen, trombone / Stefan Baur, saxophone / Frederik Munk Larsen, guitar / Anders Bjerregaard, bass / Sven Micha Slot, piano / Mads Bendsen, percussion / Matias Seibæk, percussion / Peter Barnow, sound engineer / Frederik Eberhardt, light- and video technician Supported by The Danish Conductors Association, Godsbanen – Åbne Scene, The Danish Arts Foundation – Performing arts and Fondation Banque Populaire In collaboration with Centre national de création musicale and La Muse en Circuit

9 MAY 21.00-9.00 Åbne Scene, Godsbanen

LIVE CODED MUSIC FOR OBSOLETE COMPUTERS A nostalgic technology trip

by Danish Computer Music Confederation, World Premiere (2015), 40” Six Danish composers and sound artists have come together to form the orchestra DCMC, which basically deals with presenting live music encoded for extinct computers. The choice of these obsolete computers should not be understood only as a nostalgic look back to the composer’s childhood as they all grew up with this type of technology, but as a staging and study of the forgotten and neglected potentials inherent in these first home computers.

The old and forgotten technological voices, which today has been removed from our consciousness, are brought to life again and tell us about a time when it was still possible to create remarkable and relevant computer music.

The composers have all been in their stores to find old computers, as they will wake them back to life in an unusual concert form. Equipped with various old (primarily 8bit) computers, including the iconic Commodore 64 and the first “portable” Macintosh, they will create a room, where the machines’ instrumental character will be explored. The audience will be able to follow, how music is created through projections of codes, but also through physical printouts of the code, that creates the music. Thus, endless paper rolls will slowly fill the room as the music plays.

Performed by DCMC Sandra Boss / Jonas Olesen / Søren Lyngsø Kundsen / Mikkel Moir Pihl / Jonas R. Kirkegaard / Morten Riis In collaboration with Kunsthal Aarhus

10 MAY 12.30 Kunsthal Aarhus

SPOR NEW MUSIC SCHOOL Concert with new works by the new generation by students from SNMS and guest performance by Århus Sinfonietta K. Stockhausen, excerpts of Tierkreis, version for octet, work no. 41 7/8 (1977). Performed by Århus Sinfonietta, conductor Søren K. Hansen Students from SNMS, World premieres of SNMS works performed by the students This year SPOR has embarked on a new adventure: SPOR New Music School.

For several years we have had the idea of sharing all the sound, knowledge, professionalism and inspiration that we every year gather in Aarhus with young students.

In cooperation with several dedicated partners we have launched a composers course for young people aged 11 – 15 all of them from the Region Midtjylland.

During the festival days they work together in groups to make a composition, guided by students from the Composition Programme at The Royal Academy of Music, Aarhus and composer Østen Mikal Ore. During the workshop days the youngsters also meet professional composers, musicians and listen to concerts at the festival – all to inspire and broaden the musical horizon.

And now here we are – this concert marks the ending of the course and the beginning of a new SPOR tradition: the SPOR New Music School concert where young students present their newly written pieces.

This year’s theme STAGING THE SOUND has also been a part of the assignment for SNMS and the concert mirrors this process. The students at SNMS have been asked to have Tierkreis by Stockhausen as a starting point for their compositions.

We are proud and excited to present something brand new and we look forward to listening, seeing and meeting the new young composers, performers and audiences in this first version of SPOR New Music School!

In collaboration with and supported by Aarhus 2017, Danish Arts Foundation, Tuborgfondet, Danish Composers’ Society, Den Kreative Skole Silkeborg, The Royal Academy of Music, SNYK, Østen Mikal Ore, Aarhus Musikskole, Århus Sinfonietta

10 MAY 14.00 Granhøj Dans

ADAPTER IN CONCERT Cut and paste – fix and free

Mette Nielsen, Reopen, World Premiere (2015), 25” Matthew Shlomowitz, Letter Piece 9: D2: E2, World Premiere (2015), 5” Eivind Buene, Johannes Bramhs Klarinetten Trio, Danish Premiere (2011), 22” Matthew Shlomowitz, Fast Medium Swing, Danish Premeire (2008), 10” This Sunday afternoon the German-Icelandic ensemble Adapter will perform works by three very different composers. As a whole the concert will demonstrate staged music in fixed, mixed, divided and unstructured forms.

Reopen by Mette Nielsen: There’s the fixed and the free. There’s something that displaces itself, and something that gathers. There’s something controlled. Something that repeats itself, and what almost say the same as another. There’s something branching freely and some that fizzles out.

Letter Pieces by Matthew Shlomowitz is an ongoing series of short performance pieces. They combine physical actions, music and sometimes text. Each Letter Piece has a score, positioning a small number of physical actions and sound events - which the players invent – in a fixed order. As Shlomowitz explains: “I have called them Letter Pieces because the scores use letters to represent these sounds and actions. To put it simply, I’ve created the structure, and the players create the content; two enactments of the same piece are to likely look and sound entirely different.”

For SPOR 2015 Shlomowitz has composed a new piece: Letter Piece 9: D2 E2.

Johannes Brahms Klarinetten-Trio by Eivind Buene is an interpretation of the chamber music performance, by way of intervention. What happens is this: A chamber music ensemble is sitting on stage, performing what seems to be Johannes Brahms’ Klarinetten-Trio from 1891, but the intervention gradually changes both the music and the interplay between the musicians, and it alters the expectations of the audience during the course of listening. The intervention that takes place on stage also happens in the written music, that is to say, in the parts of Johannes Brahms’ clarinet-trio. Buene have worked with the Brahms-notes as found, physical objects, and implemented his own musical imaginations as well as found material from the layers of new music.

The main device is the collage. This is evident in the way the ‘original’ score is manipulated by cutting and pasting other materials into it – a collage in a literal sense. But it is also a collage in terms of discontinuing the smooth

time-flow of Brahms’ chamber music, transferring the quality of collage from the spatial realm of paper to the temporal realm of musical performance.

Fast Medium Swing by Matthew Shlomowitz is composed for piano, three instruments and sampler. Most of the score for this piece is fixed in the usual way, but two aspects are left open: ­­— The trio part may be played by any combination of instruments — The ensemble create/select their own samples In addition to its musical association, the title is also a technical term for a specific type of bowler in cricket.

Performed by ensemble Adapter Kristjana Helgadóttir, flute / Ingólfur Vilhjálmsson, clarinet / Andreas Voss, cello / Elmar Schrammel, piano / Gunnhildur Einarsdóttir, harp / Matthias Engler, percussion Supported by Nordic Culture Fund and A.P. Møller og Hustru Chastine Mc-Kinney Møllers Fond til almene Formaal as part of the project ‘Staging New Nordic Music at SPOR 2015’

10 MAY 16.00 Granhøj Dans

STAGED NIGHT / INSZENIERTE NACHT Literal readings of the classics

by Simon Steen-Andersen, Danish Premiere (2013), 55” It is customary in the theatre to update works of the past through their production on the stage. The action is often relocated to another time and place, roles redefined, the story given a new emphasis. Spoken theatre sometimes even changes the text through cuts, reordering of scenes, insertions or parallel narratives.

In the performance of historical musical works there might be many good reasons to retain an authentic, historically justified practice. But assuming that composers, when creating their works, were writing for a contemporary listener, and playing with the expectations and experiences of that particular time and place, wouldn’t it make just as much sense to adopt the approach of the theatre, to try and update the music to the present time, adapt it to the expectations and experiences of the substantially changed, and radically reorientated listener of today?

In Staged Night / Inszenierte Nacht Simon Steen-Andersen takes on the role of director and stage-designer, but more than just setting the stage and the light for a musical performance, he works with the concept of “inner-musical staging” – amplifying, emphasizing and updating ideas, associations and references already present in the historical pieces. With simple means, but with a humorous virtuosity, he brings together four famous works of classical composers, all related to the theme of “night”: *J.S. Bach, “Schlummert Ein” from the cantate “Ich Habe Genug” *Schumann’s “Träumerei” *”Der Hölle Rache”, the aria of the “Queen of the Night” by Mozart *Ravel’s “Scarbo” from “Gaspard de la Nuit”, the infamous, almost impossible piano piece based on a poem by Aloysius Bertrand, describing a daemon haunting the humans in their sleep.

PLEASE NOTE After the concert SPOR and Edition S will host a closing reception at the foyer at Bora Bora Performed by ensemble Ascolta Julian Belli, percussion / Erik Borgir, cello / Andrew Digby, trombone / Florian Hoelscher, piano / Boris Müller, percussion / Markus Schwind, trumpet / Hubert Steiner, guitar

Supported by Nordic Culture Fund and A.P. Møller og Hustru Chastine Mc-Kinney Møllers Fond til almene Formaal as part of the project ‘Staging New Nordic Music at SPOR 2015’.

With friendly support from Ernst von Siemens Musikstiftung In collaboration with Bora Bora and Goethe-Institut Dänemark

10 MAY 19.00 Bora Bora

THURSDAY 7 MAY

FRIDAY 8 MAY

16.00-19.00 OPENING SPOR 2015 Festival opening and exhibition tour: We are welcoming to SPOR festival 2015 by having receptions and a vernissage tour to the exhibition spaces Spanien 19C and 19B (at 16.00), Women’s Museum (at 17.00) and Rum46 (at 18.00)

13.00-16.00 Seminar: STAGING THE SOUND International symposium on new music theatre, opera and staging.

Venue: Godsbanen, Remisen

20.00 OPENING CONCERT The world premiere of Simon Løffler’s marionette performance piece with live musicians Ensemble: SCENATET Venue: Granhøj Dans 22.00 SCHUBERT LOUNGE Eivind Buene interprets Schubert‘s Lieder Performers: Peter Tinning Transatlantic Trio & Eivind Buene Venue: Granhøj Dans

20.00 SOUNDS IN ACTION Concert with new works from this year’s Call for Proposals by Roman Pfeifer, Jamie Hamilton and Niklas Seidl Performed by Kammerelektronik and ensemble Ning After the concert there is a Q&A moderated by Simon Steen-Andersen Venue: Granhøj Dans 22.00 MIHÁLY SOLO Julia Mihály performs works by herself, Iris ter Schiphorst and Ole Hübner Venue: Granhøj Dans

EXHIBITIONS FRIDAY to SUNDAY at 13.00-17.00 GRÙPAT EXHIBITION by the art collective Grúpat and Jennifer Walshe Venue: Rum46 & Exhibition Space Spanien 19C FRIDAY to SUNDAY at 10.00-17.00 (fri & sat), 10.00-16.00 (sun) GRÙPAT EXHIBITION by the art collective Grúpat and Jennifer Walshe Venue: Women’s Museum FRIDAY to SUNDAY at 13.00-17.00 SERIOUS IMMOBILITIES by Kaj Duncan David Venue: Spanien 19B

SATURDAY 9 MAY

SUNDAY 10 MAY

12.00 COSA DI TUTTI 5 small “operattles” by Christina Messner performed out in the open Ensemble: Ning Venue: Starting point at the bridge between Immervad and Frederiksgade

12.30 LIVE CODED MUSIC FOR OBSOLETE COMPUTERS Performance by Danish Computers Music Confederation Venue: Kunsthal Aarhus

14.00 TRIO A new work with robot controlled pipe organ performed by Wayne Siegel and Henrik Knarborg Larsen Venue: Musikhuset, Symfonisk Sal 16.00 ARTIST TALK WITH JENNIFER WALSHE Venue: Rum46 19.00 PHILL NIBLOCK CONCERT Concerts with works by Phill Niblock and Frederic Acquaviva Performed by Loré Lixenberg, Guy De Bievre and Phil Niblock Venue: Granhøj Dans 21.00-09.00 (sun) SISTERS IN GLASS A 12 hour long night performance by Sisters Hope Venue: Godsbanen, Glass container

14.00 SPOR NEW MUSIC SCHOOL CONCERT Family concert with works by the students from SNMS Performers: SNMS students and Århus Sinfonietta Venue: Granhøj Dans 16.00 ADAPTER IN CONCERT Concert with Eivind Buene, Mette Nielsen & Matthew Shlomowitz Ensemble: Adapter Venue: Granhøj Dans 19.00 STAGED NIGHT Danish premiere of Simon SteenAndersen’s work Staged night/Inszenierte Nacht Ensemble: Ascolta Venue: Bora Bora 20.00 CLOSING RECEPTION at Bora Bora

21.00-09.00 (sun) EMPHÉMÉRE ENCHAINÉ A 12 hour long night performance by François Sarhan Ensemble: SCENATET Venue: Godsbanen, Åbne Scene

The programme is subject to change Prospective changes will be announced at www.sporfestival.dk

ARTISTS AND PERFORMERS AT SPOR 2015 ADAPTER (DE/IS) is a German-Icelandic ensemble for contemporary music based in Berlin. The core of the group consists of a quartet with flute, clarinet, harp and percussion. Together with steady guest instrumentalists this core grows into chamber music settings with up to 10 players. On international concert tours and in the studio Adapter plays world premieres and other selected works of the recent past. The ensemble also produces and co-produces larger interdisciplinary projects – and is interested in exploring and testing the limits of trans-medial approaches in various settings. Adapter stays in touch with the latest developments in the differing scenes of contemporary creation - maintaining a progressive, authentic and powerful style.

ASCOLTA (DE) is an ensemble based in Stuttgart, Germany. The ensemble was founded in 2003 by seven musicians with the intention of facilitating excellent new scores for a unique instrumental group, through close cooperation with composers. Over the years Ascolta has commissioned about 200 new works by composers such as Beat Furrer, Olga Neuwirth, Isabel Mundry, Pierluigi Billone, Chaya Czernowin and Martin Smolka. Creative programming plays a central role in Ascolta’s philosophy. “Staged Night“ by Simon Steen-Andersen is the most recent in a long list of close collaborations with more experimental artists, such as Jennifer Walshe, Francesco Filidei and various figures from the Fluxus movement. Ascolta is a regular guest at most German and international new music festivals.

CHRISTINA CORDELIA MESSNER (1969, DE) has through the last couple of years mainly been engaged in works, where she links different sections of art. She does multi-medial works, solo pieces, chamber music and ensemble pieces. Messner lives and works in Cologne, where she completed her studies in Würzburg, majoring in violin with Prof. Max Speermann and composition with Prof. C. Wünsch.

She has realized numerous projects, such as the music-theatrical work “Love Songs for Heim@t“, premiered in the summer of 2014 in a public space in Cologne or the “Salomé-Extrakte”, commissioned

by Tonhalle Düsseldorf. Messner has participated in numerous projects and concerts of new music and performance art, working with various artists.

DANISH COMPUTER MUSIC FEDERATION (DK) consists of six Danish composers and sound artists.

DCMC basically deals with presenting live music encoded for extinct computers. The choice of these obsolete computers should not be understood only as a nostalgic look back to the composer’s childhood as they all grew up with this type of technology, but

as a staging and study of the forgotten and neglected potentials inherent in these first home computers.

The old and forgotten technological voices, which today has been removed from our consciousness, is brought to life again and tells us about a time when it was still possible to create remarkable and relevant computer music. DCMC consists of the following members: Sandra Boss, Jonas Olesen, Søren Lyngsø Knudsen, Mikkel Moir Pihl, Jonas R. Kirkegaard and Morten Riis.

EIVIND BUENE (1973, NO) studied at The Norwegian State Academy of Music from 1992 to 1998, and is currently working as a freelance composer in Oslo. He has received commissions from Ensemble Intercontemporain, Birmingham Contemporary Music Group, Fondation Royaumont and a variety of Scandinavian orchestras and ensembles. Apart from writing music for soloists, ensembles and orchestras, Buene also frequently engages in collaborations with improvising musicians, developing music in the crosssection between classical notation and improvisation. In addition to music, Buene writes critique, essays and fiction. He made his literary debut with the novel Enmannsorkester in 2010, and has since published another novel and a collection of essays.

FRANÇOIS SARHAN (1972, FR) is a composer, visual artist, designer and director. He mixes com­ positions, visual elements (movies, collages, stage design) – sometimes presented separately, some­ times altogether. He has studied composition, analysis, aesthetics, cello, conducting, and harmony and counterpoint with various teachers, in addition to attending Jacques Roubaud‘s seminars on compared poetics at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes in Paris. He graduated from the Conservatoire National Supérieur de Musique de Paris in analysis and composition.

Sarhan’s works require exceptional performance skills of their practitioners and are mostly tailored for the people, who perform them. He is also noted for creating his own music-theatre and multimedia works in which he himself often performs.

FRÉDÉRIC ACQUAVIVA (1967, FR) is a sound artist and composer of experimental music. He has created chronopolyphonic installations and has given performances in art galleries, museums and underground venues. Staying away from traditional networks of musicians and composers, he works with historical figures in art, poetry or video. He chooses an experimental presentation in his music, for example by using non-technical perception based on the disposition of the listener and the sound, or presenting the sound different places simultaneously.

He is constantly exploring the relationship between voice and language, sound and it’s meaning, and the idea of physical body sounds integrated into the musical composition, kept away from the concert hall’s diffusions (acousmatic or sound installations).

GUY DE BIÈVRE (1961, BE) is a composer, musician, teacher and theorist. As a teenager he briefly dabbled in punk rock and new wave experiments, but moved on to free improvisation. When this also became unsatisfying, he chose to funnel his musical ideas into experimental composition. Having never been academically trained he enjoyed the freedom to integrate and combine ideas coming from different horizons, ancient, “classical”, experimental, jazz or non Western music, but also 20th century visual arts.

His early works (1980s) suggested a conceptual postmodernism, relying on statistical organization and collage. These works were often fully notated and he started adding more interpretative freedom to his works, which also dominates his creative output today. As a performing musician he play the guitar, the lap steel guitar and the Dobro.

IRIS TER SCHIPHORST (1956, DE) was born in Hamburg. After completing her piano studies and giving numerous concert performances, she spent two years travelling the world. Back in Germany, she took up theatre studies, cultural studies and philosophy in Berlin. At the same time she began to explore electronic music and sampling techniques intensively. In 1992 she was awarded first prize in the third Composition Competition for Synthesized and Computerized Music. Schiphorst transcribes sounds, that she finds interesting and transform them into compositions. As she has written many different pieces; instrumentals, multimedia pieces, orchestral works, operas, performances, compositions for children, film music etc., her way of working is always shaped by the particular frame of reference.

JAMIE HAMILTON (1986, UK) is a composer and sound artist who often works collaboratively, exploring interdisciplinary approaches, which arise from conversations with other artists. He uses contextual sounds, multimedia and acoustics to examine ways in which sound acts as a measuring device, that can highlight aspects of our perception. In much of this work sound and listening are seen as a mode of organization; integrating other forms of media, scenographic elements and different practitioners.

HENRIK KNARBORG LARSEN (1974, DK) is a Danish percussionist. He has performed as a soloist and chamber-musician all over Scandinavia, Europe, USA and Asia. He is Head of Percussion at the Royal Academy of Music Aarhus/Aalborg, where he has re-build the percussion education, based on modern principles that encompass interpretation theory, practice strategy and body and mind awareness.

JENNIFER WALSHE (1974, IR) is a composer, performer and visual artist. The collaboration between SPOR and Jennifer Walshe began back in 2007. SPOR was the first institution in Denmark to present her, and in 2014 she was the guest curator

if the festival. She is highly respected as on of the leading composers in Europe recognized for a personal and highly original artistic profile. She uses herself as networker, composer and performer and The Irish Times has called her “The most original compositional voice to emerge in Ireland in the last 20 years”. Walshe studied composition at the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama and at Northwestern University, Chicago, graduating with a doctoral degree in composition in 2002.

JULIA MIHÁLY (1984, DE) works in the field of contemporary music, performance and electroacoustic music. She connects her voice with liveelectronics and uses various kinds of controllers like Wii remote, gamepads, tablets, usb cameras and circuit bended toys as musical instruments. Related to this, Max/MSP has become her mother tongue.

Furthermore field recordings and the use of analog synthesizers mark substantial components in her electro-acoustic compositions. The crossover of different music styles, such as contemporary vocal music, old school computer game music, trashy pop music tunes and various influences of electroacoustic music and electronica, is probably the most outstanding feature of her compositions and performances.

KAJ DUNCAN DAVID (1988, DK/UK) is a composer working with mixed media and exploring various intersections between instrumental, electronic, audiovisual and installatory forms. His recent output often incorporates light and/or video, sometimes explores concrete or everyday situations, and increasingly aspires to scenic composition. Apart from making music and performing in various improvising constellations, Kaj is also active as a curator/ producer of concerts, for example with Aarhus Unge Tonekunstnere. He has studied Music at Goldsmiths in London (2006-2009) and composition with Simon Steen-Andersen in Aarhus (2010-2013). Currently he is studying with Manos Tsangaris and Franz Martin Olbrisch in Dresden.

KAMMERELEKTRONIK was founded by the German composer Roman Pfeifer in 2012. It is a chamber music theatre company, whose activities lies in the space between instrumental theater, dance performance, scenography, drawing and photography.

LORÉ LIXENBERG (UK) is a singer and stage director born in the UK. Lixenberg has performed widely in opera, concert repertoire and music-theatre and works with many leading composers. She has performed internationally at many festivals including those of Salzburg, Lucerne, Donaueschingen, Aldeburgh, Witten, Edinburgh and Huddersfield, and at the Wien Modern and Oslo Ultima festival. Loré Lixenberg has also performed with many orchestras and ensembles including the Halle, Tokyo PO, Danish

National SO, Swedish Radio Orchestra, Ensemble Intercontemporain, London Sinfonietta, Klanforum Wien, BCMG Ensemble Aventure, Icelandic SO and The Royal Danish Opera.

MATTHEW SHLOMOWITZ (1975, AUS) is a London -based composer. By incorporating ideas and performer skill sets from other art forms, he makes works that combine musical events and physical actions to play with perceptual relationships between movement and sound. He also makes works that combine pre-recorded sound with live instrumental music; He likes to incorporate pre-recorded sound that is easily identifiable from the real-world (e.g. football crowd, rollercoaster ride) to create a framing context for the instrumental music and vice versa.

His works engages with everyday and popular culture and he is particularly attracted to stuff that is typically regarded as prosaic, banal or saccharine, as he’d like to create experiences that enhance and transform perception of the familiar, drawing attention to things, that we usually ignore or don’t take seriously.

METTE NIELSEN (1985, DK) graduated from The Royal Danish Academy of Music in 2013. She works with the open and the random versus the controlled, with unison and polyphonic tones, the almost unison and heterophonic. The random encounters in the music, that becomes more intense, because they are not predetermined. Her works has been performed

by Copenhagen Phil, Ensemble Intercontemporain, Snow Mask and Figura Ensemble a.o., at Klang festival, Copenhagen International Organ Festival and others.

NIKLAS SEIDL (1983, DE) is a German composer and cellist based in Cologne. He is mostly writing for unconducted groups and individual performers.

Besides organizing the ensemble hand werk, he is also playing with ensemble mosaik and leise dröhnung. With Paul Hübner he creates music videos and performances, called “The (...) entertainment”.

NING (NO) is a Norwegian contemporary music ensemble exploring the physical, theatrical and visual aspects of musical performance. They’ve worked professionally since 1997, devising shows in collaboration with composers, actors, choreographers and directors and touring with different productions.

All their work is concerned about the creating role of the musician/performer in interdisciplinary collaborations. The work of the ensemble is exploring and expanding the possibilities within this role. Ning creates music theatre pieces based on written music as well as improvisation, and in this work they are both performers and their own directors. The group is based around two main members, but is also working as a network for other artists interested in the relationship between sound, space and performative expressions.

OLE HÜBNER (1993, DE) is composing intermedial new music, making interdisciplinary projects and music theatre, working with electronic materials, improvising, conducting, and dealing with many different exciting art and pop subjects. In his often highly conceptual work he makes use of videos and new media of all kinds. He often moves in the field of video art and musical theater, and also plays liveelectronics and synthesizers.

PETER TINNING TRANSATLANTIC TRIO (DK/IS/ US) A suitable description of the sound of Peter Tinning Transatlantic Trio would be “Cool as a summer day north of the Arctic Circle”. Rawness, coolness, playfulness, and melancholy put together into a diverse yet consistent musical language. The trio was formed in Iceland in 2013 where Danish guitarist Peter Tinning toured with Thorgrímur Jónsson (IS) and Scott McLemore (US). Since then a tour during the summer of 2014 in Denmark has led to the recording of their first album. The release in spring 2015 will be followed by a tour in a.o. France, Iceland, and Denmark.

PHILL NIBLOCK (1933, US) is an intermedia artist using music, film, photography, video and computers.

Niblock makes thick, loud drones of music, filled with microtones of instrumental timbres, which generate many other tones in the performance space.

Simultaneously, he presents films/videos which look at the movement of people working, or computer driven black and white abstract images floating through time.

Since the mid-60’s he has been making music and intermedia performances which have been shown at numerous venues around the world, among other: The Museum of Modern Art; The Wadsworth Atheneum; the Kitchen; the Paris Autumn Festival; Palais des Beaux Arts, Brussels; Institute of Contemporary Art, London; Akademie der Kunste, Berlin; ZKM. Since 1985, he has been the director of the Experimental Intermedia Foundation in New York, where he has been an artist/member since 1968. He is the producer of Music and Intermedia presentations at EI since 1973 (about 1000 performances) and the curator of EI’s XI Records label. Phill Niblock’s music is available on the XI, Moikai, Mode and Touch labels.

ROMAN PFEIFER (DE, 1976) was born in Freiburg im Breisgau, attended the Folkwang University of the Arts in Essen studying instrumental composition with Nicolaus A. Huber, as well as electronic composition with Dirk Reith. He frequently attended international summer courses for new music in Darmstadt and has collaborated with renowned artists and ensembles. Since 2003, Roman Pfeifer has taught notation, music theory, analysis of electronic music and electronic composition at the ICEM of the Folkwang University of the Arts in Essen. He has published texts on various composers and lectures on electronic music, instrumental speech synthesis

and instrumental theatre. In 2012 he founded the chamber music theatre company Kammerelektronik.

SCENATET (DK) is recognised as one of the most innovative and experimental ensembles for music and art in the Nordic countries. The ensemble moves in a cross-genre field of music, drama, film and happenings to areas with yet undefined genre.Founded in 2008 by artistic director Anna Berit Asp Christensen, SCENATET perform for a broad and diverse audience and rarely in the same place or context twice. SCENATET design every concert individually and describe themselves as a creator of conceptual art works and discovery processes, in which music just plays one role. SCENATET is not a traditional ensemble at all, but rather a multifaceted and unique unit within the field of the contemporary arts.

SIMON LØFFLER (1981, DK) has studied composition with Bent Sørensen at The Royal Danish Academy of Music (2002-2007) and with Simon Steen-Andersen at The Royal Academy of Music in Aarhus (20102012). In 2011-2012 he took part in a research program at a.pass (advanced performance training) in Brussels. He is the co-founder of the composers collective DYGONG. SIMON STEEN-ANDERSEN (1976, DK) is a Berlin -based composer, performer and installation artist, working in the field between instrumental music, electronics, video and performance within settings ranging from symphony orchestra and chamber music (with and without multimedia) to staging, solo performances and installations. The works from the last 6-7 years concentrates on integrating concrete elements in the music and emphasizing the physical and choreographic aspects of instrumental performance.

The works often include amplified acoustic instruments in combination with sampler, video, simple everyday objects or homemade constructions.

SISTERS HOPE (DK) is a Danish-based performance group and movement, started in 2007, with an as­ sociated international troop of performers from various backgrounds. Sisters Hope operate in the intersection of performance art, research, activism and pedagogy. They draw on immersion and intervention when they manifest on the stages of everyday life and beyond. They are currently working to manifest more sensuous and poetic learning environments amongst other in the large-scale Nordic project Sisters Academy.

WAYNE SIEGEL (1953, US) is a composer and performer. Through the recent years he has worked extensively with what might be called conducting sound in space. He has developed a motion tracking software that allows him as a performer to use physical gestures to control sounds and their placement within a performance space. This work began with a project

involving interactive dance, which focused on creating sound environments that could be controlled and influenced by dancers’ movement. The idea gradually developed into a real-time composition system for his own use. Parallel to this work he has explored the idea of algorithmic composition, a sort of artificial musical intelligence. In 2012 he presented a work called ”Everyone Talks about the Weather”, a sitespecific sound installation created for the Klais organ in the Aarhus Symphony Hall. ÅRHUS SINFONIETTA (DK) was founded in 1990 by members of the Aarhus Symphony Orchestra and the Danish composer Hans Abrahamsen. Since their establishment, the ensemble has marked itself out as one of Denmark’s leading ensembles for contemporary music, but with a repertoire that reaches beyond only contemporary music. One of the biggest priorities of the ensemble is to interpret original music from all times and places in an original and artistic manner.

Since 2007 the pianist Erik Kaltoft has been artistic director of the ensemble.

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FESTIVAL VENUES

FESTIVAL TICKETS

Bora Bora Valdemarsgade 1

Partout Card (4 days)

Granhøj Dans Klosterport 6

450 DKK 300 DKK (students) Ticket to single concert

3

Godsbanen Skovgaardsgade 3-5

100 DKK 80 DKK (students)

4

Musikhuset – Symfonisk Sal Thomas Jensens Alle 2

Other tickets

5

Spanien 19B Kalkværksvej

6

Exhibition Space Spanien 19C Kalkværksvej 5A

7

Kvindemuseet (Women’s Museum) Domkirkepladsen 5

8

Rum46 Studsgade 46, st.

9

Kunsthal Aarhus J. M. Mørks Gade 13

10

Bridge (starting point for Cosa Di Tutti, Saturday at 12.00)

SPOR New Music School Concert, Granhøj Dans 50 DKK 40 DKK (students) Staged Night/Inszenierte Nacht, Bora Bora 150 DKK 120 DKK (students) Buy tickets www.billetto.dk Tickets and festival pass are also sold at the entrances and are subject to avaliabillity The ticket sale opens half an our before each event Free entrance Exhibitions, seminars and artist talks

Ujazz

FIRE! ORCHESTRA THE WILD MANS BAND HOMIES × HOINESS

JACOB ANDERSKOV’S STRINGS, PERCUSSION & PIANO og mange flere... facebook.com/aarhusfestuge aarhusfestuge.dk

04.09.2014

Lys � mere lys

10 bands, 1 dag. Billetter kr. 200 via billetten.dk

Simon Steen-Andersen

BLACK BOX MUSIC Ny DVD med hele værket og bonusmateriale

Nordis k Råds Musikp ris ����

dacapo-records.dk

Nordiske Musikdage 2015

24.-27. september i København NYE KONCERTFORMATER I UTRADITIONELLE RAMMER Kongernes Lapidarium | Den Sorte Diamant | Hofteatret

www.nordicmusicdays.org

COLLABORATORS AND SPONSORS 2015 Aarhus 2017, Aarhus Billedkunstcenter, Aarhus Kommune Kulturforvaltningen, Aarhus Musikskole, Aarhus University, Augustinus Fonden, A.P. Møller og Hustru Chastine Mc-Kinney Møllers Fond til almene Formaal, Arts Council Norway, BGNM – berliner gesellschaft für neue musik, Bora Bora, Danish Arts Foundation, Danish Composers’ Society, Danish Composers’ Society’s Production Pool and Koda’s Cultural Funds, Den Kreative Skole Silkeborg, DPA Microphones, Edition S, Ernst von Siemens Musikstiftung, Exhibition Space Spanien 19C, Foundation Aarhus 2017, Fondation Banque Populaire, Godsbanen – Åbne Scene, Goethe-Institut Dänemark, Inter Arts Center Malmö, Kunsthal Aarhus, les Bernardins, Nordic Culture Fund, Oticon Foundation, Piano Værkstedet, Mattsson & McGehee, Royal Norwegian Embassy in Copenhagen, Royal Academy of Music Aarhus, Rum46, SCENATET, SNYK, Solistforeningen af 1921, The Danish Conductor’s Association, Tuborgfondet, Women’s Museum, Århus Sinfonietta and all participating ensembles, musicians, performers, artists, technicians and volunteers.

FESTIVAL TEAM Festival and Artistic Directors

Social media

Anne Marqvardsen anne@sporfestival.dk Anna Berit Asp Christensen annaberit@sporfestival.dk

Official hashtag: #spor15 Share your best moments from SPOR on Twitter, Instagram and Facebook

Production Manager & SPOR New Music School

Find us at

Anne Bøgh anneboegh@sporfestival.dk Production assistant Sarah Tagmose Jensen sarah@sporfestival.dk Coordinator, volunteers and events Shayi Addean shayi@sporfestival.dk PR & Communication Julie Lornsen julie@sporfestival.dk Guest Curator 2015 Simon Steen-Andersen Design Pulsk Ravn Technical Crew Pappagallo Content Management System Siteloom Print narayana press SPOR festival Prøvestensbroen 3, 2 DK-2300 Copenhagen S info@sporfestival.dk www.sporfestival.dk

SPOR FESTIVAL 2005 - 2015 10 years of curating new music and sound art Guest curators and themes at SPOR 2005-2015: 2005 Niels Rønsholdt 2006 Edward Jessen 2007 Anna Berit Asp Christensen & Anne Marqvardsen

COMPOSING WHAT?

2008 Anna Berit Asp Christensen & Anne Marqvardsen

THE 24HOUR EXPERIMENT

2009 Bent Sørensen PUBLIC DISTURBANCE 2010 Joanna Bailie EXPLODED MUSIC 2011 Kammerensemble Neue Musik, Singuhr Hörgalerie

og Ausland TOUCH ME

2012 Lars Petter Hagen SPEAK UP 2013 Juliana Hodkinson TACET 2014 Jennifer Walshe DO IT ANYWAY 2015 Simon Steen-Andersen STAGING THE SOUND

10 years of research For the last ten years, SPOR festival has set new European standards for curating. Few festivals in Europe can rival the way in which SPOR uncompromisingly places scored music and sound art on a par, and has made each festival over the past decade unique by having a new guest curator each year as well as a new theme, title and visual identity as its curatorial hub. For that reason, the festival directors Anne Marqvardsen and Anna Berit Asp Christensen as well as myself as editor feel it is only natural to mark SPOR’s 10th festival by a publication in which thoughts, discussions and a critique of the curating of music and sound art are developed. Especially, in order to make a contribution to the scanty literature available on the curating of art music and sound art within both Danish and international literature on art and music.

“We formulate each year’s festival as one work, but it is also a piece of basic research into what sound and listening consist of”, festival director Anna Berit Asp Christensen states in the first article, which is an interview with SPOR’s two artistic and festival directors. The composer Juliana Hodkinson, who was curator for SPOR 2013, then introduces her readers to the composurator’s (composer + curator) ways of thinking and anxieties about ‘the imagined future’. In the publication’s third article, and under the title ‘Curating the unexpected’, the composer and sound artist Joanna Bailie, who came up with the idea for SPOR’s Call for Proposal, considers the call as a form of curating, its possibilities and challenges in the form of, among other things, extra-musical influences. Finally, artistic director of the Donaueschinger Musiktage, Björn Gottstein, discusses the curating of contemporary music festivals and how we cannot risk turning our festivals into cemeteries.

I would like to express my warm thanks to all those featured for their contributions to the publication and make use of the occasion also to congratulate SPOR’s executive committee, founders, artistic and festival directors, guest curators over the years, artists, volunteers, crews and audiences and thank them for 10 years’ exploration of the very latest in art music and sound art.

Agnete Seerup, editor

FROM COMPETITION TO CURATING Lasse Lauersen / Member of SPOR’s executive committee since 2003

Curating is by no means a new phenomenon.

It has always been a framework for the meeting between music and its audience as well as a staging which not only facilitates the experience but which, for better or for worse, influences it.

It can, for example, involve the physical setting, the actual combination of pieces of music, the musicians’ appearance on stage or the atmos­ phere in which the experience is communicated.

And it is precisely here that the SPOR festival has its great strength: it creates a space around the music that makes it more attractive and accessible than it otherwise would have been.

But that is not the way it has always been.

SPOR was admittedly from day one a curating festival – with a curator competition into the bargain. If one was interested in taking part in the competition, one had to send in a proposed festival for contemporary music (naturally within certain predefined frameworks). The prize for the best proposal was a realisation of what had been suggested – as far as that was possible.

In that way, we on SPOR’s executive committee imagined, the individual festival would acquire its particular value via the artistic preferences of the curator, and in time the festival would appear as something more diverse than if the main part of the programming had been left to one and the same artistic director.

But our expectations of the curator were, in a number of ways, rather rigid, since in 2007 we were surprised to receive a proposal from two academics without any artistic production of their own. At the same time, it was the first time we received a proposal that did not mainly consist of a theme and a programming but also contained considerations about the physical framework of the festival, its audience, holding of concerts, communication strategies, etc.

The result was an eye-opener. With Anne Marqvardsen and Anna Berit Asp Christensen’s SPOR festival 2007, completely new approaches were opened up for creating a festival, and suddenly it was obvious to us that SPOR, with Anne and Anna Berit as festival directors, would be able to develop into one of the most important contemporary festivals. No sooner said than done. Since then we have been presented with one excellent festival after the other, in which selected guest curators in close collabora­tion with Anne and Anna Berit have positioned SPOR on the international scene for contemporary music. SPOR is therefore not unique because of its guest curators – although they still represent incredibly important input for the festival – it is unique because of Anne and Anna Berit’s meticulous planning and holding of each festival as a special event, one where the sum of the concerts and exhibitions is greater than the individual works.

The SPOR of the future lies 10 years back Interview with Anna Berit Asp Christensen and Anne Marqvardsen, artistic and festival directors at SPOR Agnete Seerup SPOR is unique because the festival, like few others, uncom­ promisingly places scored music and sound art on a par, and every year sends classical music’s rigid set of rules packing.

In 2005, a group of young composers paved the way for the festival we know today, with an annual guest curator and an international vision. But it was the programme proposal for the 2007 festival that with the question Composing What? solidly planted SPOR’s clear curatorial concept in Aarhus and laid the foundation for every succeeding SPOR festival, its artistic leadership and growing international family.

Agnete Seerup (AS) You have both been artistic directors and festival directors since 2007. But hasn’t SPOR existed since 2005?

Anne Marqvardsen (AM) Yes, the first SPOR was held in 2005. In 2003 the idea for SPOR was conceived, along with the idea of a new curator each year. The executive committee of SPOR, with Thomas Agerfeldt Olesen as its chairman, set up a curator competition to which all programme proposals could be sent. It was an exceptional and visionary idea, for at the time this was not really something that anyone did in Denmark or the rest of Europe.

Anna Berit Asp-Christensen (AB) And Aarhus has of course a remarkably long tradition for new music, something that the committee was inspired by. From 1978 to 2002, the city had had Karl Aage Rasmussen and the Numus festival, which presented new music from Denmark and the international music scene in a highly original way.

The traditional curator is sovereign AS In what way was it particularly visionary of the SPOR executive committee to hold a curator competition?

AM Traditionally, one has an artistic director who has sovereign right to determine the programme year after year, and often decides what is to be included on the basis of such parameters as: This year this particular composer will be 70 years old, so we will base our programme on him, or, it’s a long time now since we heard any music from Poland! By always involving a new curator the committee ensured renewal in the programme each year.

AB You could say that the curator competition was the first step towards the conceptual curating that Anne and I added to SPOR, where the art pieces of the programme reflect each other and problematise or investigate a particular phenomenon. In the early years of SPOR, an actual concept for the festival was not an explicit requirement.

AS In 2007, you both won the competition and became guest curators yourself – how did that come about?

AB Anne and I got to know each other back in ’99 at the University of Copenhagen, and it didn’t take long before we started to colla­borate and travel to venues where musical works were being performed that could not be heard in Denmark. By chance, I came across the SPOR curator competition and suggested to Anne that we should send in a proposal. As part of our research, we also visited the festival in 2005 and 2006.

AM We spent a long time on our programme proposal, which was fuelled by having just seen so many fine international productions that made us think: Something like this really ought to be done in Denmark! It had, though, also drawn our attention to just how uniform many of the European festival programmes were. When we sent in our proposed programme to SPOR, we had no expectations that the committee behind the festival would be at all interested.

We ourselves had the idea that it was a problem that we were not composers ourselves, that we were academics, women and lived in Copenhagen.

AB Yes, and we didn’t know if the festival was at all geared to such a voluminous and experimental programme. We had outlined in great detail a programme that, among other things, included a vast symphonic work by Benedict Mason and a number of concerts with Christian Marclay – a huge name who it was far from certain could be persuaded to come to Aarhus.

Composing What?

AS What did your proposal look like?

AM We called our proposal Composing What? The festival was to have its main focus on the role of the composer. We based ourselves on the dogma that all composers should personally be present on the stage and take part in the performance of their own works.

AM We wanted contemporary art music to develop away from being the younger brother of classical music to viewing itself as just as epoch-making a player on the contemporary art scene as other forms of art. We wanted to question all established habits: Why must a sound-borne work of art always be presented in a concert hall where the audience sits in a particular way, and the musicians are up on a stage and wearing special clothes?

AB Yes, Composing What? tore down all the old codices and hierarchies. We did not have any raised stage, no backstage area, the audience was placed in various zones on the floor along with the artists. The riding hall (Ridehuset) in Aarhus came itself to function as a work, with 700 chairs positioned in fine grids, so that everything flowed together – for better or worse.

AS For better or worse?

AB Yes, mostly for better, a little for worse. Particularly the first year, when we did not have any practical festival experience. We had planned an enormously dense and technically complex programme, and all the concerts were of course to take place at the same venue – Ridehuset. No single door could be shut when, for example, a sound check needed to be made, people change clothes, warm up or eat.

It was fantastic and it worked, but it was also a great challenge. All of our festivals have been highly experimental as regards the form of presentation, and each year means new challenges. The concert hall is easy of course; it is designed to offer the music, the musicians and the audience optimum conditions – the maximum of concentration, perhaps also the maximum enjoyment. It has these fine qualities – as long as one pays attention to when such conditions can have a hampering effect.

I think we have explored this in depth over the past 10 years.

AS When does the concert hall become that sort of a hindrance?

What is the most important thing you have discovered?

AM The concert hall becomes a challenge when it scares off the audience and restricts the composers with all its rules and regulations as to how things ought to be done. One of the most important things we have found out is that we and the artists at the festival need a great deal of freedom and elbow room – also when it comes to being able to think in terms of such unconventional venues as a cofferdam, an attic or urban space as the setting for art music.

We’ve no interest in a concert hall where we can’t use a bathtub full or water or sand on the floor as an instrument! Because then it is suddenly the concert hall that determines what is possible purely artistically and musically – and that’s just not on!

AS Did you manage to get Christian Marclay to agree?

AB Yes, but it took about eighteen months to get him to sign an agreement. Finally, we simply went to NYC and hoped for the best.

We were helped by the performance biennale PERFORMA, run by Roselee Goldberg, who we also ended up collaborating with. When we finally met him, he turned out to be the nicest person imaginable, and it was easy to agree that he was to be presented with Screenplay and djTRIO at SPOR 2007. He ended up staying in Aarhus throughout our entire festival. When the festival was over, Anne and I took off our fine clothes and started to clean up Ridehuset – but that he found was a bit too much of a good thing. He had seen us lugging platforms, cables, beer crates, chairs and music stands all week long – now it was time to celebrate, so he took us to a bar and bought beers for us.

A solid basis with the first concept AS It all went so well in 2007 that the executive committee then invited you to take over the festival?

AM Yes, as early as 2006, the chairman of SPOR, Thomas Agerfeldt Olesen, had come to the conclusion that he would retire after the festival in 2007. On the Monday after the festival we were both euphorically happy and dog-tired and were standing in a circle in Ridehuset along with the executive committee, who insinuated that they would like to see us continue our cooperation with SPOR. We were only willing to do so if we were allowed to share the roles of artistic directors and festival directors equally. Fortunately, they agreed to this, and we took up our positions in June 2007.

AS Composing What? in 2007 sounds like the SPOR of today, where the works are grouped around an extremely clear theme – back then it was the role of the composer, in 2013 it was, for example, silence and in 2015 the staging of the music. In addition, today you still strive to maintain the equal balance between sound art and scored works that you insisted on in the 2007 programme. Did you create a solid foundation with the first concept?

AB Yes, there are few festivals that try to present sound art on a par with scored works – and there were none at all when SPOR started. I am highly satisfied that we were able to create a festival in 2007 that was so characteristic of what Anne and I have done since then. We formulate each year’s festival as one work, but it is also a piece of basic research into what sound and listening consist of. We spend an enormous amount of time on weaving all the works together, partly via their locations, and finally a kind of meta-layer emerges in which all the works stand conversing with each other.

AS So the SPOR festival for contemporary music and sound art can perhaps rather be called an annual investigation of all kinds of sound-borne art than a music festival?

AM Yes. We see the festival as a prism that reflects various trends and tendencies. In that way, there is not a hierarchical relation between whether something takes place in a kunsthalle, a concert hall, outdoors or some other place. The field and the way artists work today are also highly diverse, so it feels extremely natural and exactly right to reflect and support.

AB When we placed sound art and composed music on a par, it also became natural to include other neighbouring genres such as performance, modern dance and concept art. For us, contemporary

art music is just as reflective and vociferous as all other contemporary art – it is not necessarily only about sound in itself, and it does not only address those with a knowledge of music, quite the opposite. Music art has the same potential for debative curating as all other art forms, and each year we focus precisely on bringing this out. For that reason, we always have such titles as: TOUCH ME; SPEAK UP; DO IT ANYWAY. Meta-curating AS A couple of years after you took over the leadership of SPOR, you did away with the curator competition – why was that?

AM Bent Sørensen won the competition in 2008 and Joanna Bailie in 2010, but in the course of those two years it became increasingly important for us to ensure a line of continuity that strengthened SPOR’s identity, even though we featured a new guest curator and a new theme each year.

AB For the festival to be able to maintain its own style whilst also renewing itself year after year, the order of the guest curators was important – that became a kind of curating in itself. So we dropped the competition in 2011 and started to select and invite guest curators. Each of the 10 years has individually been its own, with its own theme, its own title and its own identity – and yet no one is in any doubt that it was a SPOR festival.

AS So, in a way you started to curate the guest curators across the years?

AM Yes, when we dropped the competition, an extra layer of curating was added, a meta-track where the imprint of the individual festival and the guest curator is part of a larger whole. So, as our point of departure, we are always 2-3 festivals out in the future when it comes to curator and theme.

AB Even though we have a guest curator, we still decide at any rate 50% of the programme. When we did our first festival, we saw a great need to present an international programme in Denmark. We still place considerable emphasis on an international programme, and it makes good sense to do so in collaboration with the guest

curator. Naturally, we help with the selection of Danish works and thereby introduce the whole Danish field to the curator. We also ensure that we exploit the full potential of the city. Although the festival is an international one, we must anchor it in the local.

AS Every year it is your job to make the festival cohere and ensure that the curating takes place in accordance with the identity of the festival. At the same time, you have many first performances that are often on the drawing board until the final second. How do you deal with this uncertainty?

AB That is where our own artistic practice comes into play. We cannot test anything in advance. In the same way as when the composer sits down and writes a scored work. It is a matter of experience and intuition. You don’t know if it works until the ensemble plays it.

AM We’re wild about the live element. It is so ‘alive’ and ungovernable, just as the audience is, by the way. You can never have 100% control of a festival. For us, artistic courage is the most important thing, so it may well be that a single first performance falls flat.

AS SPOR is part of a great international network. Is this because your guest curators nearly all come from outside Denmark?

AM Yes, the guest curators are good ambassadors and they create amazing networks out in the world. In 2014, Jennifer Walshe was guest curator, and this stemmed from a cooperation we began in 2007, where Ensemble 2000 did a portrait concert of her at SPOR – for the first time in Denmark. Many of the curator collaborations grow out of that type of constellation. It is like a family that follows the festival and grows when good new collaborators enter SPOR. An open call is an open chance AS In 2010, you launched an open call for proposals at SPOR festivals. Why did you choose to do so?

AB Each year we had to turn down many queries because they didn’t fit the theme of the festival. Then our guest curator Joanna Bailie came up with the idea of a Call in 2010 where one was to relate to a particular theme. Suddenly, everyone had an honest

chance to send in works. It felt right to have that openness alongside a rigorous concept for the festival, where everything is carefully selected.

AM We receive between 80 and 150 proposals each year. It’s incredible how the Call gives rise to fascinating new works by both young and established artists year after year!

AS You always schedule your annual Call Concert on Friday or Saturday evening during prime time – why is that?

AM Yes, it mustn’t be on a Saturday morning because we’re afraid it’s not good enough. It is a risky concert – we’ve no idea what we’re going to get. But it’s important that it is performed in prime time, because it is often the slightly younger artists who really invest a great deal in these works. It’s tremendously exciting to work with!

AS Do you get an inkling of the works and trends of the future via the Call that you can make use of in your work on future festivals?

AB The Call confirms our idea that the art form is developing, and that there is plenty of good stuff in the composers of tomorrow. I like very much the fact that the Call is an open platform. We don’t have the ulterior motive that we are to get something concrete in return.

We are happy to place our festival at the disposal of some younger artists and thereby nurture and stimulate the new trends and layers of growth that exist.

AS So it is just as important that the SPOR festival is a platform for young composers as it is to present major international works by Jennifer Walshe and Christian Marclay?

AM Yes, definitely! It is an extremely important part of SPOR’s identity to present on equal terms both the major international and the young up-and-coming Danish and foreign talents.

Composition on the school curriculum to ensure the quality of SPOR in the future AS SPOR New Music School is a new composition school for young music school students between 11 and 15 years old that you launched just before your 10th anniversary. In April and May, children from Aarhus and the Central Jutland Region will write new music along with professional composers. Will this be a part of SPOR in the future?

AB Yes, and we have always scheduled their concert as part of the festival programme. We are eager to plant our enthusiasm in this art form in all the young people attending music school in order to learn to play an instrument. Teach them what it means to create musical works themselves, that one doesn’t have to play things composed by others the whole time.

AS Is SNMS a form of future guarantee plan?

AM We believe it is enormously important for children and young people to gain experience of new music and art if we want to ensure that we will be able to enjoy new, experimental music and sound art of high quality in the future. Both at SPOR and elsewhere. It is tremendously important to equip the artists of tomorrow by developing new formats for children’s encounters with creative processes.

A happy curatory combination AS Where will you and SPOR be in 10 years’ time?

AM Fortunately, we can’t answer that one. The foundation is still very much alive and we will continue for as long as we feel we are making the best new festival every year! If that is how it feels after so many years, I don’t think it will be any different in another five or ten years.

AB I actually think we have a very happy curatory combination: a new playmate each year, but the house is always the same.

ssssshshhhshhhhhhshshshshshsssssshshhshhhshhhhhh Composurating SPOR festival Juliana Hodkinson This essay is written for the celebration of 10 years of SPOR festival. I gratefully acknowledge the contribution of SPOR festival’s artistic directors Anna Berit Asp Christensen and Anne Marqvardsen, as well as all the artists and production staff involved. Excerpts from my correspondence with many of these are woven into the following text, whose other references are listed at the end.

In 2013, I was invited to curate SPOR festival, whose theme was TACET. Explore the peripheries of music, said the publicity: hear musical fragments, feel your aural memory, listen to music with your teeth, get close to opera in micro-format and hear how pianists play a man who speaks in tongues. Experience how silence and sound ruthlessly expose their respective limits and sharpen our hearing.

The small things, small sounds and ideas of tiny from tiny, suffused with the dissonant richness of the minor and the private. – Do you have her e-mail address? 00º33’45”N 00º45’33”W. 1 – Ok, we can fine-tune the order of the pieces/the jury constellation/the budget/the concentrate/the resolution (543x181px). – Is it still the plan to have several miniatures in different locations? 2 – He wants to do a concert rather than an installation. – The singers have become a lamp and two glockenspiels, and you have to put on hearing protectors and bite the stick. Try an earplug sometime, he wrote, but they are so fiddly. 3 – Any more title ideas? – Ok, he really wants to do an installation, not a concert. The noise would be underwhelming, less than a spectator might expect, because the guitar would never hit the ground and the sound would not be the sound of impact, but of the guitar dangling at the end of its tether. – I would not want to cancel. Perhaps we can provide some temporary shelter (a tent or tarpaulin).

The guitar itself can get wet. Only the performers and amplifier need

to stay dry. 4 – It’s going to be so quiet that it can’t be heard normally, no voice audible but that of the sea on the far side, A Long Way Away 5, heard in a giant industrial ‘mute’ and referencing the smallest whispers of undersea creatures. Will the cofferdam still be there on the pier? (Or somewhere at sea? I hope not!). 6 – Shall we pursue the piano sub-theme as a resonant body with motors, damped with masking tape from top to toe? 7 – I’ll ask him if black box can be done in a miniature format? The curtain is ripped open to reveal covert fumbling in the innards of a black box. 8 – Buried alive one audience member at a time in a chrysalis of total darkness, poured on by rice and sand. 9 – An opera in her grandmother’s desk, the only physical space she could have truly called her own. 10 – Ok. A partout card to end all partout cards The composer-curator is an auto-curator, holding the promise of a partout card to end all partout cards. The free-floating composurator is required to offer deeply idiosyncratic interpretations of knowledge, encouraged by the extension of her range of power to the ordering of others’ works, to create and design new and wider relations between what we already have experienced and what may be new. More and more, said Daniel Burne of Documenta back in the 1970s, the subject of an exhibition tends not to be the exhibition of works of art, but the exhibition of the exhibition as a work of art. Art works today serve only as a decorative gadget for the survival of the exhibition (let us say: festival, for our purposes here) as noise, noise whose author is none other than the organizer of the festival. So the question is: the silence heard in noise, immediately, suddenly, is it not still dominated by the unheard silence of the Komposer-organizer, capit? Is the composer/capital not the stage director of noises and silences, as miseen-scène? 11 An excellent idea, I will definitely try that. But o, o, o.

Art! must tend toward anti-art, the elimination of the ‘subject’ (object, image), the substitution of chance for intention, and the pursuit of, yes, silence, there we have it. Umph, while curating and composing, while performing and listening, we have all settled down in a position of opposition. From which it is impossible to take power? Sound becomes our enemy, for it denies/promises to deny us the realisation (transcendence!) we desired. A new element enters the work and becomes constitutive of it: the tacit or overt appeal for its own abolition as a sign of the abolition of art music itself. 12 The empire never ended “The best of new Danish music”, said the local newspapers in 1979.

Numus Festival’s hallmark was Danish music played by Danish musi-

cians, alongside the presentation of one foreign name or idea. From 2005, a new festival all about sound, SPOR festival has been liberating itself from the strictures of music and the national politics of Denmark (a poetics of outer space?), yet – we love music – without the self-imposed obligation of dissociation from the past that many forward-tilting sonic ventures seem to exude. The empire never ended. 13 You hear from the immigration police that you will be removed from the country. Who can help you? Child door sweet. 14 Exploring the ways in which sounds coalesce into works and then into festivals, seminars and milieus, a curator becomes acutely aware of the foundational contexts upon which our sonic cultural experiences are built.

In the face of all this, it would be strange not to fall silent, from time to time, in order to order diverse ears, hands, technologies, local and international scale, plastic forms, hungry careers, musical agilities and sonic ranges. We might need to desensitise in order to hypersensitise, to clean our ears with a break. But purging our bodies and minds of music is not so easy; we shall come back to this. To compose is, like curating, always to filter out and to bind, to exclude entire regions of the sound world as noise and to produce ‘music’ (that which is ‘audible’) with the input. The noises rejected by the body, even a body that composes, are not heard. If they are, it is as dissonances, as flows of sound entering a device not prepared to receive them and transform them into music. The phenomenological body is a filter and requires, then, that whole sound regions be desensitised. ssssshshhhshhhhhhshshshshshsssssshshhshhhshhhhhh = sustained unvoiced consonant sound, with extended transitions between tongue positions, producing saliva that audibly interferes with the unstable consonant sound. Tacet – it actually means shut up in polyphonic music, first used to signal not only that a particular singer should stop singing, but also that said singer should listen to the other parts. And if ‘tacet’ was written in all parts, then they should all just listen (to God?).

Hearing too much To see badly, is to see too little; to hear badly is to hear too much. Too many harmonics, says Nietzsche, said Lyotard. 15 Surges of tension, intensities, events, dissonances, stridencies, positively exaggerated, ugly silences. It is worth following Lyotard on this: silence as the ideal of health is the neurosis of that Europe which orders the following representation: to reduce drives to silence, to keep them on the outside, to disseminate the reassuring image of the unified body offering the solid arms of its bronzed stimuli shield to the exterior, with nothing, the void,

left to hear ‘inside’. Skin, surface of the body, is full of holes. But the ‘good form’ on the ‘inside’ as silence, the empty, purged body, is the obliteration of the body as noise-sound to the benefit of an orchestraconducting body, the operator musically effaced, annihilated. From the silence of noise, plural, to the silence of order. What prevails today is the silence of the prince, placed in the privileged seat in the theatre of Serlio and Palladio, the silence demanded of the public in the concert hall, and of the stage machinery and stagehands. When his health is good, Leriche, the doctor, the prince, must not be able to hear the hypothetical director of the body, the stage pit, the sings, the upper flies, the innards, the pumps for blood, air and saliva. But where there is a body, there is noise. He got up without a sound = with the old bed groaning, the floorboards creaking, the door squeaking.

So when the LaSalle Quartet recorded Luigi Nono’s string quartet Fragmente-Stille: an Diotima, the inaudible noise floor and then unparalleled dynamic range of the compact disc charted an ideal aural geography for the crevasse-like pauses of intended silence which Nono hoped would vibrate into ‘silences intemporally sung’. 16 In any case: musical experience and experimental music, without success, without failure, but with event: event that in one swoop clears away libidinal, political and sonic economies. Silence is no longer the composer’s, the signifier’s; it is the noise-sound of the involuntary body, the noisesound of the libido wandering over bodies, ‘nature’, that must be heard.

So in the found soundscape, the next composer of these silences muted the audible passages played by the LaSalle Quartet and then elevated room tone, discreet ambience and other assumed silence high above the threshold of audibility, so that we hear on-the-fly tunings, annunciatory gasps, hurried breaths, sul ponticello bowings, and creaking chairs, fused with a distant plane, moving equipment, room tone, digital glitches and dialed-in echo, all going on in our dreaming spaces.

Composers, curators and festivals also inhabit the silence of the signifier, the silence of domination; they consider the surface of experience as appearance, and even if they modestly decide not to take power, power is already taken by it to the extent that it repeats this device of appearance and effacement, of theatre, of politics as a domain. ffffffffffffffffffphhphphphphphphphhpffffffffffffffffffff in between radio stations khkhkhkhkhkhkhkhkhkh change to another wavelength.

If curating is the theoretical, utopian, concept-based end of programming artistic experiences, then how to curate newly commissioned works that don’t yet exist, and – given a dose of curatorial support

– may yet (hopefully) develop in unforeseen directions? And, how to subsume widely diverse artists under a theme that inevitably casts their work as flat and less resonant than when experienced without the framework of a group scenario? Curating older works solves part of the first problem – but exacerbates the second. Add to that the conundrum that curating normally applies to gallery works, not live performance. The politics of curating lies normally between the politics of collection and of supporting the generation of new work.

Curating is a foray into science fiction – anticipating a future at the same time as treating what’s to be created as if it already exists.

Juggling these temporalities involves great leaps of the imagination in the co-existence of both artists and curators. The artist is not sure how the contextual framework will turn out; the curator is not sure how the commissioned works will turn out. Both delay committing to concrete plans for as long as possible, much to the frustration of organisers and producers. Every adjustment to the concept or framework seems like cheating, rewriting the imagined future already so carefully communicated to all involved.

A Tradition of Fragments ­– Following up on your correspondence with SPOR festival, about a concert programme of string quartet fragments: the festival this year is about the borders of music, and a sub-theme, surrounding fragments and aphorisms, is shaping up. I’d like to curate a string quartet concert that draws on the romantic tradition of fragments, miniatures, etc., and also force a fragmentary form of perception over the concert as a listening format. It sounds a bit severe, but I think it can be done with elegance and subtlety, and above all with respect for detail, by collecting works that are either made up of aphoristic sections, or whose structure easily permits fragmentation, so that I would ‘compose’ a programme with enough pauses and unexpected continuities that something novel and interesting should arise.

– The quartet thinks your idea of linking together fragments of different composers’ quartets into a new work (if I’ve understand that more or less right) is exciting and attractive. We’re up for that, if we can together find a form that’s manageable for us to learn!?

– Sorry for the delay in replying, could you play Nono Fragmente Stille: an Diotima (1979), fragment 1; Webern Sechs Bagatellen (1913) No. 1 (Mässig); Nono Fragmente Stille: an Diotima (1979), fragment 2; Nono Fragmente Stille: an Diotima (1979), fragment 5; Kurtag 12 Microludes (1977-78), No. 1 sospiri; Nono Fragmente Stille: an Diotima (1979),

Fragment 25 (Endlos?!); Beethoven String Quartet no. 15 in A minor, op. 132, Molto adagio mit innigster Empfindung, bars 1-7; Kurtag, 12 Microludes (1977-78), No. 2, Frage und Antwort; Webern Sechs Baga­ tellen (1913) No. 2 (Leicht bewegt); Nono Fragmente Stille: an Diotima (1979), fragment 26 (mit innigster Empfindung); Beethoven String Quartet no. 15 in A minor, op. 132, Molto adagio mit innigster Emp­ findung, bar 10, 2nd beat – bar 15 (end of 2nd beat): bar 21, 3rd beat – bar 30; Kurtag 12 Microludes (1977-78) No. 5, Lontano/Heiligtum; Webern Sechs Bagatellen (1913) No. 3: Ziemlich fliessend; Czernowin String quartet (1995), letter H; Abrahamsen 4th String Quartet (2012), 3rd movement: letter B-C; Webern Sechs Bagatellen (1913), No. 4 (Sehr langsam); Nono Fragmente Stille: an Diotima (1979), fragment 48 (Ockeghem Maleur me bat); Abrahamsen 4th String Quartet (2012), 1st movement: letter D-E; Czernowin String Quartet (1995), letter J; Kurtag 12 Microludes (1977-78), No. 6; Abrahamsen 4th String Quartet (2012), 3rd movement: J-K; Webern Sechs Bagatellen (1913) No. 5 (Äußerst langsam); Beethoven: String Quartet No. in B-flat major, op.

133 Grosse Fuge, Allegro molto e con brio, bars 187 (2nd beat) to 114 – attacca: 134 (first beat) to 171; Kurtag 12 Microludes (1977-78) No. 10; Nono Fragmente Stille: an Diotima (1979), fragment 52; Webern Sechs Bagatellen (1911-1913) No. 6 (Fliessend)?

None of the string quartets cited here stand in need of a work-concept discussion in terms of their realisation in performance. Like the commissioning of Nono’s quartet by the Beethovenfest in Bonn (a festival inaugurated by Liszt on Beethoven’s 75th anniversary), the decision to end a festival all about contemporary sound works with a more or less unplugged string quartet concert produces a meeting between the engagement with an utterly bourgeois musical form and a series of works composed in flight from the bourgeois background of inherited musical forms. A new mediation of the string quartet within changed listening cultures.

Anticipating the future What reasons could we have, then, for looking back to look forwards – for the study of history? Sound and the sonic largely negate the contribution of music of the past to its sensibilities; those who rewrite the history of listening and soundmaking are more safely called media archaeologists than music historians. But music is a large thing to throw away. Insofar as the past has been transmitted as tradition, it possesses authority; insofar as authority presents itself historically, it becomes tradition. Arendt wrote this of Walter Benjamin, referring to the breaks in tradition and loss of authority that took place in his time, and his discovery that the transmissibility of the

past relates to its capacity to be cited in the present: its citability.

Benjamin was well aware that the original context of a quotation from tradition or history was far less important than the new context it helped to create. 17 An isolated quotation does not necessarily make sense. The citability and meaning of a quotation – even if it is only a fragment of the original text – are determined by the frame in which it is used and from which it gains its meaning and potential authority.

A tradition of fragments, the broken time-line, presence and memory linked by fragments, gaps, absurd connections: in history, much of what is unrepeatable and irreplaceable comes to light in unique creations, breakthroughs and realisations – creative steps like revelations from some other source than the mere course of happenings; they lay the foundations for the next step.

Composer and Ph.D. Juliana Hodkinson curated SPOR festival in 2013, and has figured as composer with works performed at several Numus and SPOR events – Korrektur (1997), Water like a stone, sagte er, dachte ich, Why linger you trembling in your shell? (2000), The General Case, with Jennifer Walshe (2007), Versprengung with Ulrich Polster, and Fish & Fowl, with Niels Rønsholdt (both 2011), Angel View (2014).

1 Abel Paúl’s piece 00º33’45”N 00º45’33”W for piano and record players received its first performance at SPOR 2013, performed by Duo Cacio e Pepe.

2 Four miniatures by Manos Tsangaris constituted a mini-festival within SPOR 2013: Double for two singers end light (from Diskrete Stücke); Schäfchenbühne for objects (from Die-Döner-Schaltung); winzig for ensemble (from winzig).

3 Simon Löffler’s C was commissioned by SPOR 2013 and performed for audiences of 35 at a time.

4 Seth Kim-Cohen’s Critique of Instrumental Reason (by the use of electric guitar) was first performed at SPOR 2013.

5 Individual movements from cyclical and open works by Sarah Nemtsov were performed by Aarhus Sinfonietta with Petteri Pitko: Brief – Stimmung, Briefe – Puppen ohne Köpfe, Poker, Roulette, Central Park / Manhattan and A Long Way Away.

6 Kirsten Reese’s no voice audible but that of the sea on the far side was commissioned by SPOR 2013 and installed in a coffer-dam in Aarhus harbour.

7 Marianthi Papalexandri-Alexandri’s Solo for motors and resonant body (2012) was performed at SPOR 2013

by Ernst Surberg. Christian Winther Christensen’s Six Preludes (2012) were performed by Duo Cacio e Pepe.

8 Simon Steen-Andersen’s Black Box Music (2012) received its first Danish performance at SPOR 2013, performed by Aarhus Sinfonietta with soloist Håkon Stene.

9 Matthias Schack-Arnott’s Chrysalis was performed by the composer at SPOR 2013, in an instrumental structure designed to house one audience member at a time.

10 Claudia Molitor’s Remember Me was performed by the composer at SPOR 2013, for audiences of 20 at a time.

11 Paraphrased and adapted from Lyotard, Jean-Francois (1984 [1971]): “Several silences” in Roger McKeon (ed.): Driftworks. Semiotext(e), pp. 91-110. “Plusieurs silences” first appearsed in Musique en jeu 9, Nov 1971.

12 Paraphrased and adapted from Sontag, Susan (1969 [1969]): “The aesthetics of silence”, in Styles of Radical Will. Farrar, Straus and Giroux: New York.

13 Erik Bünger’s The Empire Never Ended was performed in a version for two pianos by Duo Cacio e Pepe.

14 Yannis Kyriakides’ Norms of Transposition was installed at SPOR 2013.

15 Paraphrased and adapted from Lyotard (1984 [1971]).

16 Christopher DeLaurentis’ Of Silences Intemporally Sung (2011) was played in the concert hall preceding SPOR’s closing string quartet concert A Tradition of Fragments and Miniatures.

17 Arendt, Hannah (1983): “Walter Benjamin, 1892-1940,” in Men in Dark Times. San Diego: Harcourt Brace and Company.

Other sources borrowed/referenced in this essay: Adorno, Theodor W. (1984): Gesammelte Schriften 18 (Musikalische Schriften V), hg. V. Rolf Tiedemann and Klaus Schultz, Frankfurt am Main. // Duelke, Britta (2008): “Quoting from the Past or Dealing with Temporality”, in Given World and Time: Temporalities in Context. Central European University Press: Budapest, New York. // Jaspers, Karl (1953): The Origin and Goal of History. Translated from German by Michael Bullock. New Haven.

Curating the unexpected Joanna Bailie The morning after the 2009 edition of SPOR had ended, Anne Marqvardsen, Anna Berit Asp Christensen and myself sat down to discuss how my curatorial proposal for the 2010 festival might be implemented. Perhaps because most of the composers and pieces had already been chosen by this point, the idea of including some sort of open call or competition in the festival seemed quite appealing — that doing so might inject an element of newness or even a little uncertainty into a process that had been going on for over a year. The other hope was that an open call of this kind could help to raise awareness of the festival both in Denmark and abroad. In fact, the night the winning proposals (which by then had been turned into pieces) were presented at SPOR 2010 proved to be the most popular in terms of audience numbers, and the Granhøj Dans space was almost entirely full. I’ve never been sure whether this was simply a coincidence, or if it was the prospect of a concert of new pieces by untested composers itself that was ultimately so alluring. Certainly, the call for proposals is the ‘wildcard’ element of the festival, providing curatorial danger in the form of unknown works. One could not be sure how these works might turn out, after all they were generally chosen in the first place on the strength of a one-page proposal.

What’s more, one could also never predict how the works might interact together within a programme — they could potentially be a source of difference, artistic friction, or even mayhem. In particular, one of the 2010 Call pieces, Chaos Magic Music Theatre by Páll Ivan Pállson and Monika Frycova, managed to live up to its name (no small feat in itself) and its very strangeness, its unexpectedness, gave us all something to talk and think about. Most importantly perhaps, the experience of Chaos Magic Music Theatre made us realise that we had not quite digested all the possible outcomes of 60s performance art and Fluxus, and that in the new millennium we were still working in an environment that was quite well-behaved in aesthetic terms — an environment that did not usually encompass the outright strangeness that Pállson and Frycova offered us that night.

Extra-musical curatorial influences The way that the world of contemporary music actually functions is a rarely discussed subject that is (and should be if it isn’t) of interest to everyone involved in the field. A great deal of the mechanics of programming and commissioning still remains a little opaque to me, even as someone who has been on both sides of the composer/ curator divide. What is very clear to me though, is that contemporary music is not a meritocracy. I sincerely hope that it is at least partly a meritocracy, but there are too many outside influences, not dependent on the quality of the music involved, that are in play for us to be truly confident that the most talented will always rise to the top of the pile. You may well ask what these outside non-meritocratic influences might be, and so I will outline them as follows: 1) the interests of publishers.

2) the economic incentives and backing offered by certain funding bodies, especially cultural foundations tied to particular countries.

3) cronyism (especially amongst composer-curators).

I do not wish to vilify these forces entirely — indeed I may well have benefited on multiple occasions from the last two in the course of my career. Certainly, we should not damn the funding organisations that make the putting on of new music festivals and concerts possible, and anyway, just because one gets a little money to programme the music of composer A (from cultural foundation X), doesn’t mean that a little of this money can’t be siphoned off to help programme the music of composer B on the same concert (who may have no cultural foundation fighting in his or her corner). Cronyism too, is a difficult thing to talk about, because it is so prevalent on the one hand, and on the other so complex. New music is a small world (or worlds — more on this later) where ‘everyone knows each other’, and naturally many friendships and alliances are formed — it’s the politics of any working environment. One might even say that the slightly shady practice of programming someone who is your friend also exists in the reverse — you may well become friends with a composer or sound artist through having programmed them in the first place. I would say that the problem with these extra-musical curatorial influences is not that they are the embodiment of pure evil, but simply that they skew the new music landscape somewhat, making it difficult to really see past certain distortions to the full range of music, activities and talents that are out there to be discovered.

Can a call be truly open?

This is where a competition or open call comes in. The idea is, that this kind of format can cut across the skewed landscape, across economic influences, across alliances, can access work that one might not normally come across, and that it is first and foremost (in theory at least), fair and unbiased. SPOR didn’t invent the competition or open call — they exist in quite some number 1, are mainly aimed at young composers, and more often than not ask for already completed works for set instrumentations. Some of these set instrumentations are so unusual that one might imagine that the aspiring composer would have to write a piece especially for that competition, while others stipulate that submitted works be unperformed (a difficult requirement for all but the most prolific composer who might just have some pieces to spare). As a young composer I found some of these competitions on the verge of exploitative — they were ways of getting new works without having to pay for them, and took advantage of those at the beginning of their careers, with all the insecurities and lack of performance opportunities that this status might entail. 2 When we designed the open call back in 2009, we decided to leave it truly open (without age limit), didn’t require the artist to write a new piece before being selected (just make a proposal for one), and provided a modest commission fee and some expenses. Above all, we desired to create a platform that was good for us in terms of discovering new artists and enhancing the festival programme, and respectful towards those who might apply — giving them a fair and open opportunity to be part of our event for the price of a short proposal. I’m not quite sure that we managed all of this entirely on the first attempt. I was generally very pleased with most of what we selected, but I’m not sure we succeeded in discovering as much new talent as we had hoped. Perhaps this was because we hadn’t quite spread the net widely enough — we had 44 entries for 2010 and many more would have been desirable. What was undeniable though, was that one of the selected entries was from an artist known to (and even friends with) several of the jurors, including myself. 3 The proposal he wrote was one of the strongest of all the entries, his idea original and true to the theme of the 2010 festival.

Towards the conceptual in contemporary music Were we wrong to choose his submission? In the end I don’t think so, I genuinely believe we were driven by quality rather than bias,

even if we did seem to be undermining one of the primary goals of the call — to find artists that we’d never come across before. However, I think the selection of this Helbich’s proposal (by being the exception to the rule) 4 highlighted something else very important that we hadn’t quite taken into account: composers are generally not very good at writing proposals, and more importantly, not all good pieces can be explained well or made to sound enticing in a few paragraphs of writing. We asked for composers and sound artists to be aware of the theme of the festival, of the context in which their work might be presented and to explain how their artwork might fit into such a context. Such a stipulation is rare in new music where it is far more common for this responsibility to be entirely the curator’s to undertake (or not) as they see fit.

There has been a great deal of talk in recent times over the idea that a ‘new conceptualism’ 5 has entered the contemporary music discourse (one might say ‘has finally entered’ since after all we are many decades behind comparable movements in the visual arts field). Conceptual work, whether it is new or not, by virtue of being based on ideas, lends itself much better to being explained in proposal form than say something which is purely sound/music-centred.

I recently came across this issue again, in another call for proposals context, this time in a pedagogical setting — the process very clearly favoured composers who were used to thinking and talking about their work in a certain way (score-oriented composers need not apply!). In theory, if Johannes Kreidler and Brian Ferneyhough say, were to enter the call for proposals, one might imagine Kreidler’s clearly articulated conceptual approach having a better shot at being chosen. This says nothing about the relative worth of their work, simply that Kreidler’s potential piece might sound better on paper. Needless to say, this bias towards the conceptual in contemporary music practice aligns itself quite well with the SPOR festival itself, which under the direction of Anne and Anna Berit has prided itself on focused, idea-based curatorial practices that go against the grain of a great deal of traditional new music programming. I am all in favour of such an approach, and believe it is an essential component in the reinvigoration of contemporary music that must take place if it is to remain a viable art form. However, there is always a small part of me that is afraid the call for proposals format might ‘throw the baby out with the bathwater’ and in a way become too aesthetically exclusive.

Sometimes it’s good to have a bit of Ferneyhough alongside the Kreidler.

Scenes, micro-scenes and artistic cross-pollination Although I may have been guilty of making generalisations myself during the course of this article, I must say that I am always a little suspicious of commentary on the state of new music that talks about the scene as if it were one unified thing. 6 It is most certainly not one unified thing, it comprises many scenes and micro-scenes, some born out of geography, others of genre. There are links of course — there may be individuals, ensembles or organisations that facilitate connections between these scenes, but I imagine many young composers and sound artists feeling hemmed in by the limits of the particular new music world they feel they belong to. The idea of having a different guest curator at SPOR each year is not only to generate a new concept for the theme of the festival, it is so that the festival can have access to a new network and therefore a new constellation of contemporary music practitioners. In fact, up until 2011 the guest programmers themselves were chosen as a result of a call for curatorial proposals, and in many ways the format we launched at the 2010 festival was a mirroring of this kind of openness. The call not only traverses geographical boundaries but also those of genre. An important principle of programming at SPOR is that it presents different kinds of work in the music and sound field on the same platform with the hopes of reaching a broader audience and creating a space where there might eventually be the chance of artistic cross-pollination. If we can say the curator has access to a new network, then hopefully the call for proposals has access to all networks, or at least a great many of them. This naturally might prove problematic as a jury member — having to compare extremely dissimilar works displaying a variety of aesthetic outlooks, using different media, instrumental forces and employing space and time in all sorts of ways, is a difficult job. But as far as problems go, it is not such a terrible one to have.

Composer and sound artist Joanna Bailie (born 1973 in London) curated SPOR festival in 2010. Her recent work is characterized by the use of field recordings together with acoustic instruments, as well as an interest in the interplay between the audio and visual. Together with Matthew Shlomowitz she runs Ensemble Plus-Minus.

1 See for instance www.composerssite.com.

2 The competition that forms the basis of Gaudeamus music week, I hasten to add, is an important exception. Although there is a small application fee involved, instrumentation is quite open and already performed works are accepted. The Gaudeamus competition as such has provided quite valuable experience and exposure for many young composers.

3 The composer in question was David Helbich, and his ‘acoustic intervention’ was entitled Shouting.

4 Helbich has a bit of a mixed practice and also works in the performing and visual arts domains. He’d thus had plenty of practice at writing proposals.

5 I’m thinking for instance of “Darmstadt Forum I – New Conceptualism: A Dead End or a Way Out?” which took place on 4 August 2014 and included speakers such as Ashley Fure, Harry Lehmann, Martin Schüttler and Steve Takasugi.

6 Susan McClary’s “Terminal Prestige: The Case of Avant-Garde Music Composition” comes to mind.

Here Come the Undead Curating contemporary music today BjÜrn Gottstein The psychology of space The Staatsgalerie Stuttgart has a painting in its collection that demonstrates well what curating is about and what problems may arise from it. I am not talking about the way this picture is hung or the context in which it is shown. It is the motif that touches upon the subject. Giovanni Paolo Pannini’s 1757 Roma Antiqua is set in a large, church-like hall, particularly spacious, with a ceiling some 30 metres high and many side wings, galleries and balconies, opening up a complex three dimensional space in itself. On the walls of this hall there are pictures of the beautiful and historical sites of the city of Rome, showing the Colosseum, the Pantheon, ruined columns, depicting either the insides or the outsides of the monumental sites.

Apart from the fact that Pannini reduces Rome to a collection of postcard motifs, choosing only the obvious, being overly didactic, he also creates an interesting superposition of spaces. Each of the paintings within the painting has a different perspective so that the observer’s view is taken in many different directions at the same time. While this is on the one hand an interesting experiment in the way different spaces and perspectives can be overlapped, it is at the same time a complete disaster in terms of the congruency of the whole. In other words, if different artists had actually painted the paintings within the painting, these artists would have had every right to complain about the distortion of perspective to which Pannini has exposed their work. At the same time, the fact that all the pieces in the piece were actually painted by Pannini himself gives them a questionable similarity not only among themselves but also in relation to their surroundings, the church-like hall in which they are hanging.

Musical works are of course not paintings, but they do contain a perspective of their own, a dimension, a framework, and a style of their own. To put together a concert programme also means to superimpose and confront these perspectives, dimensions, etc. Good concert programmes are the result of superb taste on the one hand and a feel for the psychology of a work on the other.

A young conductor from Sweden, Christian Karlsen, once told me about a game his mentor Tom Morris would play, making lists of the most insensitive and clumsy concert programmes he had encountered. Along with many others he listed the following five different concert programmes: 1) Antonio Vivaldi “The Four Seasons” – Anton Bruckner “Symphony No. 9” 2) Ludwig van Beethoven “Symphony No. 3 (Eroica)” – Johannes Brahms “Symphony No. 1” 3) Johann Sebastian Bach “Magnificat” – Carl Orff “Carmina Burana” 4) Gustav Mahler “Symphony No. 9” – Frédéric Chopin “Piano Concerto No. 1” 5) Modest Mussorgsky/Maurice Ravel “Pictures at an Exhibition” – Igor Stravinsky “Le Sacre du Printemps” – Maurice Ravel “Bolero” So how do you actually go about making a good concert programme? Of course you can follow the line: overture – solo concerto – intermission – symphony, and you will never disappoint anyone.

But to find new ways of combining formats, to find new concert dramaturgies is of course an important part of keeping contemporary music contemporary. There are curators who seek the clash, who will have a recorder piece performed between two orchestral pieces.

Whether this somewhat brutal method of revising concert life really does lead to new musical experiences must remain undecided. One of the great disappointments of making concert programmes and experimenting with different dramaturgies is that concert programmes with an emotional ending are the most satisfying and get the most applause and praise. Obviously even the contemporary music listener is looking for something that enlightens or moves or overwhelms, something to take home.

One additional aspect of Pannini’s painting is that the context dominates the pieces shown. No matter what the “original painter” had in mind, it has now become part of the legend of the city of Rome.

It can be dangerous to give titles to concerts, to subsume works under a motto and curate a festival under the premises of a unifying subject. I remember the anger of a composer from Palestine who happens to be an atheist, when he realised that one of his artworks was part of a concert programme titled “Islam in contemporary music”. You can bend and twist the perception of a work by placing it in a context. Just imagine the damage done by a concert headed “Music by racist composers”...

Thematic superstructures serve many functions. They can of course direct the thoughts of the programme maker. Let’s think about art and violence and see what names we come up with, what works would have to be played or commissioned? Subjects and mottoes are furthermore necessary for selling ideas to a funding institution.

A jury needs a cause in order to develop a liking for a project. You cannot apply for funding by saying “I want to put up some excellent music”. Then come the journalists who are also in urgent need of a motif. They have to sell the festival report to the editor, and they will then need something to write about that links and contextualises the pieces so that their readers can actually place the artwork in the world. And finally it also has an impact on the artwork itself and thus become artistically meaningful. There are artists who are willing to dig themselves into subject matter and find musical equivalents for a specific idea. When Alan Hilario, to give example of how a festival idea can actually be the fertile soil for great art, was asked to write a piece for the Audio Poverty festival in Berlin in 2009 the original concern was pointing toward the Schoenbergian Verein für musikalische Privataufführungen (The Society for Private Musical Performances) and the idea of reduction and exclusion, but Hilario soon picked up ideas from his youth in the Philippines and the idea of music in a Third World country, not being able to fund a fancy art event in the first place and the importance of the art of Karaoke. The piece was much closer related to the festival idea than originally intended.

Inertia and momentum Being an artistic director does not mean that one is in charge of everything. One is only to be held responsible for all that may go wrong. Decisions are usually not made alone. There are many interests involved and there is too much at stake for one person to be completely autonomous. On the one hand it is a good thing that no single person has so much power. The arts should not be a case for dictatorship and tyranny. The fact that most festivals are run by a sole artistic director is actually terrible. Where are the principles of dialogue, of pooling ideas, of discussion, debate, discourse, and democracy if the artistic director sits in his office staring out the window waiting for his brilliant idea to appear? Yes, it is sometimes good not to have to compromise. But is the dictator really the principle by which we want to govern the life of contemporary music?

In Germany those festival directors who are appointed by the broadcasting station responsible for a new music festival are in office until

their retirement, sometimes running a festival for well over 20 years.

Does that coincide with the principles of permanent renewal? But even though the festival is being run by a single person, this person has to deal with the needs of everyone involved: composers, musicians, publishers, co-commissioners, agents, and collaborators.

When it comes to putting up a concert, the priorities and the attention soon shift. I remember one day, when I was talking with a composer who was explaining his very complex and highly philosophical concept to me, my thoughts started drifting away. I really wasn’t paying attention before my subconscious picked up the words “... in complete darkness”. Immediately my alarm bells went of. What about fire and police security? How dark will it be exactly? What about emergency exits?

With great envy I once read Hans Ulrich Obrist’s interviews with curators of the older generation, with Walter Hopps on his first exhibitions in Los Angeles and Johannes Cladders who ran a small venue in Krefeld. 1 They seemed to have been free in what they did, since they did not have to meet any expectations. They did not have to count visitors, they were not depending on good reviews, and they were not confronted with people who thought it was absolutely necessary that their works were presented at their venue. Being the artistic director of a festival with a long tradition and a great repute can also get in the way. You cannot invent the Donaueschinger Musiktage all over again. And it is hard to do away with all expectations. It was actually not a bad joke when a friend suggested that in 2017 in Donaueschingen there should only be 8-channel tape pieces. The fact that it can only be a joke is actually a tragedy. Another pressure point to deal with is the facilitation of the masterwork. Such a masterwork is expected from all curators at regular intervals. It is of course not known what such a masterpiece is supposed to look like or how one goes about commissioning one. It is always only after having heard the piece that everyone is then certain that such a masterpiece has emerged, like after the performance of Enno Poppe’s Speicher in Donaueschingen in 2013 or Rebecca Saunders’ VOID at the Wittener Tage für neue Kammermusik in 2014.

One way to seemingly assure the regular production of masterworks is to ask famous composers to write large-scale pieces which will make the musicians look good and will be praised by the audience.

To do without this type of commission would mean to jeopardise the idea of contemporary music altogether. Concerts also serve to reassure the contemporary music audience of its own importance, value and sovereignty. This means coming to terms with the representational function of a festival. But this type of commission also means playing it safe, and taking little risk to none cannot be good for the arts. In a discussion about curating festivals, Ultima’s Lars Petter Hagen once said that if we are not willing to take risks and start questioning everything we are doing in contemporary music today, that’s when we are actually jeopardising the legitimacy of contemporary music. This reechoes an observation Carl Dahlhaus once made about the masterpiece – that you couldn’t consciously wish to make one. Dahlhaus in fact said that every composer who sets out to write a masterpiece will inevitably fail since the masterwork means that something paradigmatically new comes about that could not be foreseen by anyone involved, not even by its creator. And of course some 25 years after cultural studies, post-colonialism, political correctness and the questioning of the role of the (dead) white male European, it is really frustrating that we are actually still dealing with the idea of the masterwork at all.

Going to prison Saying no is an unpleasant part of the job as curator. Another is negotiating finances. There are a lot of nos. And there are lots of finances. The life of music is completely ruled by the mechanisms of competition, money, and success. A filmmaker from the Netherlands once made a film about unsuccessful artists. 2 In order to find candidates for her movie she actually published ads. A lot of people called in, telling her how unsuccessful they were. But you cannot imagine the heartfelt sorrow of those artists that were not chosen for the film. Many of the artists the filmmaker turned down kept calling assuring her of the fact that they were in fact unsuccessful beyond comparison. The question is if we can really overcome the principles of winners and losers. Why do we have to live with these categories of competition that might be reasonable in sports and the financial world? Should the arts not have overcome this kind of thinking long ago? Just remember that there was a time when techno music 12-inches didn’t reveal who the musician behind it was. They were anonymous white labels, and the only thing that mattered was that the music was ‘kicking ass’.

One of the nicer parts of the curator’s job is discussing music with the composers. “Just tell me what the instrumentation is, how long the piece is supposed to be and I will take care of the rest,” a composer once said to me. I did not make me feel superfluous. I respect any artist that doesn’t want to engage in in-depth conversations with the curator. The composer works alone, he or she has his or hers ideas and strategies of making these ideas work. Maybe only an invisible curator can be a good curator?

One story still impresses me. The Mexican musician and sound artist Mario de Vega often works with explosives when exhibiting in Mexico, reflecting upon the omnipresence of gunpowder and fireworks in Mexican society. When once detonating a bomb in a gallery space in order to prepare the space for the exhibition, the fire service was called and de Vega and his curator went to prison, albeit just for a couple of hours. The fact that the curator knew that something heavily illegal was going to happen but nonetheless supported de Vega in realising the project and in the end joined him in prison is a degree of responsibility for the artist and the artwork that I can only pay my highest respect to. It is not only about the romantic notion of supporting the arts at all costs, but also about acknowledging the necessity for art to go beyond boundaries. It is the curator’s job to make sure that no one gets hurt, and to carry as much of the risk that lies within the artistic process as possible. His role is that of the mediator between the artist and institutions that might not be willing to understand the liberating aspects of the work.

It does not always have to be a bomb, of course. The discussions with orchestras that feel misunderstood or even put on are legendary in the history of contemporary music. There are works written against the orchestra, criticising the apparatus by having it play the impossible and that will cause resentment among the musicians. There are works of conceptual nature that hardly challenging the musicians.

In the German context Dieter Schnebel’s 1977 orchestra workshop and concert “OPXEΣTPA” comes to mind, initiating actions within the orchestra by which he insinuated that the musicians are in fact alienated from the music, which he wanted to change. This made the musicians really angry, finally distributing leaflets before the concert by which they distanced themselves from Schnebel’s work. The liberation of the orchestra is not in the hands of the composer - nor the curator. The orchestra can only liberate itself.

Theory and practice An interesting part of the contemporary music world that is not often pointed out is the tradition of biography. The German practice of hiring musicologists as the head of festivals is a rather singular idea.

It has, of course, to do with the role of the broadcasting companies after the Second World War and the fact that a music programme editor for the musical station would always be a musicologist. In other countries it is usually a composer or a musician who run festivals.

There are things to be said about both solutions, the composer/musician personally being the one that is more accustomed to the practice of the music life, about the necessities of production, whereas the musicologist might make more of the historical significance of a work. But more important, the different professions have different listening cultures, thus the composer will always be composing along whilst listening, the musician is more involved with practical manners of how it sounds, how it is to play and how the music presents itself within the concert frame, and the musicologist is looking for significance from a historical or theoretical perspective.

Having said that, it is important to point out a fact once one has engaged in the field of curating one will soon develop a specific view.

In his interview with Hans Ulrich Obrist, Seth Siegellaub points to the professional routine of viewing art. And in fact the listening habits of the curator have the tendency of growing somewhat condescending toward performances and artworks. One task is really to not fall into that trap, to overcome routines and find new approaches to listening, because otherwise concerts will fall into the role of institutionalising the arts, or as Siegellaub put it: “The ‘authority’ of museum spaces makes everything so ‘museum-like’.” He elaborates that Claude Gintz showed “L’art conceptuel, une perspective” at the Musée d’Art moderne de la Ville de Paris in 1989 everything looked “dead”: “But isn’t this one of the more important functions of museums, to kill things, to finish them off, to give them authority, thus distance them from people by removing them from their everyday context? Even over and above the will of the actors involved with any given museum, I think the structure of museums tends toward this kind of activity: historicising.

They become something of a “cemetery for art.” 3 Musicologists of the 1970s started a discussion about the ideology of the concert hall, questioning the bourgeois background of the classical tradition. It was a discussion similar to the “museum of the

future” discussion in the visual arts. The classical concert has not been abolished since, but there have been many experiments with the concert form, finding new venues, new audience spaces, having concerts in the dark, in promenades or “liquid rooms”. 4 But the discussion concerning concert formats today is not about ideology.

It is about getting funding and developing audiences. It is a question of hedging one’s bets. What is missing is a discussion about what contemporary music wants to be about. A discussion similar to what was brought up in the 1970s. It may mean to give up some of the great accomplishments of the past decades, but we cannot risk turning our festivals into cemeteries. And we shouldn’t wake the dead. “This used to be utopian music”; Norwegian composer Øyvind Torvund once said, “and now it is a style.” It is this development we have to reverse. It is of course not only curators who need to engage in this process. And it is in fact above all composers and musicians who started questioning the premises of music making in the 21st century. All we need now is courage and good faith.

Björn Gottstein (born 1967 in Aachen, Germany) studied musicology and is currently working as an editor for contemporary music for the Südwestrundfunk in Stuttgart, Germany, and is the artistic director of the Donaueschinger Musiktage.

1 Hans Ulrich Obrist “A Brief History of Curating”, Zurich & Dijon 2013.

2 José van der Schoot “Erfolglose Künstler” (1995).

3 Hans Ulrich Obrist “A Brief History of Curating”. Zurich & Dijon 2013, 120.

4 A concert format developed by the Belgian Ictus Ensemble and presented for example at the Internationale Ferienkurse für Neue Musik in Darmstadt 2014 and at MaerzMusik in Berlin 2015.

Contributors Joanna Bailie, Björn Gottstein, Juliana Hodkinson and Agnete Seerup Translation and proofreading John Irons Editors Agnete Seerup (resp.), Anne Marqvardsen and Anna Berit Asp Christensen Design Pulsk Ravn Printing Narayana Press Financial support has gratefully been received from The Danish Arts Foundation, pool for Information, documentation and publications – Music

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