Recollections- day 5

Monday January 21st: Started the day off with a great conversation over breakfast, discussing our varying responses to virtuosity, cliche, 8-channel spatialisation, and other prominent and not so prominent aspects of the previous days string quartet and electronics concerts. Making our way to the Hans Eisler Hochschüle after a quick lunch we had the first of four sessions of discussions and masterclasses with Berlin-based composers. This first one was with Wolfgang Heiniger, a composer of electronic, computer, and chamber works with a distinct interest in theatricality, machines and the social situations surrounding the creation and presentation of music. The first two hours or so of our meeting with him consisted of group discussions of questions such as "what is music" and "what does a musician do" which lead into/overlapped with a fairly informal introduction of his music and interests. To list a few particularly characteristic points raised and discussed:

• music as social act
• the history of music as the history of technology
• the history of electroacoustic music as the history of technology in the 20th century
• correlations between the master-slave relationship and our contemporary relationship with machines - the topic of the liberation of machines
• the musician as one who presents or reveals (zeigen auf Deutsch) - the object of their presenting/revealing being sound. 

The masterclasses were similarly fascinating, including a discussion of the nature of theatricality in Tony's voice + viola piece I don't know what I would do without you, resistance in notation in Jessie's I did not see it to the end, and notational paradigms in Elise's string quartet. 

After vast quantities of sushi for dinner we attended a concert in the Volksbühne at Rosa-Luxemburg Platz featuring music by Karlheinz Stockhausen, Fabien Levy, and Christoph Ogiermann performed by the Neue Vocalsolisten Stuttgart. Having previously noticed the peculiarities of a state-funded new music festival (a concept totally alien to many of us, coming from the US) this concert, which fell on an important anniverary of the Élysée Treaty, really emphasised this aspect of Ultraschall, as the Fabien Levy piece, a lengthy work for 6 vocalists and 6 instrumentalists dealing with issues of guilt and forgiveness in the relationships between French and German intellectuals during and following world war II, was preceded by speeches by various German and French government officials, including the French minister of culture. Following the distinctly utopian late-period Stockhausen vocal work Menschen, Hört and Levy's piece, Ogiermann's aggressive, hyperactive piece for amplified voices and electronics was a daring programming choice- with the 6 vocalists surrounding the audience, shouting and occassionally screaming fragments of german texts - often disrupted and distorted by glitchy electronics, distorting any clear understanding of what was being said- the only clear statement occurring towards the end of the piece as the phrase "ich bin der Chef" ("I am the boss") was yelled aggressively for what felt like a short eternity. Viscerally disturbing music that prompted a lot of conversation over drinks that evening.