Music

The music project “into ...” of the Ensemble Modern and the Siemens Arts Programme, in collaboration with the Goethe Institute, is the attempt to use music to explore the essence of a city.

There are marvellous descriptions of cities in poems and illustrated books. But how does the heart of a city sound? That was the question which Jens Cording, Director of the Siemens Arts Programme in Munich, and Roland Diry, manager of the Ensemble Modern, asked themselves. They had a study made on immigration and invited composers to let their impressions of four mega-cities sound forth in music played by the Ensemble Modern. In a series of four concerts, the composers presented their musical views of Istanbul, Dubai, Johannesburg and Pearl River Delta.

The access of the composer to the respective place was as individual as his personality. From some, one experienced less about the city than about his method. The staff of the local Goethe Institutes made it possible for the composers to form their own personal pictures of the places. They showed the composers round and enabled them to meet important representatives of various branches of the arts and sciences. During their stay, the Goethe Institute organised musical events and provided the stimulus for intense discussions on music.

into Istanbul

The most intense works were about Istanbul. The culturally rich city on the Bosphorus, at the threshold between Asia and Europe, inspired the imagination and enchanted the composers. For the thirty-nine year-old Israeli-Palestinian Samir Odeh-Tamimi, a picture by the Turkish painter Osman Hamdi Bey, entitled The Tortoise Teacher, exploded into the chant of the muezzin, the noise of the streets, the images of the synagogues and bridges. Cihangir is his declaration of love for the city. The Austrian-Swiss composer Beat Furrer was fascinated by the “incredibly accomplished chanting” of the imam of Sultan Achmet Mosque. It inspired his Xenos, which means “the stranger” in modern Greek and “hospitality” in ancient Greek. For the fifty-four year-old Russian composer Vladimir Tarnopolski, the personal encounter with the city turned his original idea of a “Westanbul” into his Eastanbul. The French composer Mark Andre blended interiors with each other: mosques in Istanbul with Western concert halls, people from Istanbul with people Stuttgart, all whispering their names. His Üg is derived from the Turkish word for “transition”.

into Johannesburg

In Johannesburg, the composers were confronted with fear and violence, which broke out again and again from below the surface of an apparently humane and peaceful co-existence. The tones of the forty-six year-old Lucia Ronchetti’s Rumori da monumenti resound from the depths of the old gold mines like the pulse of the earth, admonishing like ancient souls. The thirty-six year-old Dortmund composer, Jörg Birkenkötter, would have liked to stroll through the streets of Johannesburg, but as for reasons of safety this is possible only with restrictions he wrote a musical stroll, entitled with keys. In his Johannesburg Hymns the thirty-four year-old Norwegian composer Lars Petter Hagen employed vuvuzuelas, musical instruments that are used to express protest and that will probably be banned from the Football World Championship in 2010. The thirty-one year-old English composer Luke Bedford felt constantly afraid in Johannesburg and sought out a refuge on a hill with a view over the city; his work is entitled By the Screen in the Sun at the Hill on the Gold.

into Dubai

Dubai, the city in the desert, whose alluring image of being a paradisiacal land of milk and honey has been badly scratched, appeared shuttered up. The true culture is hidden behind closed doors, in a strong Arabic culture and in the desert. All the composers spoke about it, but their music spoke of the everyday life. The thirty-six year old Munich composer Jörg Widmann wrote Dubaian Dances (Dubairische Tänze); awareness of the 1,000 years-old ban on music in Dubai led the forty-two year old Karlsruhe composer Marcus Hechtle to write Empty Quarter (Leere Viertel); the thirty-four year-old Hungarian composer Márton Illés discovered the smallest beasties in the mega city for his Scene polidimensionali XVI “...Körök”; and the thirty-seven year-old Lithuanian composer Vykintas Baltakas visited people at the markets and in lifts and sought the authenticity of culture in his Lift to Dubai.

into Pearl River Delta

In the inconceivably big metropolitan area of the Pearl River Delta the composers re-discovered the fascination of the small gestures of everyday life that make life human and endearing: the smile of the waitress in the soup kitchen who recognises you, or the meaning of you own standpoint, whether at the assembly line or at a place where you can look all around into the distance. The forty-eight year-old composer Unsuk Chin discovered her Gougalon Scenes in street theatre performances. Walking through this glitzy city of skyscrapers, the forty-seven year-old composer Johannes Schöllhorn was fascinated by its village-like quiet and wrote his No-Man’s Land (Niemandsland). The thirty-three year-old Scottish composer David Fennessy discovered the individual in sites of mass production in his 13 Factories. The fifty-seven year-old Heiner Goebbels found no tones for the Ensemble Modern; he recorded a taxi trip in Hong Kong and processed the sounds himself in his home studio, under the title out of. The fifty-four year-old British composer Benedict Mason returned to his beginnings as a filmmaker and had the Ensemble Modern play Chinese-sounding music live to his contribution. His film was essentially on the trail of minor everyday situations. For the title, he painted a Chinese ideograph that he invented.