Goethe-Institut Music Section Newsletter

Thanks to our collaboration with BR-Klassik, a number of Goethe-Institut music projects will be presented in a new quarterly radio series called Dialog der Kulturen – Aktuelle Projekte des Goethe-Instituts. The opening episode (11.05 pm on 2 October 2021) is about the current music scene in Iraq, specifically Egmont in Iraq, a music theatre production recently staged in Baghdad despite the Covid-19 crisis and all its attendant complications and obstacles. Presenter Uta Sailer talks to people involved in the show about artistic and technical aspects of the production and about the current Iraqi arts scene.

COLLECTIVE; Op. 135 – Berlin Exposition is a music theatre production that grew out of the Goethe-Institut’s The other Beethoven(s) project. In this piece performed by the Sonar Quartet along with deaf dancer/performer Ines Konietzko-Fischer, Tehran actress Elham Korda and mezzo-soprano Claudia van Hasselt, Iranian composer Amen Feizabadi explores issues of political and cultural alienation and exclusion. The focus is on the perception of performance practice: the audience is confronted with various restrictions of sensory perception, the kind experienced by people with physical impairments. This music theatre project is designed for hearing as well as deaf spectators. Performances will be held on 2 October 2021 at 7:30 pm and 3 October 2021 at 5 pm at the Villa Elisabeth in Berlin and will also be livestreamed.

The Tarabya Cultural Academy is holding a multidisciplinary festival, Studio Bosporus, till the end of October to mark its tenth anniversary. In addition to screenings, concerts, performances and readings, an exhibition in Berlin-Kreuzberg will present about 30 different artistic positions by former fellows of the Cultural Academy and Turkish artists. The focus of the two-month festival will be on crucial questions of German-Turkish dialogue and social diversity in both countries.

Timezones is a podcast series exploring the diverse worlds and practices of musical artists around the world, asking: What is involved in living and working in culture and the arts nowadays in different countries, cities and contexts? In a long, wide swathe running from the US to Bangladesh, this experimental journey processes the artists’ thoughts and moods, their social, political and intellectual realities, and their (life) philosophies into artistic audio collages. The podcast is a joint project of the Goethe-Institut and Norient. Each new episode of the English-language podcast series is released on the last Thursday of the month, starting with "Survival and Engagement Through Many Languages" about the San Francisco Bay Area on 30 September 2021.

The present-day arts scene is vivacious, multifarious and global, and yet our conception of so-called "contemporary music" remains pretty Eurocentric even in the 21st century. Why is that? This question is explored in Postcolonial Recherche, a collaborative project of the Goethe-Institut and ensemble recherche. Over the course of a year, ten composers selected from developing and emerging nations will discuss artistic issues and closely – but virtually – collaborate with the ensemble recherche musicians. South African composer and musician Bongani Ndodana-Breen is going to be curating the project. An interview with him has now been posted on the ensemble recherche website.

The Goethe-Institut in association with the German Embassy in Bishkek, the Kyrgyz capital, has provided support for the Rosa Otunbaeva Foundation project by purchasing musical instruments for the so-called jailoo children. Every summer, the foundation opens day camps for kids in the jailoos, the traditional remote upland pastures of Kyrgyzstan, where children and teenagers can spend their free time playing and learning. The Goethe-Institut's Music Division sets aside € 50,000 annually to support the development of the performing arts and cultural infrastructure abroad by donating musical instruments.