MaerzMusik Festival 2024
MaerzMusik’s guest performance at the Akademie der Künste deepens the collaboration between the two institutions and demonstrates the festival’s interdisciplinary focus; musical explorations dealing with the ethics of improvisation can be experienced. The programme also includes artistic interventions that expand the potential of the voice and search for new forms of co-creation.
As part of MaerzMusik 2024, the following events will take place at the Akademie der Künste on Hanseatenweg on Friday, 22 March:
2 – 6 pm
Library goes AdK
Discussion and Reading with George Lewis, Harald Kisiedu
Hanseatenweg, free admission
7 – 8 pm
Topographies of Hearing: YOUR MOUTH LIMB DISMEMBERED, THE GRADUAL TONGUE DISSECTED
Performance and Installation with Audrey Chen, Hugo Esquinca
Hanseatenweg / Halle 3, free admission
8:30 – 11 pm
(Musical) Ethics Lab 6
Concert, Workshop Presentation and Discussion with Splitter Orchester, Trondheim Jazz Orchestra
Hanseatenweg / Studio, 20/15 €
Discussion & Reading: Library goes AdK
On 22 March, the MaerzMusik Library will head to the Akademie der Künste on Hanseatenweg to exhibit “Contemplations into the Radical Others”, the research project on Lucia Dlugoszewski. In addition to this transfer of knowledge, the new book Composing While Black will be presented in a discussion, with authors George Lewis and Harald Kisiedu.
Knowledge isn’t static – in fact, it has to keep moving in order to survive. The MaerzMusik Library will make a guest appearance at the Akademie der Künste, deepening the collaboration between the institutions, contextualising the media exhibited during the festival in a different location and expanding on central issues. In addition to a book stand and an exhibition of multimedia content from the research project “Contemplations into the Radical Others” on the life and work of Lucia Dlugoszewski, the literal transfer of knowledge will be deepened in a round of talks. Members of the Akademie der Künste, including George Lewis, who co-edited the anthology Composing While Black with Harald Kisiedu this year, will meet with an audience for a discussion.
Performance & Installation: Topographies of Hearing: YOUR MOUTH LIMB DISMEMBERED, THE GRADUAL TONGUE DISSECTED
As part of MaerzMusik’s “Topographies of Hearing” series, Audrey Chen and Hugo Esquinca are presenting their new work “YOUR MOUTH LIMB DISMEMBERED, THE GRADUAL TONGUE DISSECTED”. They push the boundaries of physical expression and the technological manipulation of human sounds.
Through their collaborations, Audrey Chen and Hugo Esquinca simultaneously explore the dynamics between a sonorous body, the processing interaction of a system that responds directly to the particularities of its spectra and the relation these two have with a defined space. “YOUR MOUTH LIMB DISMEMBERED, THE GRADUAL TONGUE DISSECTED”, is presented within the framework of “Topographies of Hearing” at MaerzMusik 2024, as a weeklong intervention across four locales, pushing the physical limits of the hyperextended voice through unstable arrangements for signal processing. Working with the phenomena of phantom limb, oral and auditory perceptions, the voice-process interplay is used as a means to reveal the depth and explosive capabilities of the vocal apparatus, creating residual sensations dispersed through the physical spaces, invoking the artifact of memory inherited into musculature.
“Topographies of Hearing” is a series of sound installations, concerts and durational compositions commissioned by MaerzMusik that pose questions about immersive listening encounters and the ways they are experienced beyond concert halls and performance spaces. Inspired by the work of Maryanne Amacher, the festival has invited Audrey Chen, Hugo Esquinca, Christina Kubisch and Jessica Ekomane to create site-specific sound art in the MaerzMusik Library at the Haus der Berliner Festspiele, at the Akademie der Künste, at SAVVY Contemporary and at other locations in Berlin. These works deal with acoustic images and scenographies of the ear, examining the relationship between audience and environment. Through live concerts and performances that happen either spontaneously or at fixed times throughout the festival, they accompany MaerzMusik as immersive spaces of listening as well as collective experiences that challenge the politics of listening, opposing Western contexts of concert halls and sterile exhibition spaces. Physiological constraints – seated, frontal, contorted – are transformed into new realms of composing and performing music and sound. How can we make our movements resonate? How does the space shape our sound? What sonic imprint do our – human – bodies leave behind? And what can the sounds that came before us tell us about our past as well as choreograph our today and tomorrow?
Concert, Workshop Presentation & Discussion: (Musical) Ethics Lab 6
Since 2022, Splitter Orchester and Trondheim Jazz Orchestra have been actively exploring the connections between improvisation and ethics in a long-term project initiated by Christopher Williams. At MaerzMusik, they will present the practical results of their musical research as a concert and in an extensive audience discussion.
Having ethical principles is one thing; acting ethically is something else. The interdisciplinary, practice-oriented research project “(Musical) Improvisation and Ethics” goes beyond the thoughtless execution of established norms and rules, understanding ethics instead as an ongoing process that is constantly being renegotiated. Bringing together artistic researcher Christopher A. Williams, anthropologist Caroline Gatt and philosopher Joshua Bergamin, in a collaborative partnership with Berlin’s Splitter Orchester and the Trondheim Jazz Orchestra, the project presupposes a combination of habitual behaviour and explores its modulation with and through external and social contexts. To what extent are these processes reflected in the music of large, improvisation-based ensembles?
Since early 2022, Berlin’s Splitter Orchester and the Trondheim Jazz Orchestra have been exploring this question by assembling in the laboratory at irregular intervals to (re)act as free radicals in self-experimentation, or in different configurations, with varying theoretical and practical focal points. By means of experimental improvised music, they attempt to document the genesis of musical material, making visible and simultaneously questioning the values and norms of improvisational practices and their relationships to human and non-human elements in their immediate surroundings. At MaerzMusik, the Splitter Orchester and the Trondheim Jazz Orchestra will for the first time ever join forces on stage to present of the practical results of these intense research processes, both in the form of a concert titled “(Musical) Ethic Lab 6” as well as in an expansive conversation with the audience.