Press conference March 28, 2007
Linz 2009 Kulturhauptstadt Europas: Musical Concept
with Martin Heller, Artistic Director Linz09 und Peter Androsch, Conception Music Linz09
Wednesday, March 28, 2007, 10 a.m.
Anton Bruckner University / Göllerichsaal, Wildbergstr. 18
The title “European Capital of Culture” serves as our guideline: we see culture as the way people coexist with one another and with nature—thus, how they configure the circumstances of their lives. One sphere in which these living conditions assume immediate and concrete form is acoustic space. Everything that is audible constitutes acoustic space. It is all-embracing, public just as much as it is private, openly propagated and intimate at the same time.
There are still hardly any generally accepted rules governing acoustic space; thus, what we’re currently witnessing is something like the Auditory Wild West in which acoustic claims are being staked out and new territories occupied using technological means.
Acoustic space must be made the subject of conscious reflection and subject to planning and zoning policies. The culture of acoustic space has to be worthy of a democratic society.
Accordingly, the musical program of Linz 2009 European Capital of Culture pursues three objectives: human self-determination in acoustic space too; sensitization as a higher degree of consciousness of (acoustic) sensory perception; and concentration that becomes tangible in radical approaches to topics and their realization.
The programmatic principles are: distinctiveness, manifest support for innovation, making audible the creative potential that resides in and has emerged from Linz and Upper Austria, as well as respect for artists, guests, speakers and audience members.
The Projects – A Topography of Hearing
The musical program will present clearly positioned content that maximizes organizational flexibility and variety.
Some of the musical projects have links to existing structures such as festivals, concert series and cultural institutions; open up venues for intensive encounters with individual themes; formulate fundamental artistic and political statements on particular issues; or are set in motion as tours, campaigns and temporary interventions.
Campaign to Win Back Acoustic Space
We have become a society of noise. Slowly and steadily, our environment, which is so strongly dominated by images and visual stimuli, has gotten loud. The rich biodiversity of site-specific sounds, voices and noises has given way to the monotonous background din of vehicular traffic that is everywhere the same. Public acoustic space is a battlefield upon which a wide variety of private and private sector interests are being pursued.
Enterprises have long since begun using audio branding as a means of staking their acoustic claims as well to public spaces, and the operation of the appliances of daily use that surround us have long been producing custom-engineered sounds. More than a third of the music industry’s revenues are generated by retailing ringtones for the cellphones that, thanks to the inherent absence of the interlocutor, have endowed the private conversation in a public space with the appearance of a monolog.
In the shopping centers, stores, restaurants and waiting rooms acoustically plastered with more or less inconspicuous musical wallpaper, audio tracks attuned to the time of day and the target audience’s demographics tweak the emotional guidance systems of those present in that space. In the car, on the job, in the offices of our service society, format radio with its totalitarian mix of music, news and extended commercial breaks has achieved airwave superiority.
The iPod as the Walkman’s more potent successor allows its owner to move freely about the public sphere while barricaded in a tonal universe of his/her own choosing.
Peace and quite have become a value-enhancing feature of real estate, vacations and leisure-time experiences for which a tidy surcharge is due. Among the walls cordoning off rich from poor is a sound barrier.
Whoever is poor lives amidst noise.
Acoustic environmental pollution is perhaps the last major unrecognized environmental problem, and one that is so ubiquitous that not even the environmental protection organizations are conscious of it.
Linz 2009 European Capital of Culture is working on a campaign
- for a public acoustic space that is democratic and fit for human habitation
- for the (human) right to acoustic self-determination
- for a critical acoustic consciousness
- against being involuntarily subjected to ambient sounds
- against the abuse, destruction and impoverishment of the acoustic sphere.
PLANNED PROJECTS
A selection
Parade
Public spaces in Linz have long served as open-air stages for a wide variety of musical events and thus have simultaneously became the scene of a struggle for the assertion of cultural hegemony—from the Nazis’ marching bands to the May Day processions of the Socialists and Communists. In these days of unavoidable commercial audio saturation and of the socially suggested cult of intimacy, what’s called for are personal and communal acoustic experiences in urban tonal space that give back to the public sphere some of its dignity and significance.
The scenario that’s been chosen to accomplish this is a parade of peripatetic musicians featuring great tonal artistry convening from all points of the compass—from Central Europe, the edges of the continent and beyond—that orients itself multi-dimensionally on the typography of the city. Accordingly, this conclave will not focus exclusively on downtown Linz; the routes will be dispersed, with the harbor and Pöstlingberg as featured culmination points. The musical spectrum will include oom-pah bands, players of the antelope horn and bagpipes, brass ensembles and choruses, and will make due without (occasionally fetishized) electronic amplification. The creative encounter with musical diversity is emblematic of one of Europe’s greatest cultural achievements, which the crossing of borders and migration have played an essential role in bringing about.
Moreover, the act of accompanying these musicians on their routes through the city is meant to make us even more cognizant of just how much immediate experiential quality the public sphere has lost as a result of its reduction to a setting for motorized locomotion.
The prototype of this musical and acoustic experience is the music of the Tonga people of Zimbabwe, Ngoma Buntibe, which is rooted in the spiritual and social life of an African village and which caused a sensation and made history at the Festival of the Regions in 1997 as part of an expedition over the Totes Gebirge mountain range in Upper Austria. Keith Goddard and Peter Kuthan, the originators of Parade, have been passionately committed to the music of the Tonga for more than 10 years, and they have already lined up numerous artists to join in on this process of cultural exchange between Austria and Zimbabwe.
Circus
Circus is content and venue all wrapped into one. Always updated, mobile, open. And: Circus has no stage. It is the stage.
Everyone is part of the action; everything is comprehensible, transparent. And nevertheless, Circus is a place full of mysteries and magic. Here, we’ll present musical programs that will enchant young and old alike.
Circus will be setting up its tents for an extended run in Linz and vicinity.
Montezuma – Falling Eagle
Music theater by Bernhard Lang
Montezuma – Falling Eagle, based on a text by Christian Loidl (1957-2001), is a lyrically refracted account of the last days of Montezuma.
The projected work of music theater aspires to textual polyphony in that the primary plot is overlaid by the story of Syd Barret, the legendary founder of Pink Floyd, and brachiated into additional lyrical text compositions by Loidl. This work is realized by means of a theatrical installation that fits seamlessly into the architecture of the Brucknerhaus venue and that presents various different action points by the cast to the audience walking through the stage set.
The suspension of boundaries, the dissolution of (space) contours and the ecstatic opening of space are the programmatic components of the mise en scène. Musically, the piece uses looped gesticulations and synchronized movements of bodies and sounds to explore difference/repetition machinery.
On another level, inherent in this work is the commemoration of Christian Loidl, friend and inspiration. It is a sort of tribute to him and the high-energy scene he was a part of.
Fouché (Working title)
An opera by Franz Hummel
Libretto: Sandra Hummel
“Joseph Fouché” presents the personality of this public figure in order to deliver a dramatic psychogram of the obsession with power, a Hieronymus Bosch-type parable about a phenomenon that, albeit with much less boldness and wit, still haunts the corridors of democracy.
Fouché was Napoleon’s chief of police, monk and instructor priests, Jacobin, master of intrigue, intellectual mass murderer, and the inventor of total state surveillance. Having amassed great wealth and nearing the end of his days, Fouché—with the half-hearted approval of Metternich—flees into exile in Linz. Sensitive and subtle, highly educated, totally amoral, the Fouché that arrives in Upper Austria is a pitiable creature. Day in and day out, he ambles about the penitentiary-like central courtyard of his villa, constantly casting his searching, anxiety-ridden gaze towards a lone figure standing atop a distant hill. Is it Bonaparte? Is the man pursuing him? Keeping him under surveillance?
Fearful visions alternate with hybrid attacks and reveal the utterly dire straits in which he now finds himself, the man who had been obsessed with power but had always played second fiddle, the man whose cunningly weaved web of espionage and betrayal had finally come to be regarded as treacherous by the man of action himself: Napoleon.
Robespierre, Marat, Danton, Louis XVIII, Lafayette, Napoleon, Josephine Bonaparte: Each of these figures from his past steps forth from the anonymity of the chorus to torment Fouché’s memory.
His name synonymous with corruption and abuse of power, Fouché remains, as a faithful pater familias, the prototype of the loveless and unloved individual driven by the compulsion to know everything about everyone. He ends up a human wreck.
Instant Anton
Symphonic hits for advanced players: The previously unknown Urfahr versions of Bruckner’s symphonies finally get the attention and acceptance they rightfully deserve.
Instant Anton offers the essence of Bruckner’s tonal worlds.
PROJECTS IN COOPERATION
A selection
Projects of the Anton Bruckner University
Culture IN THE SCENE: Meditating Cultural Activities
Undergrads at the Anton Bruckner University for Music, Drama and Dance are developing interdisciplinary approaches to artistic performance and ways of facilitating a wide variety of target audiences’ encounters with cultural offerings. They’re being supported in this endeavor by European experts in the field of staging and presenting works of music and art.
Six cultural mediation projects for all age groups are being planned for 2009. Each will be the offshoot of a prior workshop.
Storytelling with musical accompaniment for our youngest audiences, up-close-and-personal chamber music (in the literal sense of the word) in assisted living facilities, hybrid film/dance/music performances for young adults, and composition workshops in music schools—we’re exploring a wide variety of approaches that provide for direct contact between audiences and performers, and enable the general public to experience art and culture in a creative way.
Project director: Constanze Wimmer
Linz–Vilnius: Composers and Performers Workshop
Students and teachers arrange works by composers from Europe’s 2009 joint capitals of culture.
Prime emphasis will be on the workshop character, whereby the close encounter of composers and performers is designed to engender an intensive process of cultural exchange that contributes to the sustainable propagation of contemporary music from Lithuania and Austria.
The plan is to arrange working phases of about a week in the respective cities beginning in 2007 in order for the students and teachers to learn the works on site with the composers. The working phases will conclude with a public concert.
A CD documenting this artistic encounter will then be released in both cities.
Project director: Norbert Girlinger
Music, Dance and Performance in the Age of Electronic Media Art: An International Symposium
This symposium will take an interdisciplinary approach to analyzing the opportunities, limits and challenges inherent in the interdependence of art and electronic media, as well as aspects of their theoretical, technological, sociological, aesthetic and pedagogical implications.
Furthermore, participants will elaborate on specific aspects of electronic media art in the fields of music, dance and performance including new challenges in the artistic design of media projects, the composition and realization of interactive works in the context of concerts and performances, soundscape projects, computer-supported musical analysis and interpretational research, and the development and analysis of the possibilities of applying new music and media technology for scientific, pedagogical and artistic-cultural purposes.
Project director: Peter Revers
Blacklisted Music: A Symposium
This project offers the opportunity to confront the history of the Bruckner Conservatory from 1945 until its conversion into the Anton Bruckner Private University, and to subject its various interconnections with and the aftereffects of National Socialist thinking to objective, open-minded and critical examination.
To accomplish this, scholars will have access to documents in the files of the Bruckner Conservatory and in the archives of the City of Linz and the Province of Upper Austria as well as material from private collections in order to authoritatively determine the extent to which 1945 meant complete continuity or a new beginning for cultural life in Upper Austria.
This investigation will focus particularly on Allied cultural policymaking in the wake of the collapse of the Nazi regime, on the postwar directors of the Bruckner Conservatory and on the question of what reparations means in the context of cultural values.
This symposium is being conducted jointly with the Department of Contemporary History of the Johannes Kepler University of Linz. Historian Oliver Rathkolb and university faculty members will deliver addresses and present research results compiled by their students.
Project Director: Anton Voigt
“Ida and Jim – The Linz Diaries”: A Danced Jazz Cantata
Students from abroad who are currently enrolled at the Anton Bruckner Private University—temporary residents of the city—are given the opportunity to speak their minds and artistically express how they experience Linz.
Segments of interviews with foreign students discussing their experiences in Linz and the fictional love story of Ida and Jim (the names stand for the Institute for Dance Art and the Department of Jazz and Improvised Music) give rise to a plot that serves as the basis for a musical dance performance.
Project Participants: The IDA dancers and the JIM – Think Bigger Orchestra plus the New Vocal Ensemble (an artistic joint venture of several of the school’s departments).
Project Director: Christoph Cech
Further cooperations
Plus, we are currently negotiating cooperation agreements with some of the leading institutions in the Linz music scene such as the Brucknerhaus, the Bruckner Orchestra, the Landestheater and the Posthof.
Staff
The musical concept of Linz 2009 European Capital of Culture has been developed by Linz composer Peter Androsch who is responsible for its content.
Staff members:
Elke Wagner, MSc (assistant)
Dr. Peter Leisch (consultant/programming)
Alois Fischer (consultant/programming)
Florian Sedmak, MAS (research/concept) Engelbert Ecker (research/texts)
Mag. Peter Kuthan (research/organization)
Leo Saftic, MAS (organization)
Elke Santin (office organization)
