Programme: Music
The centrepiece of the Music Programme was acoustics, with all its political and European ramifications. This area of the programme was given the name HÖRSTADT. HÖRSTADT harks back to the idea underpinning the Linz KLANGWOLKE and expands it by interpreting the entire city as an acoustic space. For Linz, HÖRSTADT opens up undreamt-of possibilities in terms of politics, business, culture, art, education and tourism, independent of fashion trends and short-lived technological fads: it puts the human being as a whole at the centre, as an acoustically sensitive being, as a person.HÖRSTADT grew out of a comprehensive societal coalition involving the administrations of the City and the Province, the Catholic Church, the Austrian Federation of Trade Unions, the Trade Union of Private Employees, the Occupational Health Service, the Labour Inspectorates, the Labour Chamber, the School Board, various media, associations for the hearing impaired, universities and institutions of higher education, Upper Austria’s Landes¬musik¬schulwerk and a number of other institutions and commercial companies. Well-known personalities, such as conductor Franz Welser-Möst, Festival President Helga Rabl-Stadler, mountaineer Reinhold Messner and physicist Anton Zeilinger, came out early in support of HÖRSTADT.
This thematically stringent area was consolidated further by joint venture projects, not all of which are capable of being classified in terms of content even though they all fullfil an important function in the social embedding of the Culture Capital activities. The joint venture projects include collaborations with Brucknerhaus and Posthof, both of which are LIVA subsidiaries, Landestheater Linz, Bruckner Orchester Linz, the Cultural Office of the City of Linz, the Jazz club Count Davies, the festival INNtöne, Jazzatelier Ulrichsberg, Musica Sacra, the Music School of the City of Linz, Anton Bruckner Privatuniversität, Landesmusikdirektion, Jeunesse Musicale and others.
HÖRSTADT consists of three pillars: the LINZ CHARTER, BESCHALLUNGSFREI, the campaign against imposed noise, and AKUSTIKON, the European research and mediation institute dedicated to a long-term development of acoustic space. Additional activities were initiated to intensify and strengthen the campaign character. HÖRSTADT had been conceived from the start as a social process that would continue beyond 2009 to bring about a repositioning of Linz.
The LINZ CHARTER is an attempt to rethink urban development in acoustic terms. It is a compendium of values and goals that are meant to serve as guidelines for future development. The City of Linz is therefore the first city worldwide that has made acoustic considerations part of its political agenda. This was finalised when the Linz City Council passed the LINZ CHARTER unanimously on January 22, 2009. AKUSTIKON, located in Pfarrgasse, is a miniature cosmos of hearing, which is radically dedicated to what is audible and to the process of hearing. It is not only a locus of hearing but also a venue for acoustic research, theory formation and mediation. BESCHALLUNGSFREI, the campaign against imposed noise, is designed to protest our massive exposure to background music in the public sphere.
Once the LINZ CHARTER had been passed, Upper Austria’s Provincial Government endorsed the prioritisation of the struggle against imposed noise, when leading politicians of the ÖVP and the Greens signed a relevant working agreement. This is evidence of the incisive effect that HÖRSTADT has had on societal development. The echo was remarkably strong Europe-wide: The City of Erlangen has also unanimously accepted the LINZ CHARTER, Hörstadt Hannover is due to start in 2010 along the same lines as Linz, the IBA Hamburg (Europe’s largest building exhibition) has invited AKUSTIKON to participate in joint studies, the Festival della Creatività in Florence, which was initiated by the EU, presented HÖRSTADT to its 450,000 visitors, etc. The foundations are being laid for a course in acoustics at Linz University of Arts and Industrial Design and at Johannes Kepler Universität, which will be available from 2012, more than 2,000 sites in Austria have been labelled as “beschallungsfrei”, i.e. free from imposed noise; they include first and foremost the Parliament in Vienna; AKUSTIKON in Pfarrgasse 9-13 will in future be the headquarters of HÖRSTADT.
Within a very short time these initiatives have positioned Linz and Upper Austria as a locus of acoustic awareness and as a centre of acoustic competence. This process has included all social groups and all strata of society and is seen preeminently as a cultural process that showcases the influence we have on the acoustic conditions we live in.
The Music Programme has been able to attract the attention and participation of sizeable audiences even for challenging musical projects, which speaks to its success. To quote a few figures: RUHEPOLE, the oases of quiet, were visited by more than 42,000 people, ORGELSTATIONEN [Organ Stops] by 13,000, the TE DEUM DER TAUSEND [Te Deum of a Thousand Voices] by 9,000, the open air concert FRISCHLUFTKLASSIK [Classics Alfresco] by 16,000, AKUSTIKON up to the end of Culture Capital Year by more than 9,700, CIRCUS by 8,500, PARADE, the Festival of Marching Bands, by 7,000 and MEGAHERTZ, the European youth music festival, by 50,000.
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