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LUFF: Music award for Noise from Lausanne
Gabrielle Weber: Lausanne Underground Film and Music Festival awarded music prize
LUFF, Lausanne Underground Film and Music Festival, has been programming experimental music to accompany a selected film programme in Lausanne since 2002. This year, the festival received one of the special music prizes from the Federal Office of Culture (BAK). A few weeks before the start of this year’s edition, I met three members of the management team at the new Lausanne cultural centre Pyxis, right next to the cathedral in Lausanne’s old town, which is where LUFF’s offices are located. A conversation with Thibault Walter and Dimitri Meier, artistic directors of the music programme, and Marie Klay, managing director.
Gabrielle Weber
Marie Klay, Thibault Walter and Dimitri Meier come to our meeting as a trio and they are constantly developing each other’s ideas in conversation. There’s a reason for this: “The LUFF works as a collective,” Marie Klay tells me right at the start. “The team consists of around 50 people and meets regularly once a week throughout the year.” Decisions are made collectively and everyone has their say. Klay has been part of the team as Managing Director since a reorganisation in 2014: “All areas are equally important. Programming, for example, is no ivory tower”. Joint listening sessions are at the heart of the programme, adds Thibault Walter. They listen to and discuss works together before deciding who will be invited. This allows everyone to get involved. Thibault Walter has been part of the programme since its launch in 2002. Dimitri Meier joined in 2015 and continuously built up the music programming team.
The prize
The LUFF has gradually developed from a small insider event in Vevey to a major festival in Lausanne. Nevertheless, it is still an underground event. “When we received the call from the BAK, we initially thought it was a joke or a phishing phone call: we never expected to receive a music prize,” says Dimitri Meier. “The fact that we’re receiving this award for music is a profound challenge for us. But at the same time it is a recognition of our existential work and our choice of programme over the years,” says Thibault Walter.
Noise!
LUFF likes to label its music programme ‘Noise’. The music genre, which originated in London in the seventies, is commonly understood to mean hiss, full volume, no melody or rhythm. But what is perceived as just ‘noise’ by some people is music to others – white noise can now also be found in the mainstream. But LUFF sees noise differently. “For us, noise is anything that goes against common musical practices. For some years, we also spoke of ‘non-music’ or ‘anti-music’,” says Dimitri Meier.
For Thibault Walter, noise is a relative term: “Noise usually has a negative connotation, but LUFF always uses it positively. We ask ourselves why certain sounds are undesirable and excluded and that’s exactly what we’re interested in.”
At LUFF, noise can also be humorous and melodic or quiet and subtle. Artists from Japan, where noise has been gaining ground since the 1980s and, alongside England, has one of the largest noise communities, are regularly present.
Jon the dog live @LUFF 2023
John the dog
Japanese performer Jon the Dog, for example, already performed at LUFF in 2023 and will be back in Lausanne again this year: she sings songs with a kind of childish voice, accompaning herself on the harmonium: melodious, harmonious, rhythmic and full of humour… in a way that is reminiscent of Japanese animated films. Her name comes from the fact that she performs in a dog costume, sometimes surprisingly in ‘hard’ noise concerts in Japan. For Thibaut Walter, she is an almost mythical figure. He suspects that she wants to hold up a mirror to the scene with this ‘positive immaturity’ and believes it is a reversal that says a lot about the scene.
“Noise doesn’t always mean at full volume, aggressive or exclusive… a sound can also be shaped very finely and full of nuances,” continues Thibault Walter.
Lise Barkas live @ LUFF 2023
Lise Barkas
Another example of the LUFF’s understanding of noise is embodied by Lise Barkas from Strasbourg: Barkas performs solo on the hurdy-gurdy. She was brought to Lausanne by the LUFF at an early stage and is now an internationally renowned noise artist. Her music oscillates between sounds that resemble early music and a scratchy, yet highly differentiated, noisiness. For Dimitri Meier, her concerts can also be read as a criticism of the usual over-amplification in the classical noise scene, which is completely idiotic.
A squat in Vevey
LUFF originated in a squat in Vevey, where a small circle of cinéphiles showed films from the New York Underground Film Festival, says Thibault Walter. The initiator left Switzerland and connected them to the Cinémathèque Suisse in Lausanne. In the Casino de Montbenon, where the Cinémathèque is located, they came across a huge unused room in the basement which turned out to be ideal for concerts. Together, they developed a kind of American New Wave cinema: selected films framed by concerts and so a film festival turned into a film AND music festival. “That’s another paradox. Receiving a music award for a music festival in a film festival.”
Lausanne scene full of experimental formats
The Lausanne scene was already rich in experimental formats before the festival. “The festival allows to showcase things that were already there: in flats, cellars or restaurants. The fact that so many people came together was a powerful, almost magical moment. We realised that we were not alone when we did something in our basements and that encouraged us to keep going,” says Thibault Walter about the early days of the festival.
To this day, all events take place at the Casino de Montbenon, headquarters of the Cinémathèque Suisse. By having them all in one place, the team also wants to bring the different audiences in contact with each other. The collective’s contributors also come from different backgrounds, for example from the film scene, like Marie Klay. The team is open and attentive, there is a friendly, almost familial atmosphere: they all believe and fight for the world being a good place, says Klay. “When you come together, you can make a positive difference”, Thibault Walter adds: “LUFF is a place that gives hope”, and Dimitri Meier: “Whenever one edition is over, we always look forward to the next one!”.
Gabrielle Weber
The LUFF took place for the 23rd time between October 16 and October 20.
New York Underground Film Festival, Pyxis – maison de la culture et de l’exploration numérique, Cinémathèque suisse Lausanne.
broadcasts SRF Kultur
Musik unserer Zeit, SRF Kultur, 25.09.2024: LUFF – Lausanne Underground Film and Music Festival taucht auf, author / editor Gabrielle Weber.
Musikmagazin, SRF Kultur, 5.10.24: Noise aus Lausanne: Das LUFF erhält Schweizer Musikspezialpreis, talk (min 10:30): Marie Klay, Dimitri Meier und Thibault Walter in talk with Gabrielle Weber.
Neo-profiles
Lausanne Underground Film&Music Festival (LUFF), Swiss Music Prizes
Sol Gabetta awarded the Grand Prix Suisse de musique 2024
A portrait of cellist Sol Gabetta by Florian Hauser
Sol Gabetta, cellist, cosmopolitan and Swiss by choice, was awarded the Grand Prix suisse de musique 2024
Florian Hauser
What does it take for a global career in classical music? Talent, luck, a strong personality and last but not least, the willingness to get involved in teamwork, i.e. working with an artist agency, press agency and record label. Sol Gabetta does it all.
When her career began, thirty years ago, she would never have dreamed of it. ‘I was a romantic musician, a young woman with high hopes of getting to know everything about art and music – everything was open.’ After the happiness of a sheltered childhood in Argentina, where Sol Gabetta was encouraged to the best of her ability, developped her passion and became a strong, self-confident person in a protected space, she took off. In 1998, at age 17, she won the 3rd prize at the prestigious ARD Music Competition. In 2004, something like a turbo ignited: the Credit Suisse Young Artist Award brought her maximum attention. She founded her own festival, won one prize after another and soon the big orchestras – like Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra, London Philharmonic Orchestra and many others – were lining up. Festivals invited her, and from 2010 she was also featured in the magazine KlickKlack on Bavarian television, since then Sol Gabetta has been omnipresent in the media.
Teamwork is everything
One thing leads to another. A CD label, an assistant, an agency, Sol Gabetta begins to build a team around her and has a knack for it: “You develop fine and sensitive antennas to sense what you really are, what you really want.” She trained in Basel with cellist Ivan Monighetti, who is still a coach for her today when she needs him. She met Christoph Müller, who increasingly mutated from cellist to music manager, was her partner for a time and now looks after her Swiss management, including her Solsberg Festival. She met her current partner, the violin maker and restorer Balthazar Soulier, who can take care of all the minor and major issues of her almost 300-year-old Goffriller cello or the Stradivarius cello from 1717.
Largely thanks to a large network in the background, Sol Gabetta is as free and uncompromising in the organisation of her tours as she is in her choice of repertoire: ranging from all eras to the comtemporary works such as the Concerto en Sol, which grandmaster Wolfgang Rihm wrote for her four years ago.
Wolfgang Rihm, Concerto en Sol, Cellokonzert für Sol Gabetta (2018-19), Kammerorchester Basel, conductor Sylvain Cambreling, concert recording world creation: Victoria Hall Genève 2020.
The volcano
“I’m a bit like a volcano, but a calm one. I really do have this clarity about what I’m looking for and which path I want to take. Of course, there are also uncertainties and that’s why I just try to have important people around me.” Discipline and routine are also important. “As soon as I wake up, I actually do the most important thing: practise. The learning process in my brain needs to be fresh, and the few hours I have left in the morning are golden.”
Sol Gabetta is a happy example of how a soloist floats through the market. She knows how to act on and off the stage with the right instinct, positive charisma and an engaging personality, with the necessary drive and enthusiasm to inspire the audience.
Florian Hauser
ARD Musikwettbewerb, Credit Suisse Young Artist Award, Wiener Philharmoniker, London Philharmonic Orchestra , KlickKlack, Ivan Monighetti, Solsberg Festival, Gautier Capucon, Jean-Guihen Qeyras, Nicolas Altstaedt, Truls Mörk, Daniel Müller-Schott, Bruno Philippe, Johannes Moser, YoYo Ma, Giovanni Antonini, Simon Rattle, Christian Thielemann, Jacqueline du Pré, Alisa Weilerstein, Julia Hagen, Wolfgang Rihm
broadcasts SRF Kultur
Passage, SRF Kultur, 13.9.2024: Teamwork ist alles. Cellistin Sol Gabetta und das Musikbusiness, author Florian Hauser.
Musikmagazin, Grand Prix suisse de musique für Sol Gabetta, SRF Kultur, 25.5.24 (ab Min 06:00): Talk: Sol Gabetta im Gespräch mit Florian Hauser.
neoblog, 10.1.2020: Melancholische Eleganz – Wolfgang Rihm schreibt für Sol Gabetta, author Gabrielle Weber.
neo-profiles
Sol Gabetta, Wolfgang Rihm
Marianthi Papalexandri-Alexandri and the independence of objects
Marianthi Papalexandri-Alexandri’s works are fascinating for seeing and hearing. Her pieces, which consists of a variety of objects, sound installations and performances, surprise visitors and listeners with the simplicity and elegance of their functioning. During my meeting with the artist, we discussed the intimate relationship between objects and sound.
Alexandre Babel
By entering the exhibition, a sound composition consisting of a multitude of short pulses fills the room. The sounds are so close together that one perceives a single, constantly moving structure. By approaching the object constituting Marianthi Papalexandri-Alexandris Modular n.3, the source of the sound moves closer to the visitors’ ear and he or her begins to distinguish the individual impulses from one another. The closer one gets to it, the more this installation object reveals its identity and sound. It is a continuous rotating movement that generates sound impulses through friction with a nylon thread, amplified by loudspeakers.
Marianthi Papalexandri-Alexandri, modular n.3, en collaboration avec Pe Lang, 2019.
The produced music, the third in a series of the same name created in close collaboration with artist Pe Lang, is therefore practically inseparable from its physical appearance. While the collection of loudspeakers creates a sound universe in its own right, understanding the production mechanism unfolds a narrative that reveals a concrete and poetic dimension. “I like to draw the audience’s attention to the way in which an instrument is built. In my opinion, the structure of my works is also based on the understanding of how they work”, explains Papalexandri-Alexandri.
Modular n.3’s principle is also reflected in other works by the artist, such as Untitled n.V or Speaking of Membranes and raises the question of the expectations associated with an object’s function. A loudspeaker is normally used to spread sound by amplifying electric energy. In this case, however, the loudspeakers are not connected, as the sound is acoustic.
“You recognise that it’s a loudspeaker, but I want to give it a privileged space, I want to hear its own voice.” If Papalexandri-Alexandri draws the audience’s attention to the essence of the object by making it vibrate through the movement device, what does it look like when the installation is not switched on or the object is exhibited as inanimate matter? The artist continues: “Sometimes I wonder what happens when a sound or musical object does not produce sound, is it a dead object? I think that every musical object is functional. When you set it in motion, you are exploring a certain kind of functionality. But maybe there are different functionalities to be explored on the same object.”
In Solo for generators, motors and wind resonators, a piece that was composed for recorder player Susanne Fröhlich, with whom Marianthi Papalexandri Alexandri has a long-term relationship, the connection to the instrument bypasses once again conventional expectations. A recorder, dismantled into its individual parts, is presented spread out on a table. On the same table a motorised device sets wires in rotation. These are connected to membranes stretched over the open parts of the recorder. The result is reminiscent of long waves of sound. “As we have dismantled the instrument, you can only see fragments of it”, explains the composer. Once more, the use of a musical object that is normally associated with a specific use, in this case the production of sound by blowing into the mouthpiece, is transformed into a sound manifestation produced by the instrument itself. Papalexandri-Alexandri continues: “When you place this instrument on a stage or as part of an installation, it becomes a resonant object. You see it as a body and no longer as a musical instrument that you recognise. This kind of process gives me the feeling of offering the audience a new approach to the instrument, a kind of tribute.”
Marianthi Papalexandri-Alexandri, salon de musique du 31, Susanne Fröhlich, Festival Archipel Genève, march 2019.
Marianthi Papalexandri-Alexandri’s world reveals an attention to manufacturing precision. The immaculate set-up of the equipment suggests that the artist seeks a certain control over the sequence of events. During the performance, however, the programmed control does give the work a rigid quality, on the contrary, it reveals a dimension of fragility emanating from the possible imperfections associated with the passage of time. In relation to the Solo for generators, motors and wind resonators, the composer tells us that control is never absolute. “When I play with this device myself, I can feel it and create beautiful sounds, and the same goes for Susanne (Fröhlich). But I’ve also experienced situations where the device did not work during the performance. This is due to the tension between the performer and the machine, which is necessary for the piece to take shape.”
This duality between control and fragility contributes to the poetic aura of Papalexandri-Alexandri’s works, as she explains: ‘Ultimately, it’s not really about control. My attitude is more about accepting events as they unfold.’ When asked how she would like to develop these events further, she replies: “What’s my personal contribution? I simply want to engage with the existing objects, they already have a lot to tell.”
Alexandre Babel
neo-profiles :
Marianthi Papalexandri-Alexandri, Pe Lang, Festival Archipel
Linked to the future – Lucerne Academy’s 20th anniversary
Just beautiful concerts? No. At the Lucerne Festival, an academy looks after young musicians and theis interests, be it instrumentalists, composers and/or conductors. The Lucerne Festival Academy brings them all together. Festival director Michael Haefliger and composer and conductor Pierre Boulez came up with the idea for this academy 20 years ago.
Benjamin Herzog
It’s a hot saturday afternoon by the Lake Lucerne and the Lucerne Festival has been running at full speed for a good week now. This applies not only to the dense sequence of concerts, debut recitals and free formats for visitors in front of and next to Jean Nouvel’s emblematic Culture and Convention Centre KKL. The first three weeks of the festival are very intense for the participants of the Lucerne Festival Academy as well. 110 in number, from 30 different countries: Instrumentalists, composers and conductors. Some of them will be presenting the fruits of their first phase of work in a concert this Saturday afternoon at the KKL. Pierre Boulez’ enormously difficult Rituel in memoriam Bruno Maderna for eight instrumental groups, Wolfgang Rihm’s In-Schrift and a piece by Lisa Streich called Ishjärta, which translates “iron heart” in English and in which the composer attempts to express two different emotional states simultaneously.
The interaction between performers, lecturers and learners makes sense. British composer Eden Lonsdale, a participant in the Composer’s Programme, says: ‘Working with an orchestra shows you what you have concretely written on your score.’ Chinese composer Yixuan Hu is also happy regarding the artistic-pedagogical triangle built by academy orchestra, conductor and teacher. ‘This collaboration here is unique,’ she says. ’You can get very far very quickly.’ In seminars this year, twelve composers of orchestral music and smaller ensemble pieces discuss new pieces with composers Dieter Ammann and Unsuk Chin, who stood in for Wolfgang Rihm this year, as he passed away in July. The tone is friendly but direct with the clear intention of bringing theory and practice together.
Young composer Wolfgang Rihm shocked the audience with his orchestral work ‘Sub-Kontur’ at the Donaueschinger Musiktage in 1976, Lucerne Festival Contemporary Orchestra, conducted by Sylvain Cambreling, SRG/SSR in-house production.
With its own orchestra, the Lucerne Festival Contemporary Orchestra (LFCO), the Composers Programme, an initiative for conductors who want to deepen their knowledge of new music, and workshops where Academy members can discuss practical performance issues with invited experts from ensembles such as the Ensemble Intercontemporain, Frankfurt’s Ensemble Modern and Klangforum Wien, the Lucerne Festival Academy is broadly based. A management workshop and two prizes, the Fritz Gerber Award for instrumentalists and the Roche Young Commissions for composers, round off the programme.
Three weeks of campus atmosphere
Three weeks of campus atmosphere, full of encounters. Former academy students say that the network built up in Lucerne has helped them in their artistic careers, be it for specific questions about a notation, a playing or conducting problem, or simply in a friendly way. The Lucerne Festival itself also actively cultivates bonds between former and current academy members: an alumni programme actively involving former participants in the ongoing academies was founded in 2016.
The LFCO performed this year’s composer in residence ‘Reigen’ as a spontaneous pre-programme to the festival opening concert in KKL’s main hall, LFCO, SRG/SSR in-house-production.
Composer and conductor Pierre Boulez, who died in 2016 and founded the academy 20 years ago together with Lucerne Festival’s artistic director, Michael Haefliger, explained in an 2016 (the founding year) interview that 20th and 21st centuries’ culture was ‘neglected in educational institutions’, which is why such an academy was urgently needed. It would otherwise be ‘hardly possible’ to concentrate on this repertoire for three weeks over the course of the year. The sceptical attitude of universities towards modern music has certainly changed since then. But concentrated work, as students can tell you, is often made impossible during the semester due to the many other commitments.
Wolfgang Rihm, whose role at the Lucerne Festival Academy became leading after Boulez’s death, saw the academy as a necessary and logical addition to the Festival rather than as a special organisation for avant-garde music. According to Rihm, the Academy’s musicians should ‘understand modernism from its roots. These roots reach far and wide and at some point go back to the Romantic repertoire.’ In other words, to Brahms or Schönberg, who play a key role. It is symptomatic that Schoenberg’s monumental Gurrelieder – characterised by both the apotheosis of Romanticism and the emergence of modernism and thus perfectly combining the two festival ideas of ‘concert’ and ‘academy’ – will be performed this year.
Arnold Schönberg accompanies the LFCO throughout the festivals. In 2019, the orchestra performed his five orchestral pieces op 1, LFCO, conductor Riccardo Chailly, concert 8.9.2019, KKL Lucerne, in-house production SRG/SSR.
During this hot Saturday afternoon’s concert with the Lucerne Festival Contemporary Orchestra, the high standard at which modern and contemporary music is performed here becomes plain to hear. The orchestra, although most of the musicians met for the first time a week ago, easily mastered the sometimes adventurous difficulties with astonishing precision. With its diverse and large academy, the festival takes on work, it actually wouldn’t be supposed to. After all, music schools and academies should be responsible for the next generation and yet, for a classical music festival, the link with the future generations is of course also one with its own future.
Benjamin Herzog
Pierre Boulez, Eden Lonsdale, Yixuan Hu, Ensemble Intercontemporain, Ensemble Modern, Klangforum Wien, Fritz Gerber-Award, Roche Young Comissions, Unsuk Chin
broadcasts SRF Kultur:
Musik unserer Zeit, 4.9.2024, SRF 2 Kultur, 20 Jahre Lucerne Festival Academy, Autor Benjamin Herzog.
Musikmagazin, 24.8.2024, SRF 2 Kultur, Komponieren an einem Epochenübergang – Lisa Streich, Autor Benjamin Herzog
neo-profiles:
Lucerne Festival Contemporary Orchestra (LFCO), Lisa Streich, Dieter Ammann
Meta-layers and broken fascination in Léo Collin’s music theatre
He mixes sound, performance, video and theatre with cooking, sport, thrillers and environmental activism. Young composer Léo Collin born in France and now living in Zurich, produces evocative music theatre happenings. I visited him in his studio, located in Zurich’s Rote Fabrik.
Gabrielle Weber
Most of his small studio is taken up by a simple wooden table, covered with a control desk, microphones, headphones, cables nd with an electric guitar leaning against it. Large, colourful sketches hang on the walls. This is where Léo Collin develops his music theatre pieces, which are always site-specific, i.e. performed in the great outdoors, industrial spaces or petrol stations.
Léo Collin, Video: Fastnacht, Neue Musik Rümlingen 2020.
Dressed in camouflage suits, performers storm down a grassy hill from a wooded area. They chase each other and perform almost choreographed actions. Fastnacht, a music theatre piece with electroacoustics, premiered on the green meadow at the Rümlingen 2020 festival, focuses on a community celebrating war games. The piece is characteristic of both his musical concept and workflow. Collins’ interdisciplinary site-specific music theatres combine sound with video, electronics as well as theatrical actions and the audience usually right in the thick of it.
“There was little time for the Fastnacht on site-rehearsals and the play was also performed several times, which required precise conceptual preparation and clear instructions for the performers”. The score for Fastnacht is an audio track that uses ‘in ear-headphones’ in order to assign individual actions to each performer. Roles that break the plot are built into the performance and the performers are followed by a sound crew with a microphone (Collin himself) and control desk. “By showing how a scene is recorded, I break the fascination. I like such meta-layers”, says Collin. For the live performance, each audience member receives headphones with live sound and a fictitious audio contribution: this soundtrack creates another meta-layer. ‘Many people play war games like this at home on the weekend. They don’t want to have to experience war themselves. I want to show these dualities’.
Fractured re-enactments
Collin creates fractured re-enactments which always come with a personal background: “The idea came from a photograph seen at Zurich’s Photobastei – a nondescript landscape with apple trees entitled ‘Verdun 2017′. My family is from that area. One of the bloodiest battles of the First World War took place in this idyllic landscape in 1916. But the photo shows a harmless subject”. A place always carries history, says Collin. “Through sound, I can add a completely unexpected layer to a picturesque landscape.”
Léo Collin grew up in a small village in the French Jura, studied in Lyon, Geneva and finally at the ZHdK in Zurich, initially musicology, then piano, electroacoustics and composition. He composes electronic music for theatre and dance, including for Schauspielhaus Zurich or Deutsches Theater Berlin and conceives music theatre and educational projects, for example for the Sonic Matter Festival Zurich.
Collins’ work is always oriented towards specific spaces and mostly developed with a fixed group of musicians, the Kollektiv International TOTEM (KIT). He usually also performs himself, involving other musicians and artists. The audience is part of his pieces, it participates musically or is right in the midst of it, surrounded by loudspeakers or equipped with headphones.
Meaningful places
Locations are also essential in his trilogy, a three-part scenic work entitled Baleen, Medusa and Corals. Corals, the third part, is set in a petrol station, for example. It is the human counterpart of coral reefs, microcosms like cities that appear out of nowhere and grow continuously. “In the vast plains of the USA or Australia, there is often nothing for a long stretch and then suddenly a petrol station full of people, food and petrol, while petrol embodies environmental destruction.”
Léo Collin, Corals, music for Gas stations, Ensemble Inverspace, in house-production SRG SSR.
Trilogie’s general theme is the concern for biodiversity loss. The three titles Baleen, Medusae, Corals – whales, medusae, corals – stand for different sea creatures and their biospheres. “It’s about the food chain in ‘web food’: the big ones eat the small ones,’ says Collin. “In my youth, ‘No future’, i.e. criticism of capitalism and consumerism, hovered over everything. Today, the topic is still with me.”
Medusen took place in a trashy industrial building on the outskirts of Zurich. The audience is divided in four groups, wearing headphones and guided by devices on their mobile phones or by an actor, walking through various rooms in the footsteps of a past crime.
A jigsaw puzzle of events
The plot consists of a jigsaw puzzle of events: in the first part, Balleen, between self-awareness group, sports event or TV cooking show, in the second part, Medusen, between crime thriller, concert and reality show: “I was involved in very different things before I started with music. In Trilogie, I explore my childhood and youthful memories and translate them into sound,” says Collin. “As a child, for example, I often sat in front of the television and usually watched sports. I later realised that the commentary is what gave it that kind of magic. My work confronts these memories with contemporary music in the hope of some kind of emancipation.”
Léo Collin, Trilogie: Balleen, Corals, Medusen
Trilogy has accompanied Collin’s musical path for many years. The piece is constantly growing, proliferating and changing – like the biospheres within the worldwide web food.
Gabrielle Weber
An extension of Fastnacht, the music theatre Blind Test, will be performed at the Neue Musik Rümlingen Festival together with Kollektiv International Totem and Hyper Duo on August 24 and 25, 2024.
On 19 June 2025, Léo Collin and the Collegium Novum Zurich will once again devote themselves to biodiversity in Plankton, a music theatre for performers, ensemble and mobile audience (2025, world premiere at Zentralwäscherei Zurich).
neo-profiles
Léo Collin, Kollektiv International Totem (KIT), Neue Musik Rümlingen, Hyper Duo, Sonic Matter Festival, Collegium Novum Zürich
Lauren Newton’s vocal artistry
A pioneer of vocal artistry – US-American vocalist Lauren Newton.
Her passion for exploring the full potential of the voice drives her work in free improvisation, jazz and contemporary music. Closely associated with the Swiss experimental music scene, she taught jazz vocal performance and free improvisation at the Lucerne University of Music (HSLU) between 1993 and 2019.
Luca Koch
While her career encompasses a broad range of ensembles, from large jazz orchestras to vocal ensembles and long-standing duos, her concerts are notable for their captivating depth and immediacy. This year Lauren Newton is celebrating her 50th anniversary on stage. For the SRF Culture programme Living Past, I visited her in Tübingen, Germany, where she is currently based and had the chance to listen to groundbreaking live recordings with her.
A twist of fate
Lauren Newton actually wanted to study art in Oregon in the USA, but she didn’t get in and, as a twist of fate, she tried her luck in the music department. Both classical music and jazz were already present at home. Her father played double bass and sang in nightclubs. Lauren also had a good voice and began studying classical singing. In her third bachelor year, she was allowed to take part in an exchange year in Stuttgart. This was unusual for Bachelor students, but her teacher vouched for her and Germany became her new home.
Lauren Newton, Sound Songs, Solo–Improviation 2006.
Classical music student by day, jazz-rock singer by night
In Stuttgart, Lauren began her Masters in the singing class of opera singer Sylvia Geszty and at the same time immersed herself in the city’s young jazz scene. At a jam session, she met trumpeter Frederic Rabold, who was impressed by her voice. A short time later, Newton was singing in his jazz-rock band, the Frederic Rabold Crew. The mix of simply composed themes and free improvisation was ideal for her and allowed her to refine and use previously acquired skills in the more liberated setting of improvisation. Both activities merged seamlessly, it never felt like a double life, she told me in the interview.
Vienna Art Orchestra
The Frederic Rabold Crew was invited to Vienna in 1979 for the television programme Bourbon Street, which did not go unnoticed by Swiss jazz musician Mathias Rüegg, who had founded the Vienna Art Orchestra with Wolfgang Puschnig two years earlier. After the TV appearance, he immediately asked Lauren Newton if she wanted to join. For ten years, Lauren Newton was an irreplaceable part of the Vienna Art Orchestra, which became an authority in experimental jazz with dozens of album productions and major tours. Her voice stands out from the jazz orchestra with razor-sharp precision and playful virtuosity. A time that Lauren Newton would not have missed for the world, even if the constant travelling on the tour bus as the only woman was challenging.
Vocal Summit
I got to know Lauren Newton personally when she was teaching at the Lucerne University of Applied Sciences and Arts. To me, she was not only an important figure as a vocalist with a wide vocal range, but also as a musician with a great interest in other voices. She not only helped her students to discover their own voices, but also collaborated with other singers on stage time and again. Together with Bobby McFerrin, Urszula Dudziak, Jeanne Lee and Jay Clayton, she formed the vocal all-star band: the Vocal Summit. Together, five completely different voices create soundscapes that breathe. Lauren Newton also continued her work with voices in larger formations with vocal ensemble Timbre.
Vom Vom Zum Zum
Lauren Newton has made a name for herself as an experimental vocalist who expresses herself particularly through sounds. But working with text also plays an important role in her music, which is plain to see and hear in her particularly influential collaboration with Austrian poet Ernst Jandl. His poems were deconstructed and reassembled, words were twisted, stretched and spoken backwards. The album Vom Vom Zum Zum, on which Ernst Jandl speaks while Lauren Newton plays around his words, was a special discovery for me.
Pi from Vom Vom Zum Zum, Lauren Newton with Wolfgang Puschnig, Mathias Rüegg, and Uli Scherer, 1988.
Duos in dialogue
Free improvisation is like a musical conversation. The players respond to each other, they comment, agree or argue. This works best in a duo, Lauren Newton tells me in the SWR studio in Tübingen and duo recordings form a large part of her oeuvre, featuring collaborations with Anthony Braxton, Phil Minton, Aki Takase and Joëlle Léandre, for example.
O How We, Lauren Newton and Phil Minton performed together on stage for the first time at the A Voix Haute Festival in Bagnères de Bigorre, France, on August 13, 2010.
The double bassist Joëlle Léandre in particular has accompanied her to this day. Their deep musical friendship is reflected in their interplay. The rich, concise sound of Léandre’s double bass playing perfectly complements Newton’s crystal-clear voice. The duo recently released a new album: Great Star Theatre, San Francisco.
Luca Koch
Frederic Rabold, Frederic Rabold Crew, Mathias Rüegg, Bobby McFerrin, Urszula Dudziak, Jeanne Lee, Jay Clayton, Wolfgang Puschnig, Vienna Art Orchestra, Ernst Jandl, Anthony Braxton, Phil Minton, Aki Takase, Joëlle Léandre.
neoprofile:
Lauren Newton
broadcast SRF Kultur:
Living Past – Lauren Newton, Pionierin der Stimmkunst, 13.02.2024, made by Luca Koch.
Cathy Van Eck: The transcendent role of a concert piece
Cathy Van Eck, composer and media artist, shapes the Swiss and international contemporary music scene with her subtle and highly aesthetic sound performances. Her piece In the Woods of Golden Resonances for solo percussion played a special role within a dedicated concert evening. A portrait of Alexandre Babel.
Alexandre Babel
The theme sounds like an invitation: Spanish percussionist Miguel Angel Garcia Martin curated a concert evening entitled Aufbau/Abbau (set-up / Dismatle) in the friendly takeover series at Basel’s Gare du Nord, entirely dedicated to solo percussion. Six world premieres to shed light on the logistical reality of professional percussionists. After all, setting up and dismantling for a concert often takes up almost as much time and significance as the music itself. Even if the theme of the evening seems somewhat vague at first glance, it served as starting point for a multifaceted question that all participants made their own by creating a new work. Cathy Van Eck’s In the Woods of Golden Resonances is a unifying example.
In the Woods of Golden Resonances features drummer Miguel Angel Garcia Martin centre stage, in relative darkness with a red headlamp, so that the audience only recognises his darkened silhouette. With slow and controlled movements, he walks to a cymbal lying on the floor in a corner of the stage, lifts it and then holds it horizontally at mouth height. A clear, amplified breath sound shows that the performer is wearing a microphone and blowing on the instrument as if trying to clear the dust from it. This sound is obviously processed electronically and the playback through the speakers makes up the majority of the sound environment. “The blowing increases the ‘volume’ of the two speakers in the room and creates an acoustic feedback. The whole piece consists of such feedback sounds, as if Miguel were ‘beating’ the room,” says Cathy van Eck.
He then walks to a metal stand on which he places his instrument. This simple but carefully choreographed action is repeated several times with other cymbals hidden in the room, allowing the audience to observe the step-by-step and ritualised set-up of a percussion set on stage.
In Van Eck’s works, the musician’s body often takes centre stage. Dutch-born Van Eck completed her masters degree at Leiden University. Among other things, she publishes and researches regarding possible connections between gestures, sensors and sounds and teaches at the Sound Arts Department of Bern’s University of Arts. “In In the Woods of Golden Resonances there is also a fairly strong relationship between the performer’s movements and his material. His movements are not meant as a gesture of ‘pointing outwards’, with the meaning ‘I control the sound’, but rather as a careful searching and perceiving. That’s why Miguel has a different posture on stage in this piece than in the other pieces of the evening,” says van Eck.
Cathy van Eck, In the Woods of Golden Resonances, Miguel Angel Garcia Martin, world premiere gare du Nord Basel, 9.4.2024.
The strength of In the Woods of Golden Resonances lies in its repetitive, simple formal structure. The piece serves to move from state A to state B and ends as soon as the installation is completed. Cathy Van Eck’s score does not stipulate that the cymbals are to be played once they have been set up. Instead, they serve as a structure for the next piece in the programme, Cymbals by Barblina Meierhans. Van Eck’s piece thus not only translates the theme of the concert exactly, but also establishes a concrete connection to the evening’s next element.
The installation and stage change-over, form the actual piece and while one normally tries to reduce the duration and significance of the reconstruction in order to ensure the musical flow, In the Woods of Golden Resonances does exactly the opposite: it uses this intermediate space between two states for a moment of introspection into the musician’s private sphere. Van Eck’s aesthetic choices emphasise this through the dreamy atmosphere created by the semi-darkness or the sensual impression left by the amplification of the musician’s breathing sounds.
The work poetically evokes the technical reality of the percussionist and his instruments and at the same time connects it with the environment. The spatial dimension of the concert hall is also emphasised. Cathy van Eck explains: “The sounds arise from an interplay between Miguel’s exact position in the room, the cymbals and the loudspeakers, and then of course the room acoustics.”
However, Van Eck goes one step further, as she invites the audience to feel part of the process. Sound effects such as the electronic processing at high volume create an immersive impression and the drummer’s actual ‘ballet’ gives the audience the illusion of beeing part of the process. Finally, she ‘neutralises’ the drummer’s figure through the lighting effect to a simple silhouette that everyone in the audience can identify with. Van Eck explains: “In this case, the lighting was a decision made by Miguel, the drummer, who worked with me and the director. I can also imagine this piece in a brighter environment. For me, the way light is designed, very much depends on the space.”
In the Woods of Golden Resonances is part of a series of consecutive and differentiated works. Within the series, it subverts the usual expectations of a concert piece while respecting its primary code. The sound treatment is so interesting, that it can also be simply ‘listened’ to.
However, the role of the individual work or its creator is called into question in favour of a unity that creates a link between both elements. I ask myself whether the necessity of creation does not lie in the fact that it leads from one state to another?
Alexandre Babel
Alexandre Babel is from Geneva and lives in Berlin. He is a composer, percussionist, curator and publicist. This is his first contirbution to the neoblog and its team.
neo-profiles :
Cathy van Eck, Gare du Nord, Alexandre Babel, Barblina Meierhans
broadcasts SRF Kultur:
Musik unserer Zeit, 29.01.2014: Grünes Rauschen – Klangkunst mit Cathy van Eck, editor Cécile Olshausen.
Onlinetext, 28.01.2014: Bei Cathy van Eck klingt Gewöhnliches ungewöhnlich, author Cécile Olshausen.
Musik unserer Zeit, 16.6.2021: Alexandre Babel: Perkussionist, Komponist, Kurator, editor Gabrielle Weber.
neoblog, 10.09.2021: un projet est avant tout une rencontre.., author Gabrielle Weber.
World premiere in 100 years?
Music of the future – escaping the Zeitgeist this is the title of a project to celebrate SUISA’s 100th birthday. 40 Swiss musicians were asked to write down their ideas regarding music that will be premiered in a hundred years’ time: A greeting from the present for the year 2123 to hopefully mark SUISA’s 200th birthday. The project was presented at the Yehudi Menuhin Forum in Bern on 16 April 2024. Bettina Mittelstrass spoke to the musicians involved.
Bettina Mittelstrass
Helena Winkelmann, the HyperDuo, Joke Lanz, Martina Berther, Patrick Frank, Annette Schmucki, Fritz Hauser and Nik Bärtsch – these are just seven of a total of 40 Swiss musicians whose music of the future ended up in an archive box in April 2024 without ever being heard. Hermetically sealed, this archive will be supervised by the Swiss National Sound Archives in Lugano for 100 years and displayed in the entrance area of the Città della Musica. The archive will hopefully not be reopened until 2123, when the music will be awakened from its slumber and played for an audience not even born yet.
How will Switzerland sound in 100 years?
How will Switzerland sound in 100 years? An initial answer could be lying dormant in the archive box. The answers were not easily found by the 40 respondents. Scepticism prevailed. What instruments will be available in 100 years’ time? Will there still be western musical notation? Wooden instruments? Or will climate change have killed off the trees? Against the backdrop of the planet’s dwindling resources, it is impossible to know whether we will “ultimately have to burn violins and boil strings so as not to freeze or starve to death”, says percussionist Fritz Hauser.
He therefore set his composition in Morse code – in the hope that these archaic signs will inspire people of the future to make rhythmic music, whatever the instrumentation.
Fritz Hauser transcribes his music of the future entirely in Morse code. Here is his Schraffur for gong and orchestra, Basel Sinfonietta 2010, an SRG/SSR in house- production.
Music as ambassador for interplay?
Despite all the scepticism about what music will mean or enable in 100 years’ time – it will probably retain two social functions, says Swiss-Dutch composer and violinist Helena Winkelmann: acting as ambassador for interplay and mediator as well as integrator of good energy. Another thing is likely to persist in human societies, namely “that people will continue to have problems living together in the future.”
Helena Winkelmann has therefore placed the instructions for a ‘music council’ of the future in the archive box. It is the musical version of a thousand-year-old concept, the “Council of Chiefs” of indigenous American societies. In a circle, musicians take on different functions – both musically and socially. There is – for example – a questioning voice, an inventive voice, a preserving voice, a warning voice, a narrative voice and a developing voice. “That’s also the magic of this whole circle, in the sense that it is the exchange of perspectives that really helps us move forward.”
Helena Winkelmann contributes to the archive box with instructions for a ‘Music Council of the Future‘. In Geisterlieder, a cycle based on poems in 18 European original languages accompanied by various instrumental groups, Helena Winkelmann also explores the overcoming of temporal and regional boundaries. World premiere on August 5, 2023, at the Church of Ernen, an SRG/SSR in house- production.
A spaceship full of perspectives and criticism of the present
“This little spaceship basically contains a cross-section of current Swiss music creation,” is how ethnomusicologist and curator Johannes Rühl, inventor of the project, describes it. New music, electronic music, jazz, pop and folk music are represented among the 40 composition proposals, as well as sound installations and crazy ideas such as music with mushrooms, whose amino acids can already be converted into sounds today. Another proposal takes the sound of melting glaciers and transports it in the form of DNA into a future in which there will presumably no longer be eternal ice in the Swiss Alps.The sound of melting glaciers transported into the future in the form of DNA.
Most of the proposals submitted for the archive box were characterised by a sceptical and socially critical zeitgeist, confirms Johannes Rühl. The attempt to escape the zeitgeist was understandably bound to fail. “We obviously cannot get out of the now. You also get the feeling that there is a dynamic in development these days which did not exist in the past.” Is that true? We won’t be around in 2123 to find out. May those after us play “our” future music or not.
Bettina Mittelstrass
Zukunftsmusik – dem Zeitgeist entkommen: 100 Jahre SUISA. The original idea came from Johannes Rühl, ethnologist and curator of music programmes.
Città della Musica
broadcasts SRF Kultur:
Zukunftsmusik, Passage, 12.4.2014: Redaktorin Bettina Mittelstrass
neoprofiles:
Helena Winkelman, HYPER DUO, Joke Lanz, Martina Berther, Patrick Frank, Annette Schmucki, Fritz Hauser, Leo Hofmann, Nik Bärtsch, u.a.
Composing for string quartet with the Arditti Quartet
Gabrielle Weber: workshop with Arditti Quartet at ZHdK
The London-based Arditti Quartet is synonymous with contemporary music for string quartet. Since 1974, the ensemble led by violinist Irvine Arditti, dedicates itself entirely to the contemporary repertoire, both through concerts and recordings as well as in its work with young composers. At the end of February, during a stop on the quartet’s 50th anniversary concert tour, I accompanied the four musicians to a public workshop at the Zurich University of the Arts (ZHdK).
Gabrielle Weber
In a conversation on the evening before the workshop, after a lecture performance, Irvine Arditti tells me that “a piece is good when it fills time and space well’. The lively star violinist with the characteristic grey mop of curls is always somewhat ambiguous and humorous. The music has to ‘work’, regardless of style or type. He is very open regarding quality criteria: ‘We have played many good and many bad pieces. New pieces must first be given the chance to be played. Only then does it become apparent if they are good or bad’.
‘A piece is good when it fills time and space well’
The Arditti Quartet offers precisely such opportunities. Irvine Arditti, first violinist and founder, Lucas Fels, cello, Ashot Sargsyan, second violin and Ralf Ehlers, viola, are curious about young musicians and promote them in a targeted manner. They teach enthusiastically, whether at international festivals such as the Darmstadt Summer Courses for New Music or at music academies such as the ZHdK.
At the lecture performance, they first explained the general challenges of notating and rehearsing new pieces for string quartet, using pieces by composers renowned for their complex compositional style, like Iannis Xenakis and Helmut Lachenmann, and which they had premiered together.
In a lecture performance, the Arditti Quartet exemplified the challenges of composing for string quartet using the piece ‘Tetras’ (1983) by Iannis Xenakis, SRG/SSR 2023.
Together with nine composition students, they rehearsed their new pieces for the final concert the following day. Almost all of them world premieres. Rehearsals take place publicly in the large concert hall.
Schmerzquartett is the title of Franziska Eva Wilhelm’s composition. Wilhelm comes from Munich and has been studying composition with Isabel Mundry in Zurich since autumn 2021. Born in 2003, she is one of the youngest participants in the workshop.
“Pain has a lot to do with friction in my opinion and the sound of string instruments is also created by a kind of friction,” says Wilhelm. “Pain is a difficult subject and I didn’t want to romanticise it. I’m interested in the perception of pain and how it can be embodied in music: rather through texture, than a story”.
Humour is a must
On one hand there’s concentration and work, but also a lot of laughter: At one point, the musicians lose their bearings in the score and Lucas Fels lightens things up with an episode: ‘New York, Carnegie Hall!’ was Sergei Rachmaninoff’s loud reply in the middle of a concert he was conducting when a musician asked where they were. Humour relieves tension and brings the composers together.
Schmerzquartett by Franziska Wilhelm is about the texture of pain, première by Arditti Quartet, ZHdK, 1.3.2024.
“That’s all? How’s that?” asks Irvine Arditti at the end of the Schmerzquartett rehearsal, laughing once more. Wilhelm is satisfied, but would like to try out more, which is carried out without question.
Her conclusions after the rehearsal: “I have learnt a lot about specific notations. They leave nothing to chance and if there is something to be decided, the person who composed decides. As a composer, I have to know exactly what I want and be able to communicate it”.
Translating notated ideas into sound as precisely as possible
In premières, the quartet always endeavours to translate the notated ideas as precisely as possible into sound. This applies just as much to big names as it does to young, yet unknown musicians, says Irvine Arditti. Several hundred string quartets have been dedicated to the ensemble over the past 50 years and the Arditti quartet has worked on most of them with the composers directly.
“I really want to play the piece the way you want it to sound,” he says again and again during rehearsals, for example to Andrzej Ojczenasz.
Ojczenasz clarifies any last-minute notation errors in advance. This is appreciated. For example, the cello should play an octave lower in the very first bar. “That’s a good start,” the musicians comment with a laugh.
His quartet Maris Stella is inspired by Gregorian chant. “The structure is based on the counterpoint of the chorale. I combine tradition with the present,” the composer explains.
Ojczenasz comes from Poland. After studying at the Krysztof Penderecki Academy of Music in Krakow, he continued his education at the University of Louisville (USA) and is now completing a master’s degree in composition with Isabel Mundry.
Major notation errors may occur
Ashot Sargsyan uncovers a more serious notation error a little later: You have to write exactly what you aim to hear, he says. At the same time, you can feel that the musicians are convinced by the piece. The rehearsal atmosphere is trusting and Ojczenasz gladly accepts the correction.
Maris Stella by Andrzej Ojczenasz is based on Gregorian chant, recording of the première by Arditti Quartett, ZHdK, 1.3.2024.
Towards the end of the rehearsal, Irvine Arditti asks him as well if he liked it: “Yes, but…’”- He would also like to correct a few passages.
Ojczenaszs summarises his learning as follows: “Write it down precisely, then it will be played like that! And: always be honest with yourself and your message without wanting to portray someone else.”
Gabrielle Weber
At the final concert on March 1, 2024, in the main concert hall of the ZHdK, the following were heard:
Wojciech Chalpuka: Wohin jetzt? (UA)
Luis Escobar Cifuentes: Ewige Leben (UA)
Wenjie Hu: The Rift (UA)
Amir Liberson: Emptiness (UA)
Franziska Eva Wilhelm: Schmerzquartett (UA)
Nuño Fernández Ezquerra: Lienzo de Luz (2021)
Fabienne Jeannine Müller: Incertain (UA)
Pengyi Li: … Echo … (UA)
Andrzej Ojczenasz: Maris Stella (UA)
Isabel Mundry: Linien, Zeichnungen (2004)
broadcasts SRF Kultur:
Musik unserer Zeit, 3.4.&14.8.2024: Streichquartett heute, Das Arditti Quartett orund der Nachwuchs, editor Gabrielle Weber
Neue Musik im Konzert, 3.4.&14.8.2024: Das Arditti Quartett im Konzert mit jungen Komponierenden, editor Gabrielle Weber
neo-profiles:
Arditti Quartet, Isabel Mundry, Franziska Eva Wilhelm, Andrzej Ojczenasz, Wojciech Chalpuka, Luis Escobar Cifuentes, Wenjie Hu, Amir Liberson, Nuño Fernández Ezquerra, Fabienne Jeannine Müller, Pengyi Li