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Marc Kilchenmann: The versatile

Marc Kilchenmann doesn’t like to repeat himself, what he appreciates is delving deeper when he takes on a subject. For his piece Murhabala, he focussed the women’s struggle for freedom in Iran. In the musical form, overtone and undertone structures meet and clash, sometimes harmoniously, sometimes in dissonant frictions.
A portrait by Friederike Kenneweg

 

The composer Marc Kilchenmann. Portrait with a hat. Foto: Paul Wyss
Der Komponist Marc Kilchenmann. © Paul Wyss

 

Friederike Kenneweg
“I don’t know exactly why, but Persia, Iran – fascinates me since I’ve been a child,” says Marc Kilchenmann. “It has also stayed very present in my life later on. I learnt a bit of Persian, watched a lot of Iranian films and read Iranian poetry. What I particularly like is the language. It is said to be the most metaphor-rich language in the world.”

When Kilchenmann finds something that he is not yet familiar with, he is delighted. This was also the case when analysing US composer Ben Johnston’s string quartets, on which he wrote his doctoral thesis. “With Johnston, I once counted fifteen different third intervals. It felt like the ground was being pulled out from under my feet. That’s great. I said to myself: I don’t know anything. Fantastic!”

 

Maths and music, Iran and Ben Johnston

These two areas of interest meet in his work Murhabala for the microtonal keyboard instrument rhesutron and string quartet. Marc Kilchenmann discovered a mathematical treatise on binomial coefficients from the 11th century Persian polymath Omar Chayyām. He uses this, as well as the harmonic concept of Utonality and Otonality by composer Harry Partch, who had a significant influence on Ben Johnston, to find his musical structure. The term ‘otonal’ refers to intervals that can be formed using the overtone series, while those that are formed with the undertone series are called ‘utonal’.

 

Marc Kilchenmann, Dominik Blum and the Quatuor Bozzini after the first night of Murhabala in Kunsthaus Walcheturm, Zürich. © Doris Kessler
The piece ‘Murhabala’ was commissioned by Dominik Blum on the occasion of his 60th birthday. Dominik Blum and Marc Kilchenmann together with the Quatuor Bozzini after the world premiere of ‘Murhabala’ in Kunsthaus Walcheturm, September 2024. © Doris Kessler

 

The Persian word Murhabala means “juxtaposition”. In his piece, Marc Kilchenmann juxtaposes utonal and otonal interval structures. The string quartet, which mainly plays sustained ground notes, only moves in the otonal harmonic space. The rhesutron plays ornamental lines and uses both otonal and utonal intervals. As the piece progresses, the harmonic structure becomes increasingly complex. When the overtone series is combined with the undertone series, perfectly pure-sounding intervals are in some cases created. Mostly, however, tones meet at a distance that lies outside the traditional tonal system.

 


Murhabala for Rhesutron and string quartet, Recording 23.9.2024 in the Kantonsschule Küsnacht. Dominik Blum and Quatuor Bozzini

 

Waves like revolutionary movements

“You can listen to my piece in a very linear way, but you can also pay close attention to the harmony, you can just follow the string instruments or simply let your mind wander,” says Marc Kilchenmann. One thought that occupied him while composing were the women in Iran, who are constantly fighting against oppression and for their freedom. The harmonic connections that result from the structure of Murhabala resemble wave structures that are reminiscent of the ups and downs of protest being defeated and then re-strengthened. Marc Kilchenmann would like to emphasise this aspect even more clearly in the next version. “The waves that I actually imagined, this perseverance, this coming back again and again, that’s something that I don’t hear enough of in the piece. I’m going to emphasise that even more.”

 

The unfamiliar and the unknown

As intensively as Marc Kilchenmann has now explored overtones and undertones, his next composition will probably be about something completely different. After all, it is the unknown that appeals to him time and time again. “I would like to study something completely different again. I probably won’t do that now, because time is also finite. But I like dealing with completely different things and experiencing this unfamiliarity again: That’s a nicer state than knowing everything already. What could one expect from life then?”
Friederike Kenneweg

Omar Chayyām, Ben Johnston, Harry Partch, Quatuor Bozzini

neo-profile
Marc Kilchenmann, Dominik Blum, Kunstraum Walcheturm

 

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Andreas Eduardo Frank: Collaborative composing and meta-composing

Since the 2024/2025 season, Composer Andreas Eduardo Frank is the new Artistic Director & Co-Director of Basel’s Gare du Nord, one of the most important venues for contemporary music in Switzerland. Frank’s own works are multimedia, playful, humorous and often more political than one might think at first glance. A portrait by Jaronas Scheurer

The composer and new Artistic Director of Basel’s Gare du Nord, Andreas Eduardo Frank.

Jaronas Scheurer
Andreas Eduardo Frank is the new artistic director of the Gare du Nord and he is also a member of the programming team of the Neue Musik Rümlingen Festival. As a result, he no longer gets to compose at the moment, as he says in an interview. “I have to be honest, I’ve spent a lot of the last ten years sitting behind a desk and putting notes on paper. It’s a lonely job and I’m actually a rather social kind of person. Curating is some kind of meta-composing, especially when you collaborate with people, exchanging and realising ideas together.”

For Frank, the switch from composing to curating does not feel like a rupture. Even by looking at his earlier pieces, the collaborative nature of his compositional methods becomes apparent, which he emphasises in the interview: “I like to be inspired by the people I write for: What kind of sound, what kind of action, what kind of moment suits them?”

Yes, No, Maybe

However, not only his working methods have a strong social dimension, but also his very pieces. In the 2020 work Yes Yes No No, Yes No No No for violin, saxophone, accordion, percussion, electronics and video, played here by the Concept Store Quartet, Frank explored the dimensions of meaning of the words yes and no.

“I was interested in this grey area between yes and no, between one and zero. A ‘yes’ can sound beautiful, brutal, aggressive, strained, dismissive.” Frank started with these two everyday words and analysed their meaning and sound. Then there was the video aspect of the work. In the video as well as on stage, performers can be seen saying ‘yes’ and ‘no’ in different ways. “I found this an interesting constellation,” says Frank. “There are four performers on stage who all just say ‘yes’ and ‘no’. Then there are their digital avatars, who do the same. This creates very different social constellations between real performers and digital doubles, between individuals and group constellations, between various media levels. It’s a kind of social microcosm.”

New Music and politics

Andreas Eduardo Frank’s work thus has a clear socio-political dimension, which he immediately confirms: “I believe that music and art need to have an attitude towards society, to be reflected or can be heard in the music. Of course one can escape into music as a kind of ideal world. But reality is not intact.” The danger however, is for the music to become propaganda. Frank’s antidote to this is virtuosity: “I don’t want to tell anyone what he or she should think,” he says in the interview. “I want to create spaces of thought into which one can briefly dive and then a new space opens up the next moment. In this way, I try to establish some kind of virtuosity in thought form.”

Can one sing faster than the speed of light?

Another piece by Frank, Restore Factory Defaults (2017), is also centered on virtuosity. The starting point for the composition, which he developed with singer Anne-May Krüger, was the idea that one can sing faster than the speed of light. However, this actually absurd question puts us right in the middle of the extremely real everyday life of a musician. Frank’s piece is about virtuosity, competition and the power of performance.

In the piece, Anne-May Krüger sings against digital doppelgangers and the projected light choreography, which repeatedly leaves her in the dark. The various media levels such as video, light and audio recordings serve both as a virtuoso extension of the mezzo-soprano’s vocal abilities and as a media machine that she fights against.

Restore Factory Default is simultaneously a humorous examination of the limitations of human physical abilities, a multimedia virtuoso piece for a singer and a cultural-political reflection on the absurd competition between humans and machines. “On the one hand, I was interested in ‘enhancing’: So – how can I make this even more virtuoso with media means?” says Frank. “But at the same time, it’s a battle between the machine, which operates with light and the sound, which comes primarily from humans. I sometimes have the impression that behind this multimedia trend in contemporary music lies an escape from working with sound. I wanted to turn this around and therefore asked myself: can one sing faster than light?”

Andreas Eduardo Frank performing live with a modular synthesizer.

A safer harbour for sound experiments

This gentle criticism of contemporary music also brings us back to his current work as the Gare du Nord’s artistic director: “The Gare du Nord should be a place for sound experiments and a safe harbour for other approaches that may not belong to the mainstream. I want to dust off contemporary music and increasingly offer a platform to the younger generation.”
Jaronas Scheurer

Broadcast SRF 2 Kultur:
Kultur Kompakt from the 17th of October 2024 (from 00:25:51): Jaronas Scheurer reports on the opening production of this year’s season of the Gare du Nord.

Neo-profiles:
Andreas Eduardo Frank, Concept Store Quartet, Anne-May Krüger

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Nora Vetter / Performative contexts

Nora Vetter, Lucerne based viola player and composer, benefited in 2023-2024 of the Migros Culture Percentage’s Double Classic network. Each year, this mentoring platform enables several musicians to work on a specific project in depth and supported by a coach. On this occasion, we look back at her creative process and her impressions after a year of coaching, which led to the production of a new work for solo drums. A Portrait by Alexandre Babel.

 


Portrait Nora Vetter zVg. Nora Vetter

Alexandre Babel
After completing a master’s degree in contemporary music in Basel, Nora Vettter moved to Lucerne, where she is actively involved as a violist with the Latenz ensemble and the Kulturbrauerei collective, producing events with the Forum Neue Musik and working on performance projects with the VAMM! collective. She is one of those instrumentalists whose multifaceted involvement in a wide range of contemporary contexts has led her to a questioning regarding her own creative power. So since 2019, she has been developing a body of compositional work, a personal way to structure the link between space and musical action.

“I like writing for specific places, that’s how I started. My first project took place in the disused grain silos of Altdorf in the canton of Uri in 2019. The architectural space was extraordinary, with a reverberation time of almost fifteen seconds. I presented two sound works there. One consisted in dropping pieces of dry bread from the opening in the roof of the silo. On the floor, two assistants had to collect the crumbs and place them in bags. This produced a series of small bombs whose impact on the ground, enhanced by acoustic reverberation, formed the sound structure’s basis”. Seemingly performative and phenomenological, this first action harbours a desire to sculpt sound and organise it in temporal space. At the same time, the architectural context is so important here that it will influence the perception of the sound phenomenon. These are concerns that Nora Vetter likes to emphasise, regardless of the formal context of her work.

In 2022, at the closing concert of the Festival Forward as part of the Lucerne Festival, the VAMM! collective she formed with Urban Mäder, Peter Allamand and Pia Matthes presented Ein sauberes Ende, a ‘collective intervention’ in which a group of nearly thirty performers undertook a clean-up action at the end of the concert. “The performance wasn’t really a conventional clean-up,” explains Vetter, “and we introduced tools that weren’t part of the building’s equipment, such as waste pliers and leaf blowers, which scattered the scores at the beginning of the piece.”

 

 

Urban Mäder, Peter Allamand Pia Matthes et Nora Vetter, Ein sauberes Ende, UA Lucerne Festival Forward, Konzertsaal KKL, November 2022.

 

When asked about the compositional aspect of such an intervention, Vetter explains: “While the initial idea was indeed to clean the space while the audience was still seated in the auditorium, we gradually added a musical dimension to the action. I would define this piece more as a composition, since we paid attention to the succession of sounds and the superimposition of sound textures that we consciously wanted to hear in a certain order.”

Nora Vetter further represents this duality between performative action and musical structure in works such as Dream Paralysis, a concert piece written in 2021 for the Latenz ensemble. “Whereas my work in Altdorf’s Grain Silos was adapted to an existing location, Dream Paralysis is dedicated to a particular group of people. But I needed an extra element with which I could shape the visual space. I turned to the use of light, distributing it in several distinct layers: neon tubes and torches operated by the performers and stage lights that drew different tableaux programmed according to the musical form. These elements form the starting point for a space dedicated to dreams”. The piece, inspired by the cycles of sleep, plays with the combination of perceptive sources. Vetter furher explains: “When the light dims, perception changes. In fact, as soon as the visual field is dimmed, the ability to perceive other elements increases and I like that idea.”

 

 

Nora Vetter, Dream Paralysis

 

In Dream Paralysis we find the use of performed gestures that are not linked to the production of sound, but which play an active part in the compositional dramaturgy. A performative attribute which, on the surface, distances this work from Nora Vetter’s latest production, Patch work, developed during her mentoring year. “Patch work is an acoustic drum solo, written for percussionist Ruben Bañuelos. It’s a piece of pure music, the antithesis of a work like Ein Sauberes Ende,” Vetter explains. Yet the composer’s performative concerns have not been forgotten. “What really interested me during the mentorship was becoming aware of the potential connotations of an instrument, in this case the drums. The very presence of a drum kit on stage is in fact already a performative statement.” We might well wonder, then, whether the reduction in means has not actually enabled the composer to isolate the very essence of the stage gesture. “Percussion is incredibly choreographic in itself,” concludes Vetter. “The gestures Ruben makes to produce the sound, some of them very subtle, already tell the story of a world. Finally, with this piece, I feel like continuing the work I started years ago.”
Alexandre Babel

Portrait Nora Vetter zVg. Nora Vetter

Latenz Ensemble, Kulturbrauerei Luzern, Forum Neue Musik Luzern, Ruben Bañuelos

émissions SRF Kultur :
neoblog, 11.11.2022: Das Lucerne Festival Forward nimmt “ein sauberes Ende”, Autor Jaronas Scheurer.

neoprofiles :
Nora Vetter, Urban Mäder

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Tapiwa Svosve grinds saxophone sounds into the sewage system

Young jazz saxophonist Tapiwa Svosve (*1995) was awarded one of this year’s BAK music prizes. Svosve does not commit himself to any particular style, switching agilely between free jazz, ambient, noise and progressive rock. However, his musical practice is firmly rooted in the jazz tradition.

The jazz saxophonist Tapiwa Svosve from Zürich / Porträt zVg. Tapiwa Svosve.

Jaronas Scheurer
Tapiwa Svosve already achieved a lot, considering his young career: shortly after graduating from Zurich Jazz School, he won the ZKB Jazz Prize with the band District Five, followed by a performance with jazz legends Hamid Drake and William Parker and a year of work for the City of Zurich, where he organised and curated the Zurich Taktlos Festival and co-founded transdisciplinary art collective Gamut. He has performed in productions by the celebrated artist and filmmaker Wu Tsang, made music for the Louis Vuitton fashion show, released numerous albums – solo, with his various bands or, for example, the album The Sport of Love in 2023 with American electronic producer Asma Maroof and English cellist Patrick Belaga, whom he met during his collaboration with Wu Tsang. In 2024, this remarkable career was crowned with a tour of Southeast Asia and one of the coveted BAK Music Prizes.

Tapiwa Svosve sounds in G Major Kinda Love from the album The Sport of Love very tender. However, that is just one side of his diverse oeuvre.

Financial scarcity and artistic consistency

Nevertheless, Svosve is just barely getting by financially: “I mainly live off my music. Sometimes it goes alright and sometimes less,” he says during the interview, “Maybe you get to play a lot, but then there’s another dry spell and you limit yourself: you don’t go out anymore, maybe you only eat rice with soy sauce. I can accept that if it then goes up again.” The BAK prize and prize money came at just the right time: “I was really worried about how I was going to make ends meet over the next few months. The prize took me from one reality to a completely different one: One day I had minus twenty francs in my account and the next day I suddenly had this huge prize money.”

The financial scarcity is probably also due to Svosve’s artistic consistency, who hardly, if at all, submits to sales arguments or marketing strategies. “An improvisational approach is fundamental as far as I’m concerned – be it in a jazz trio, in a noise band or when I make ambient music: being open to the potential of collaborations and seeing where this constellation of people takes you.” Svosve sees himself as a jazz musician: “I was musically socialised through jazz, in what other Western musical tradition is this extreme openness at to be found?”

Jazz and community

For Svosve, the openness and improvisational approach of jazz go beyond the actual music making . His work as an organiser and curator has also been influenced by these values: “The fact that I not only make music, but also proactively create spaces for music that the mainstream may not yet be ready for, is an essential part of being a musician for me and looking back at jazz history, this has always been an important part.”

A jazz musician in very different echo chambers

Svosve is essentially a jazz musician. He studied jazz history intensively and also teaches jazz history at the Winterthur Institute for Contemporary Music (WIAM), allthough this is hard to hear in some of his projects.

It characterises his way of being and working rather than the actual musical results. A good example is the album “A Lung in a Horn in a Horn”, released in 2022. In a nocturnal action, he and artist, label operator and sound designer Rafal Skoczek climbed into a large, open pipe that was laid under the Sihl and Limmat rivers. The album was then created there – just him, the saxophone and the psychedelically reverberating Zurich sewerage system, recorded by Skoczek. There was no major clarification of what was possible or legal. There were no rehearsals, no sound check: “The aim of the action was more the way to get there than the actual result. But I still like the record today. It’s so purist. It’s not so much about my playing, but more about how this tunnel actually sounds when I grind saxophone sounds into it.”
Jaronas Scheurer

Tapiwa Svosve and his saxophone, here in A Lung in a Horn in a Horn, recorded in the sewage of Zürich.

Broadcasts SRF Kultur:
Musikmagazin, SRF 2 Kultur, 28.9.2024: Preisgekrönt: Der Saxophonist Tapiwa Svosve: Tapiwa Svosve in an interview with Jaronas Scheurer.

Neo profiles:
Tapiwa Svosve, Swiss Music Prizes

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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.

 

Marie Klay, Dimitri Meier and Thibault Walter / LUFF Swiss Music Prices 2024 © Gabrielle Weber

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.

  

     

LUFF / Dimitri Meier and Thibault Walter @ Award Ceremony Swiss Music Prices 2024 © Sébastien Agnetti

        

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

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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.

 

Probe Lucerne Festival Academy, conductor Heinz Holliger © Lucerne Festival / Stefan Deuber.

 

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.

 

Lucerne Festival Academy, rehearsal SK14, conductor Sir George Benjamin © Lucerne Festival / Manuela Jans.

 

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

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The Swiss Museum and Centre for Electronic Music Instruments – a living archive

At only seven years of age the Swiss Museum and Centre of Electronic Musical Instruments (SMEM) already won one of the Swiss Music Awards’ three special prizes. The museum is located in Fribourg and allows to experience technology, history and practice of electronic music-making.

High shelves at the Swiss Museum and Centre for Electronic Music

Friedemann Dupelius
‘The award was a total surprise,’ says Victorien Genna, project coordinator at SMEM, ’we wouldn’t have imagined something like this for at least another few years. It’s wonderful to be a recognised Swiss institution.’ Which is not only recognised in Switzerland. In addition to guests from France and Germany, numerous fans from England, the USA, Japan, Australia and New Zealand travel to Fribourg to marvel at its impressive collection. SMEM exhibits some 5000 electronic musical instruments, including almost every conceivable type of device: samplers, drum machines, synthesisers, mixing consoles, effects units, amplifiers, recording devices, microphones – even software such as the first version of the now widely used programme Ableton Live from 2001 and the corresponding old computers on which it used to run.

The Hammond Novachord was produced between 1938 and 1942

The shelves rise high to the ceiling of a former brewery – now converted into an area for start-ups and cultural initiatives. But anyone who fears thick layers of dust on the keyboards can be reassured, SMEM sees itself as a ‘living archive’. All of these devices are not only professionally maintained, but can also be played. In the museum’s ‘playroom ’, a wide selection of different instruments is on display, including classics such as the Roland TR-808 and TR-909 drum machines. Visitors can book a session for little money and even record their own jams to take home.

A museum for kids and nerds alike

When asked whether SMEM actually makes a distinction between academic, ‘serious’ electronic music and its pop-cultural varieties, Victorien Genna asks what I actually mean by that – and thus gives an indirect, but clear answer. He is not a musicologist or composer, but joined SMEM as a philosophy student who enjoys playing with synths in his private life. ‘FM synthesis is a good example: it made its way from university laboratories to the consumer market and became world-famous with the Yamaha DX7 in the 80s. Here, the nerds get their money’s worth, you can really go into detail. But even five-year-old children or someone who turned 100 should be able to have fun.’

Children also have fun at SMEM

The first circuit ends on a train journey

The fact that SMEM exists at all is a lucky coincidence, as most of the collection comes from Klemens Niklaus Trenkle – an actor who has been collecting electronic instruments since the 1970s. So many, in fact, that at some point his landlord got fed up and told him to get rid of the stuff. On a train journey, he struck up a conversation with architecture professor Christoph Allenspach from Fribourg. Allenspach had had the idea of opening a music-related museum for years and so the first wiring was unexpectedly successful. The instruments soon moved from Basel to Fribourg, an association was founded and a team of volunteers put together. The museum opened in 2017 and not much has changed since then: The number of instruments is large, the budget small.
Victorien Genna of SMEM has produced a documentary series about instruments from the SMEM collection.

In addition to public funding and private donations, SMEM thrives on volunteers and their commitment, such as Victorien Genna, volunteered until he was recently given one of the museum’s three permanent positions. The volunteers repair instruments, mix concerts or take on bar shifts. The newly received prize is therefore worth more than gold, as the museum’s collection is constantly growing. But how are you supposed to filter out which delay module or wavetable synth will be historically relevant from a flood of new technical releases? ‘Sometimes you can quickly recognise technical revolutions,’ says Victorien Genna, referring to the Elektron Digitakt, released in 2017, ’it was instantly clear upon release, that it would become an important sampler for the 21st century. But often one can only speculate and gets to know after a few years.’ Klemens Niklaus Trenkle still buys new instruments for the museum himself. ‘He has a pretty good feel for what is or will be relevant.’

SMEM organises concerts, workshops and lectures – at least once a month. Several times a year, artists in residence are hosted in Fribourg for one to four weeks to experiment with instruments of their choice. There is no obligation to produce results, but something always comes out of it, which is then usually released on Fribourg’s label oos. In October, the label plans a release by Viennese musician Oliver Thomas Johnson, alias Dorian Concept, who worked with the Yamaha CS01 synthesiser at SMEM. The polyrhythmic meshes of percussive synthesisers begin to groove more and more with each new layer and the 200 beats per minute speed is not noticeable in this agile music. It is a living archive in which history is not only documented, but also actively shaped.
Friedemann Dupelius


Swiss Museum and Centre for Electronic Music Instruments (SMEM)
SMEM on Instagram
The online magazine of SMEM
Dorian Concept on Bandcamp
Klemens Niklaus Trenkle
The album Unconditional Contours by Legowelt, partly composed at SMEM

 

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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.

 

Léo Collin working on Corals © Lea Huser

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.

 

Léo Collin: Corals © Lea Huser

 

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

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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.

 

Portrait Lauren Newton © Peter Purgar

 

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

Lauren Newton and Joëlle Léandre © Friedrich Förster

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.

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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.

 

Portrait Cathy van Eck zVg. Cathy van Eck.

 

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.