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

Daniel Zea composes for cardboard boxes and avatars

The Colombian-Swiss composer Daniel Zea understands sound as a plastic material. In his work, he combines sounds, movement, electronics and video with digital setups. A portrait by Jaronas Scheurer.

Jaronas Scheurer
“I compose more from a designer as from as a composer’s point of view,” says Daniel Zea during our interview. “I’m interested in things like symmetry and asymmetry, ergonomics and balance and sound is a plastic material to me.” He also studied industrial design in Colombia before going on to study composition with Harold Vasquez-Castañeda in Bogotá. He then came to Geneva and finished his studies with Eric Gaudibert at the haute école de musique (HEM) and also studied at the Institute of Sonology in The Hague for two years before co-founding Ensemble Vortex and starting his teaching carreer in interactive design at Geneva’s HEM: Daniel Zea’s CV is therefore long and varied – industrial designer, composer, audio designer, media artist and programmer.

Daniel Zea as avatar in his piece Autorretrato. © Daniel Zea

Zea usually writes music for complex networks where performers, self-developed and conventional instruments, electronics, video projections and computer programmes are linked together. “When I work with interactive systems, it’s actually a design project: I develop a setup combining hardware, software and human interaction in such a way that sound and music are created.” His works blend movement and sound, resulting in self-developed instruments or scores that generate themselves in real time – such as in Box Tsunami from 2021.

Daniel Zea composed Box Tsunami 2021 during the Corona pandemic for the four musicians of the Concept Store Quartet.

Box Tsunami

Zea wrote Box Tsunami for young Basel-based Concept Store Quartet during the coronavirus pandemic, with the huge ammount of parcels and packages mailed, symbolizing the consumer craze, as starting point: “A person in front of an empty box – that’s very poetic. What does it mean? Why is the person sitting there? Why is the box empty?”. That’s how Box Tsunami begins: the four musicians sit in front of large cardboard boxes with their instruments and a laptop. These are open at the top with white light shining out. The boxes knock, rustle and creak. The musicians look intently at their laptops and lay delicate, filigree sounds over the boxes’ rumbling – all on their own, without paying much attention to each other.

For Box Tsunami, Zea started by developping the sounding boxes. He fitted them with small electric hammers and so-called transducers, which transmit signals in the way a loudspeaker would. This turns the cardboard boxes into instruments one can control electronically. However, the signals are rather quiet, which is why the four musicians can only play quietly and softly. In order to link musicians and boxes, their electric hammers are controlled by the percussionist using a midi drum pad. An interactive loop links the musicians with the cardboard boxes and the score is generated from this in real time. Similar to what pappened during the lockdown times, everyone sits mesmerised in front of their screens. They are dependent on the actions of others and, above all, on the technological means of communication, but never meet each other and the boxes from online purchases pile up around them – the box tsunami.

In the self-portrait of Daniel Zea and the solo show Autorretrato from 2023, you see him sitting in front of a camera and a larger-than-life avatar of him on the screen.

Autorretrato

The setting for the composition Autorretrato (Self-Portrait) is simpler: Zea himself sits in front of a camera and on the screen behind him you can see an avatar performing the same facial expressions. A digital doppelganger. Zea can control and manipulate sounds with his facial movements. Over time, the screen is populated by various objects such as a can of cola, high heels, a hand grenade or a crucifix. This is done using a face tracking app that links Zea to the audio programme. For Autorretrato, Zea is composer, audio designer, software developer and performer all at once. “The most difficult part was definitely the performing,” the composer explains. “I’m not used to standing alone centre stage, so I was nervous before the premiere. It’s also a very personal piece. On one hand, it’s risky, but it also allows me to say and do things that I wouldn’t otherwise dare.”

Autorretrato is new and Zea describes it as a “work in progress”: “I would still like to work on the piece and expand some of its parts. The work on our self-portrait is in some way ongoing,” says Daniel Zea. He therefore continues to build, combining sound and movement, examining the subtlest facila expressions in terms of composition, developing instruments and embedding all of this in his socio-political considerations.
Jaronas Scheurer

Portrait Daniel Zea © Vincent Capes

Between April 30 and May 5, 2024, les Amplitudes Festival in La Chaux-de-Fonds will be dedicated to the work of Daniel Zea. Among other proposals, the Ensemble Vortex, which Zea co-founded, will premiere a new work for orchestra by Zea and a sound installation by Daniel Zea and Alexandre Joly will take place throughout the festival.

Nejc Grm, Alicja Pilarczyk, Pablo González Balaguer

Broadcasts SRF Kultur:
neoblog, 14.10.2020: la ville – une composition géante, auteur Anya Leveillé
neoblog, 23.01.2022 : Portrait unserer Zeit, Autorin Gabrielle Weber

Neo-profiles: Daniel Zea, Concept Store Quartet, Ensemble Vortex, Eric Gaudibert, Jeanne Larrouturou