Repository of Hearing: Echo, Mountains, Grottos
The echo is a short-term acoustic storage medium that shapes the experience of place and sound. In the performance Time Tuning, Raed Yassin's research into Karlheinz Stockhausen's 1969 concerts in the Jeïta Grotto in Lebanon capture an echo with a 50-year delay. Saxophone solos recall Daniel Ott's echo dialogue Fin al Cunfin, premiered at the Austrian-Swiss border in 2019. These works speak of the echo's significance in an acoustic, metaphysical and historical sense. Followed by the documentary film Stockhausen et les grottes de Jeïta by Anne-Marie Deshayes.
Programme
Raed Yassin: Time Tuning (2019, DE) 50 years later
Lecture-Performance
Daniel Ott: Fin al Cunfin (Auszüge, 2019, DE)
Saxophone: Remo Schnyder
Talk, moderator: Julia Gerlach, in English language
Stockhausen et les grottes de Jeïta
Film by Anne-Marie Deshayes and Luc Ferrari, 1969, 45 min., French with English subtitles
In Raed Yassin's Performance Time Tuning, spectacular concerts by Karlheinz Stockhausen in the unique Jeita Dripstone Caves in Lebanon in November 1969 reverberate to their 50th anniversary. Raed Yassins places these internationally attended avant-garde concerts in a historical context of reference to the moon landing, Mohammed and his own artistic identity. His performance of sound, video and text presents a new reading on the basis of archive research and artistic links.
Daniel Ott's music theatre action Fin al Cunfin, which was premiered in the summer of 2019 at the Austrian-Swiss border and echoes in the open architecture of the academy building in several saxophone solo passages, is also dedicated to a historical event at an equally acoustically concise location: the Altfinstermünz border complex, a narrow gorge that was the site of numerous armed conflicts (e. g. the Swiss or Swabian War of 1499) and today represents an external EU border.
This echo dialogue raises aesthetic and territorial questions. How is Austrian-Swiss history read and interpreted today and what significance does it have for the current challenges in Europe? What significance did the Stockhausen concerts in Lebanon have with regard to musical identification and legend formation, how did Stockhausen's music reach the invited international diplomats and how did this unimaginably reverberant space influence the music so that a unique experience could emerge?
With the new concert series “Repository of Hearing” the music section of the Akademie der Künste addresses readings and the sovereignty of interpretation of history and archiving in the field of music. As an example of this reflective process, an international composer/musician and a member of the Akademie der Künste each enter into a musical and discursive dialogue.