(Musical) Ethics Lab 2: Splitter Orchester and Christopher A. Williams

The composer-performers of the Splitter Orchestra meet the composer and researcher Christopher A. Williams in a great musical and intellectual experiment. For one week they will explore the ethical aspects of playing together. Two concerts will offer an insight into their working process and a radical perspective on how great improvising ensembles can sound.

"(Musical) Ethics Lab 2" is the second in a series of seven collaborations between composer, double bassist and researcher Christopher A. Williams and three outstanding large improvisation ensembles: the Splitter Orchester (Berlin), the Trondheim Jazz Orchestra (Norway) and the klingt collective (Vienna). The Lab is the public centrepiece of the research project "(Musical) Improvisation and Ethics", led by anthropologist Caroline Gatt (University of Graz), philosopher Joshua Bergamin (University of Vienna) and Williams (University of Music and Performing Arts Graz). Over a period of four years, the researchers will investigate the improvisational nature of ethical behaviour, using the seven Lab encounters as case studies.
The Lab is both a musical and an intellectual experiment. In each of the seven encounters, Williams leads a week-long workshop with the respective ensemble, assisted and observed by Gatt and Bergamin, to investigate how ethical processes emerge and change in the musicians' interplay. Rather than composing for the musicians in the usual sense, Williams acts as an empathetic counterpart, suggesting exercises and concepts that challenge the musicians' habits, values and understanding of each other and their surroundings - all within their own ways of making music. Each encounter results in two public concerts and conversations in which the working process is revealed. These encounters in turn offer case studies in a new theory of improvisational ethical becoming and a radical perspective on how large improvising ensembles can sound.

The concerts and lectures vary from one evening to the other, so attendance on both evenings is highly recommended!
A project of the University of Graz, the University of Vienna and the University of Music and Performing Arts Graz.

Supported by the Austrian Science Fund (FWF, grant ZK93)

"(Musical) Ethics Lab 2" is realised in cooperation with the Splitter Orchester and the Akademie der Künste, Berlin.

Another concert with the Splitter Orchester:
SCHRUMPF! Oktopus, Sun 28 Aug, 3 pm, for families and children from 4 years