MaerzMusik 2024 examines the conscientious listening experience and highlights border-pushing artistic approaches found across different music trends and disciplines that have helped shaping the creative freedoms of contemporary music across generations we experience today.
This year’s festival programme opens with historic and new compositions for the loudspeaker orchestra Acousmonium, marking this invention by François Bayle 50 years ago as an interdisciplinary breakthrough. There are featured works by Eve Aboulkheir, François Bonnet, Luc Ferrari, Beatriz Ferreyra, KMRU, Iannis Xenakis and François Bayle himself, among others.
Also the reinterpretation of Karlheinz Stockhausen‘s Music in the Belly by Simon Steen-Andersen and Les Percussions de Strasbourg is presented at Haus der Berliner Festspiele. This composition for six percussionists and twelve music boxes from 1974 is one of Stockhausen’s most unusual endeavors. Percussionist Aleksander Wnuk expans electronically “Form and Disposition” for solo percussion by Zbigniew Karkowski: a continuation of, and response to the original – physical and abstract at the same time.
The festival reactivate again the work of composer Lucia Dlugoszewski, especially works with dance – in collaboration with Ensemble Musikfabrik and the Erick Hawkins Dance Company from New York. New York’s ICE Ensemble with Artistic Director George Lewis is collaborating with the renowned Berlin-based Zafraan Ensemble and presenting two generations of Afrodiasporic Swiss composers: Charles Uzor and Jessie Cox, as well as works by Samir Odeh-Tamimi, Aida Shirazi, Raven Chacon and Laure M. Hiendl. The aim of “Polyaspora” is to propose a new consciousness, a new identity for new music. The b-l duo from Singapore explores the potential of acoustic and electronic keyboard instruments with a genre-spanning programme for MaerzMusik. For the “Através” evening multimedia artist Merche Blasco has created assemblages that allow the performers to expand their expressive possibilities beyond the limits of human perception.
“Topographies of Hearing” is a series of sound installations, concerts and durational compositions commissioned by MaerzMusik. The work of composer and computer musician Jessica Ekomane uses the carillon of the Nikolaikirche, in the Tiergarten near the Haus der Kulturen der Welt and the Parochialkirche, as an intervention in public space. Audrey Chen and Hugo Esquinca experiment with the dynamics of a resounding body in interaction with a technological system and the relationship they each have to a predefined space.
Christina Kubisch presents the copper installation “KUPFERGARTEN” at Haus der Berliner Festspiele considering aesthetic, economic and ecological questions and at the same time making them directly perceptible to visitors.
MaerzMusik
15—24.3.2024
Haus der Berliner Festspiele and other venues
berlinerfestspiele.de/maerzmusik | Event @ Facebook | Tickets
