TONLAGEN #stimme

CIRCLES and others

Ricardo Eizirik: in steps (2018)*
for five amplified voices and one performer

Georges Aperghis: Passwords (2016)
for six voices

Tiziano Manca: Signification (2010)
for three voices

Huihui Cheng: Your Turn (2018)*
A card game performance for six singers and spectators

Hannes Seidl: Lieder am Klavier für zwei bis vier Stimmen
From: For us. For us. (2018/19)*

Lars Petter Hagen: The Neue Vocalsolisten Stuttgart Note-Book
for six vocal parts (2010/11)

Neue Vocalsolisten

* Compositions from the project CIRCLES
CIRCLES is a project of Music of the Centuries.
The world premiere took place on February 7, 2019 at ECLAT Festival Neue Musik Stuttgart.

CIRCLES

At a time when many young artists are turning away from high culture and virtuosity, leaving temples of the Muses, despising the artificial and questioning traditional forms of reception, when the visual gesture is equated with the musical, reality becomes artistic material and every performance is charged with media, the challenge for a top vocal ensemble and the role of its members also changes: they become a projection surface, a medium, representatives of reality.

For CIRLCES, very interdisciplinary and conceptually thinking composers* were commissioned to independently compose works in which questions about cultural heritage and communities of values, about rituals, about roles in communities and about social dynamics are expressed.

CIRCLES describes scenic positions in space, but at the same time social circles addressed in the concert, semi-staged, discursive, participatory, and immersive projects-including a rediscovery of house music, a performance that emerges participatively from a conversation circle, and a fast-paced play characterized by spontaneity in which spectators can interfere, thwart, or counteract. Finally, a hypnosis session in which the audience is drawn deeper and deeper into a surreal world.

Between play and existential experience, the spectators are offered different roles: Onlooker, idea giver, interactor, even proband of a hypnosis session–or always the pure observer role.

TONLAGEN confronts contemporary music with political or even private questions. But: Are these questions relevant for contemporary music at all? And: How relevant is contemporary music to these questions?
The theme for TONLAGEN 2019 is the voice. Voices can be raised, can be emitted, can fall silent, can drown each other out. TONLAGEN wants to make voices audible, loud as well as quiet, forgotten or suppressed, popular as well as contentious. In 2019, the festival will also consciously build a bridge to the Dresden Contemporary Music Days founded by Udo Zimmermann in 1987. Thirty years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the musical past and present of Dresden and East Germany will be the central focus of the program.