The musicians enter the stage as they are used to doing at concerts. But since this does not meet the expectations of a musical theater, the composer calls in from offstage. He demands a different performance, “a bit spooky” with shadowy figures, gloomy lighting, fog lights and eerie sounds. But even this variant does not […]

In the beginning, the room was desolate and empty. But then “avatars” scurried around, provided light, dragged objects in, started up instruments, machines, record players and televisions. Something began to glow, to sound, to move. Like the Old Testament creation story, Hamburg composer Alexander Schubert’s “Genesis” project lasted a full seven days of creation, from […]

After the end of the digital revolution, we now live in a post-digital world, where digital modes of production, presentation, perception and interaction have become so commonplace that they also co-determine our analog modes of communication and behavior. At the intersections of reality and virtuality, Alexander Schubert’s works, which may be more concert-like, theatrical, participatory, […]

The composer Jörg Mainka in the age of technical reproducibility Artists today are confronted with the “power of the media”, namely with the omnipresence of images and music, with the indistinguishability of original and technically ever more perfected copy, as well as with the medial formation of opinion, processing and channeling of information. Although the […]

The fermentation process of bits and bytes thematized by Kreidler does not allow for a hasty conclusion, nor should we expect a quick maturity of artistic confrontations with it. The possibilities and hardships of music in the age of the Internet, which he has addressed in essays, conceptual pieces and now also in a work […]

Joanna Bailie’s Artificial Environments Nos. 1-5 are a composed museum walk that finds its artistic origin in our sounding environment. In this sense, the piece sees itself as a contextualization cycle of musical processes through explanation. Inherent in this is a poetry that poses a chicken-and-egg question: What came first, magical sounding soundscapes or the […]

According to Thomas Metzinger, we cannot experience consciousness as such. At most, we can perceive the context of what we call consciousness: the color of something, sounds, smells or feelings. Our consciousness remains transparent. In general, we as humans perceive only a fraction of reality at all. From the possible frequency spectrum of sounds, we […]

Many composers of the current middle generation aged forty to fifty work with computers and video as a matter of course. Following the technological-demographic regularity, there are even more in the generation of the under forties or under thirties. Michael Beil, born in 1963 and head of the Studio for Electronic Music at the Cologne […]

In the Middle Ages, anyone who wrote with their left hand was suspected of being a witch or a sorcerer. Crossing oneself with the left hand was considered unchristian and was sometimes punished by death. Until the 1970s, left-handed people were retrained and an above-average talent of the left hand was dismissed as a flaw. […]