The Exhibition of New Music Celebrates its 30th Birthday. It Links the Gardens of the Tugendhat and Löw-Beer Villas

19 June 2017, 1:00
The Exhibition of New Music Celebrates its 30th Birthday. It Links the Gardens of the Tugendhat and Löw-Beer Villas

The 30th year of the festival, with the theme NOVÁ ®EVOLUCE, is divided into three parts. June’s with the title Zvučící sochy (Sounding Statues) starts with the ringing of sound installations in the gardens of the Tugendhat and Löw-Beer villas, which remain uniquely linked during the event. Over the holidays the festival continues with “radioposlechem radioateliéru” (“radio listening to radio-atelier”) and in the autumn it links with Moravian Autumn 2017.

As part of the festival works will be heard by Christina Kubisch from Germany, Maria Blondeel from Belgium and Charlemagne Palestine from the USA, who will also be participating in the festival themselves, and the Slovak conceptual artist Milan Adamčiak, who unfortunately died this year in January. Charlemagne Palestine will even personally be personally performing at an organ concert in the Bethlehem Church on Pellicová street. “Schlingen Blängen is a continuous open sound form for pipe organ, which I began to develop in 1964 in the Unitarian Church in New York’s Central Park. Since each pipe organ is unique in terms of its size, register and its dialogue with the architecture in which it is installed, each time I prepare Schling, I pre-prepare a special palette of different timbres, selected according to differing registers and intensities and on the basis of the configuration of overtones, which are unique for specific organs and the buildings in which they are installed,” writes the author on the preparation of the concert.

Throughout the summer the festival offers a joint “radioposlech radioateliéru”, in various places and using various means. In the autumn listeners to new music can look forward to the return of AMM, which will perform the famous Treatise by Cornelia Cardew, to the Requiem by Milan Adamčiak or the several times delayed project Pounding Ponc. Aside from these we will hear works by Martin Smolka and Peter Graham, the hard-core drummer Marcel Aguirre and the improvisational orchestra, and music by Mauricio Kagel and the Russian futurists is prepared. At the conclusion of the festival there might even be a magician, or at least an acrobat.

“We will be recapitulating much, returning to earlier timings (summer with installations, concerts in parallel with the Moravian Autumn festival), projects (once more we will be filling the gardens with sound), authors and ensembles (AMM, Aquirre, Adamčiak…), but we will be remaining a progressive “exhibition”, and so everything is conceived once more otherwise: new, present, revolutionary or evolutionary,” say the festival’s dramaturge Viktor Pantůček.

The first part of the festival will take place 21 to 23 June 2017.

Christina Kubish/ photo from festival archive

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