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Andrés Nuño de Buen: Leve

Leve = light/gravityless in Spanish. I associate plucked string notes with something falling; something solid, subject to gravity. This is certainly due to their quick attack and short decay, comparable to the impact of a falling object. The idea of transforming this into something weightless, feather-light was there even before I started composing – I wanted guitar sounds to ‚evaporate‘ into something less tangible. And not only the sounds, but also the shapes they form together were to evaporate in the course of the piece. From the concrete, tangible into the diffusely floating, at some point, however, even the gestaltness of the entire piece tipped over unplanned. What happens then? After two performances, I hear the piece as a labyrinth of simple, overlapping vertical and horizontal elements, in which I eventually realize that I am trapped.

Andrés Nuño de Buen

Biography

Andrés Nuño de Buen

Andrés Nuño de Buen (*1988 in Mexico City) strives for an immediate sensuality in his music, in which listening is central as a direct physical contact between the outer and inner worlds. His pieces are created through subtle processes of sound shaping and reshaping in haptic contact with acoustic and computer-programmed instruments. In Nuño de Buen’s music, sounds are both carriers of harmonically melodic energy and triggers of physical phenomena. In “Alquitara,” for example, tuning fork tones are amplified by resonating glass bottles and used as sine generators for a kind of ‘purely acoustic synthesizer’ brought to life in the 2021 Lucerne Festival Forward by twelve players from the Lucerne Festival Contemporary Orchestra. For an upcoming collaboration with the Riot Ensemble, Nuño de Buen is currently developing a new, electromagnetically controlled version of this acoustic synthesizer that will interact with the London-based ensemble’s instrumental sounds. Several of his works use similar methods with acoustic and electronic means to make objects and instruments vibrate or change their sound. Andrés Nuño de Buen studied in Mexico City and Karlsruhe, initially with Wolfgang Rihm and Markus Hechtle. His compositions have been performed, among others, at the Berlin Contemporary Music Month, the Bludenzer Tage zeitgemäßer Musik, the Lucerne Festival Academy, the Festival Internacional Cervantino and the Juilliard Focus! Festival. Nuño de Buen has received numerous scholarships, including from institutions such as the Akademie der Künste Berlin (INITIAL Special Scholarship 2021), the Cultural Secretariat of Mexico (“Jóvenes Creadores” Scholarship 2014, 2018, 2021) and the Ministry of Science, Research and the Arts of Baden-Württemberg (Landesgraduiertenförderung 2017).

Translated with DeepL

Andrés Nuño de Buen
© Daniela Tablada Garibay
Work Information

Davor Branimir Vincze: XinSheng

The story of “XinSheng” concerns a tangled love triangle between Andrei, a boxer, Fan, his coach, and Anne, a surgeon. After Andrei barely survives an underground boxing match, Fan pressures Anne to treat him using an experimental drug, “Xinsheng,” which will save his life but at a grievous cost. Set in a quasi-dystopian world of messy relationships, cutthroat competition, and medical malpractice, the opera portrays the clash of personal feelings with professional obligations, the sacrifices demanded by love, and the paradoxical intersections of intimacy and distance.

 

As the opera proceeds and we learn more about the complicated histories of its characters, it grows increasingly difficult to know whether Fan’s desire to save Andrei is motivated by affection, professional duty, or her own financial gain. At the same time, as the stakes of Anne’s decision to administer or withhold the drug are revealed, it becomes unclear whether her final choice represents a gesture of love or of revenge. Ultimately, perhaps it is both—an act of love that is itself a form of violence.

 

The music mimics this emotional ambivalence by immersing the audience in thick, multilayered and shape-shifting textures. In its close-miked pants, gasps, and snarls of anger, the opera emphasizes that intimacy can be distancing: the closer the opera gets to its characters, the more impersonal and uncomfortable it becomes.

 

Like its inconclusive narrative, the music of “Xinsheng” veers between extremes, yet never quite settles into either. Its opening minutes, which depict Andrei’s near-fatal fight, are visceral, bringing fluttering and growling instrumental textures together with the sounds of panting and gasping to create the sound of a body in crisis. Throughout the fight sequence, the music remains unrelentingly violent, full of bass drum pulses that evoke the sound of Andrei’s racing heartbeat and shrieking cello glissandos that suggest the cries of the onlookers.

 

Later, as the drama of Andrei’s fight is supplanted by the drama of his treatment, the music becomes more distant and ethereal. As surgeon Anne stands over Andrei’s body, her reflections on the debt she owes his coach Fan—and indeed, the debt Fan owes Anne—are expressed in a beautiful cascade of descending vocal lines, accompanied by celestial synthesizer textures and sparse zither dissonances. As she slowly comes to her decision, the musical texture grows denser and thicker, culminating in an almost unbearable moment of intensity before collapsing, seemingly in exhaustion, into a field of faint, hollow harmonies punctuated by bright pinpoints of sound. Depending on how we understand Anne’s choice, this eerie wash of texture could be heard as a reprieve from the violence endured earlier or as its apotheosis.

Davor Vincze

Biography

Davor Branimir Vincze

Davor Vincze (* 1983, Zagreb) places his artistic focus on meta-reality and musical mosaicking. Inspired by technology and science fiction, he searches for hidden acoustic spaces or ways to blur the real and the imaginary, often using electronics and AI tools. Working with mosaics (multiple copies of fragmented sound gestures), Vincze searches for fluid sounds that allow for non-binary, ambiguous, or “androgynous” interpretations.

 

After studying medicine in Zagreb, Davor changed his career path and studied composition in Graz, Stuttgart, Ircam and at Stanford University. In 2014, he founded an international festival of contemporary music – Novalis. Last year, his piece “XinSheng” won 2nd prize at the Stuttgart Composition Competition as well as the Noperas! grant, which will allow him to expand the short opera into a full version. Currently, he lives in Atlanta as an Arts Fellow at Emory University.

 

Davor Vincze
© Andrew Watts
Work Information

Rama Gottfried: Scenes from the Plastisphere

Within the ocean’s accumulating zones of plastic debris, a new ecosystem is emerging which scientists have named the plastisphere. This is partly good news, because it seems to suggest that life on Earth will eventuality adapt to incorporate the results of human carelessness; but on the other hand, the resulting ecosystem may not be one which supports life as we know it. Scenes from the Plastisphere depicts a musical theater of imaginary hybrid creatures growing within and around human culture, moving with organic bodies and speaking with digital voices.

 

A sequel of sorts to Apophänie (2016), the piece develops a performance environment composed of multiple layers of movement at different scales. Actual-size human performers on stage are connected to biological entities performing in a microscopic theater. The action is right in front of us but just beyond our view, perceivable only through incomplete, implied information from the stage, and the digitally magnified sound amplification and video projection.

 

Shifting through a sequence of contrasting vantage points in the miniature pseudo-organic environment, a narrative grows between the microscopic entities. The organisms of the miniature world are born, mutated, absorbed, and consumed within the virtual ecosystem. They are artificial components of the video-instrument apparatus, yet are alive, brought to life through sonic organisation and the performer’s gesture. The score for the piece thinks musically about the lifeforms appearing within the physical materials, but the material is unstable organic matter — to discover the entities hidden in the material, the performers must recognise the connections and emerging patterns in an ever-changing field of interactions.

Commissioned through the Ernst von Siemens Musikstiftung and Philharmonie Luxembourg.

Rama Gottfried

 

Biography

Rama Gottfried

Rama Gottfried (*1977 in New York) aims to increase our sensitivity to the web of relations that connect humans and the other animate and inanimate entities that surround us. His pieces are conceived as scenographic worlds — bodies with voices that move and interact in physical and immaterial environments, constructed from the medias of acoustic and electronic instrumental performance, puppet-, object-, material-theater, live-cinema, and the site-specific performance context. Brought to life through the collaborative actions of human and nonhuman performers, the works attempt to absorb the audience and physical space, subtly expanding our awareness of detail.

 

Rama Gottfried grew up in Burlington, Vermont, where he began instrumental and electronic music training at an early age, attending Bread and Puppet Theater performances and developing a visual art practice before shifting focus to music performance and composition. After moving to New York City in 2001, he joined Ensemble Pamplemousse, collaborating with the group from 2003-2013 finding new approaches to the merging of sound, installation, and performance arts.

 

During his PhD studies at the University of California, Berkeley, Rama studied composition with Franck Bedrossian and computer music with David Wessel at the Center for New Music and Audio Technologies (CNMAT). Previously, he completed studies at New York University, Manhattan School of Music, and Universität der Künste Berlin, where he studied with Walter Zimmermann.

 

Rama’s works have been featured at Lincoln Center’s Mostly Mozart Festival, MaerzMusik, SPOR, Bludenzer Tage zeitgemäßer Musik, MATA, Klangwerkstatt, rainy days, and Ultima festivals, among others, and he has created sound installations for the Berliner Congress Center, Complice, Mino Washi Paper Museum, Stadtbad-Wedding, and the Pacific Basin Building.

 

After moving back to Berlin in 2017, Rama was appointed Professor of Contemporary Computer Music Practice at the Zürcher Hochschule der Künste (ZHdK) in 2022, where he is now teaching and pursuing interdisciplinary art and technology research at the Institute for Computer Music and Sound Technologies (ICST).

Rama Gottfried
© privat
Biography

aleph Gitarrenquartett

Andrés Hernández Alba, Tillmann Reinbeck, Wolfgang Sehringer und Christian Wernicke arbeiten seit der Gründung des Aleph Gitarrenquartetts 1994 in intensiver Zusammenarbeit mit Komponist:innen, Toningenieur:innen und Akustiker:innen daran, die musikalische Sprache und die Spieltechniken des 20. und 21. Jahrhunderts für ihre Besetzung voranzubringen. Mittlerweile ist so ein umfangreiches, neues und zukunftweisendes Repertoire für klassische Gitarre entstanden, das fortwährend erweitert wird. Viele Werke, u.a. von Mathias Spahlinger, Nicolaus A. Huber, Bernhard Lang, Beat Furrer, Georg Friedrich Haas, Zeynep Gedizlioglu und Irene Galindo Quero, wurden dabei eigens für das Aleph Gitarrenquartett geschrieben. Das Quartett gastiert bei den großen Festivals zeitgenössischer Musik und in den wichtigen europäische Auditorien, oft auch in Zusammenarbeit mit Gästen wie Sarah Maria Sun und Daisy Press. Workshops und CD-Einspielungen ergänzen regelmäßig die Ensembletätigkeit.

Biography

Ensemble Mosaik

The artistic work of ensemble mosaik builds on the continuity of its musical community, on explorative continuity, networking, collaborations with artists of all disciplines, other ensembles and with event organizers, on intercultural exchange as reflection and inspiration of global artistic concerns.

 

Since its founding in 1997, ensemble mosaik has developed into a renowned ensemble for contemporary music as a particularly versatile and experimental formation. In their 25 years of collaboration, the musicians have created a distinguished ensemble that demonstrates openness to a wide variety of contemporary music concepts at the highest artistic level.

 

Egalitarian working structures form the basis of a processual way of working in exchange with all actors involved in a concert project.

 

http://www.ensemble-mosaik.de
https://www.facebook.com/ensemblemosaik/

 

 

Ensemble Mosaik. Ensemble für zeitgenoessische Musik. Berlin, 30.8.2019
Biography

Nina Guo

Nina Guo is a high soprano currently based in Berlin. She sings notated and improvised music and frequently uses theater. Radio and humor tend to prevail in her work. When she isn’t experimenting with her instrument and learning music, she reads essays, listens in parks, and eats bread.

Nina Guo
© Cynthia-ël Hasbani
Biography

Heinrich Horwitz

Heinrich Horwitz (they/them/she/her/he/him) is a choreographer, director and actor*. They studied Theatre Directing and Choreography at the Hochschule für Schauspielkunst Ernst Busch Berlin and the HZT Berlin. They staged productions in the free scene realm, at municipal theatres as well as in contemporary classical music. Their works have been invited to the Heidelberg Stückemarkt and Autorenfestival Maximierung Mensch in Trier. For the dance piece Palais idéal they received the Dance and Theatre Prize of the city of Stuttgart and the state Baden-Württemberg. Since 2017 they have been working continously as choreographer and dramaturge with the Decoder Ensemble in Hamburg and with the composers Alexander Schubert, Sarah Nemtsov, Carola Schaal and Leopold Hurt, together with whom they mounted the evening Entitäten for the Elbphilharmonie Hamburg in 2018.
In addition to directing Heinrich has worked continually as an actor and dancer in theatre, film and television. They received the Adolf Grimme Prize for their role in the tv series Bruder Esel. Heinrich has frequently collaborated with Angela Shanelec and and had episode roles in Tatort and Der Bozen Krimi (2019). Since 2016 Heinrich has worked with the performance group The Agency. 2021 they worked on recreating the Amazon Myth in marching in a queer feminist parade through the center of Berlin.
2022 they has held a teaching appointment at AdK Ludwigsburg.

They is one of the 185+ German actors* who had their public Coming Out in Feb. 2021 with the manifesto #ActOut.

Heinrich Horwitz Foto Paulina Hildesheim
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