Beethoven Laboratory 2020 Platform Berlin 2019

In many key moments of his music, Beethoven steps outside of reality and, perhaps precisely because of this, creates pure auditory sensation. In this sense, his music is crazy, it moves things away from where they are usually found.

Since 2017, the Beethoven Laboratory 2020, initiated by the Akademie der Künste, has offered a team of young composers from Tel Aviv, Basel and Thessaloniki an open forum to develop their own visions beyond the established canon. For three years, the participants have been meeting with experienced mentors, breaking new ground, questioning conventions and examining radical breaks in music and art. Over the course of these three years, they have introduced the interim and final results of their work to the public with concerts and presentations. Halfway to the final Festival 2020, the Beethoven Laboratory now presents sound installations and new works that they have developed together in Berlin, and invites the public to share the experience of this research process with them.

Programme

2 pm, various locations around the Akademie building
Installations
Work in Progress

At various locations on the accessible floors of the Akademie building, a series of installations and short pieces are being presented. These are works in progress, provisional results of several years’ exploration of electronic sound generation, physical processes, perception and interaction. Special multi-directional loudspeakers and transducers that transmit sounds to objects or even the human skull create perceptual illusions, playing with the boundary between reality and memory. The relationship between the resultant sounds and the surrounding spaces, and the distances that this creates, are key parameters in the installations, which listeners can alter themselves through their own movements and behaviour. An interaction between listener and work is thus created out of the former’s own perceptions. Visitors can wander around the Akademie building as they listen, and at specific times have an opportunity to talk with all the artists and learn more about their works.

With installations by Adrian Nagel / Eva Gentner, Guy Raucher, Ari Rabenu / Akkad Isreel, Anda Kryeziu

4:30 pm Plenarsaal
Round table
The Future of Experimentation

Reflection on experimentation as a driving force for current musical practice has origins in speculative ideas of Beethoven’s time that have not become common knowledge or entered into canonic music history. What is the significance of the experimental process for the creative process? What areas of experimentation does the younger generation of composers find stimulating today? And what role is played by electronic media, by the relationship between humans and avatars? In this talk, project participants and guest speakers talk about transferring the speculative ideas of Beethoven’s time to our own, the multitude of forms experimentation takes, and the permeability of the music world to methods and forms of perception in science and art.

With Eva Gentner (artist, project member), Andrea Heilrath (physicist, project member), Anda Kryeziu (composer, project member), Christian Thorau (Professor of Musicology, University of Potsdam), Casper Johannes Walter (Professor for Composition at the Basel Academy of Music)

Moderator: Julia Gerlach

In German

6 pm Black Box
Concert event
Versus

This concert is distinguished by an unusual instrumental line-up, and therefore a particular combination of tone colours: violin, harp, electric guitar, trombone, accordion, Paetzold recorders and electronics. In the works presented, ideas such as ‘contrast’ and ‘juxtaposition’ often play a central role. Not only is there juxtaposition of different instruments, of acoustic sounds and electronic sounds, but also – in an extended sense – of mechanisms in music and society, or human beings and machines. The influence of the ‘Labor’, a workshop for discussion, experimentation and reflection involving all the participants, is reflected in the concert programme. The individual works were created in intensive collaboration with the performers.

With works by Manolis Ekmetsoglou, Faidra Chafta-Douka, Adrian Nagel, Ari Rabenu, Eleni Ralli, Thanos Sakellaridis and others