Memories in Music II Outdoor Audio Walks

Radio compositions and plays can be downloaded onto smartphones at the Akademie der Künste at Hanseatenweg for a one-hour walk in Tiergarten Park.

Kirsten Reese: Field Log Cobourg (2020/21, 51:20 min), radio composition about the research on the scientist Ludwig Leichhardt in Australia
Commissioned and produced by Deutschlandfunk Kultur / Akademie der Künste

Radio premiere on 7 May 2021, at 00:05 on Deutschlandfunk Kultur

The first British marines stayed on the Cobourg Peninsula in northern Australia for eleven years. In 1849, they surrendered to cyclones, termites and malaria. Shortly before, they had met Ludwig Leichhardt, a natural scientist from Brandenburg. The sound artist Kirsten Reese has now travelled to this remote scene of colonial history. At night she slept under the open sky, listening to the delicate sounds of insects. She made objects, left behind by the British, sound, spoke with local people and documented their lives in sound recordings. In Field Log Cobourg, Reese circles around different forms of knowledge: Experiential knowledge, indigenous knowledge, natural science, knowledge that is transported through sound. The artist combines her reflections with field recordings, original sounds and archive recordings.

Voice Affairs – Fokus Libanon (1:27:48 min), radio recording of the premiere of the project at ECLAT in Stuttgart, 3 February 2021
Produced by Deutschlandfunk Kultur / Akademie der Künste

Radio premiere on 14 May 2021, at 00:05 on Deutschlandfunk Kultur

The Voice Affairs project is initiating artistic dialogues between the experimental music scenes in Lebanon and European art music. It is bringing together musicians/composers from Lebanon, Egypt and Palestine with the Neue Vocalsolisten. From the perspective of contemporary composition, electronic music, sound art, improvisation and avant-pop, they are all concerned in different ways with the voice and its historical, religious and cultural connotations, reflecting on the diversity, conflicts, explosiveness and poetry of the Lebanese cultural sphere.

Compositions by Aya Metwalli, Youmna Saba, Cynthia Zaven, Dániel Péter Biró, Samir Odeh-Tamimi, Manolis Manousakis, Raed Yassin.

Neue Vocalsolisten Stuttgart – Johanna Vargas, Susanne Leitz-Lorey, Truike van der Poel, Martin Nagy, Guillermo Anzorena, Andreas Fischer

Simone Kucher: Der Stimme ihren Ort zurück (2015, 53:00 min), radio play
Commissioned and produced by Westdeutschen Rundfunks

The radio play production Der Stimme ihren Ort zurück by Simone Kucher takes its starting point from recordings of Armenian prisoners of war during the First World War, which are available in the Sound Archives of the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin. The radio play correlates with the composition Sprach der Wolf by Armenian composer Petros Ovsepyan, which is based on the same sound archive recordings (see INDOOR p. NN).

Lusine is overtaken by a voice from the past. By chance she hears a historical recording from the First World War on the radio. This voice sounds oddly familiar to her. Who is speaking? The search for the answer reminds the young woman of her family history. And of a huge silence that weighs on her.

For Lusine is part of the Armenian diaspora, which has been scattered all over the world since the Armenian Genocide 100 years ago. So the search for the voice becomes a search for memory and brings forth many others, because after a century of persistent silence only fragments of the memories and personal stories can be reconstructed.