Darmstadt On Air

In the Darmstadt On Air podcast tutors of the Darmstadt Summer Course talk to a person of their choice and this time they start their conversation from a particular piece of music, a book, a piece of art, a performance, recording etc. In episode #25 Danish accordionist Andreas Borregaard talks with his compatriot composer Niels Rønsholdt about "Until Nothing Left", a solo piece for a performing accordionist that was created for him in 2017.

Kate Molleson in conversation with Rebecca Saunders Interview with Christian Dierstein and Dirk Rothbrust on Rebecca Saunders' piece "dust": https://internationales-musikinstitut.de/ferienkurse/dossiers/dust More about Rebecca Saunders: https://www.rebeccasaunders.net/biography-detailed More about Kate Molleson: http://katemolleson.com/about

One of the central themes of this year’s Darmstadt festival is artistic collaboration and collective creativity. We are interested in how collaborative processes work, especially in the field of musical creation, where we still have a strong concept of authorship, division of labour between composers and performers, but on the other hand collaboration is fundamental for big parts of music making. In this context we’ve invited Ensemble Pamplemousse to create a concert project for Darmstadt with new compositions. Based in the US, the ensemble consists of five different composer-performer personalities. Over the last two years we’ve discussed several possible formats with the ensemble – and had to realize in the end that, due to the pandemic, the group would not be able to come to Darmstadt personally. So they’ve created a filmed version of their project Shadows that will be shown on August 4, 2021 as a stream. For the 21st episode of our Darmstadt On Air audio podcast, the music journalist and curator Peter Meanwell interviewed Ensemble Pamplemousse in June 2021 when they were together in Philadelphia, preparing their Darmstadt project. Ensemble Pamplemousse is: Natacha Diels, Bryan Jacobs, Andrew Greenwald, David Broome and Weston Olencki.

For the 19th episode of Darmstadt On Air, two composers have picked music that they like and find beautiful. Starting with one moment from each other’s oeuvre, Hans Thomalla and Katherine Young discuss music by the Roscoe Mitchell Sextet, by Carola Bauckholt and by Michelle Lou. And they also ask what makes beautiful moments, as did Theodor W. Adorno in his radio essay from 1965 which has the same title: “Schöne Stellen – Beautiful Moments”. Hans Thomalla has a long history with Darmstadt: winner of the Kranichstein Music Prize in 2004, he has been a regular member of the faculty during the last years. Hans was born in Germany in 1975 and is professor for composition at Northwestern University in Chicago, where he founded and directs the Institute for New Music. Katherine Young works as a composer, bassoonist and improviser. When she first came to Darmstadt in 2014, she won a stipend for the Summer Course two years later and was commissioned a new piece for guitar and electronics. Katherine is now based in Atlanta and teaches composition at Emory University. But she also has deep ties to the Chicago music scene, having lived and made music there for many years.

Episode 17 of Darmstadt On Air is about political activism in music. It is hosted by Peter Meanwell, music journalist and artistic director of Borealis, a festival for experimental music that takes place every year in Bergen, Norway. This year, you can experience the festival online from March 17 to March 21. Peter talks to Marshall Trammell who is invited as Borealis' artist in residence. Born in California in 1972, Marshall Trammell is a percussionist, composer, conductor and archivist. His artistic practice brings together research, political aesthetic theory, activism and community-based production. He investigates artistic strategies to enact change and transformation and understands improvisation as a collective, movement-building tool in the creation of post-capitalist imaginaries.

The 15th episode of Darmstadt On Air is hosted by a new composition tutor of the Darmstadt Summer Course: Sarah Nemtsov. She invited the set designer Sebastian Hannak to be her conversation partner in this podcast. At the opera house in Halle he created „Raumbühne Heterotopia“ in 2017, a 360° stage installation conceived as a music-theatre-city where the borders between audience, orchestra and performers are blurred for the benefit of an immersive spatial experience and emphatic „Totaltheater“. In more than ten different formats such as opera, drama, dance, performance or concert, the space can be experienced from totally different perspectives. Sebastian adapted his Heterotopia stage for several theater and music theater productions like Sarah’s opera „Sacrifice“ (2016). That was when the two artists met in Halle some years ago. He started to work on his set design when he only knew parts of Sarah’s music. Maybe more than ever before he was forced to invent reality for a piece on stage. For both of them theater is an extraordinary moment of transition.

„Collaborating is the main life force for me.“ Two inspiring harpists have met for the Darmstadt On Air podcast #13: Gunnhildur Einarsdóttir is an Icelandic harpist based in Berlin, founding member of Ensemble Adapter and harp tutor of the Darmstadt Summer Course since 2014. She invited harpist and improviser Rhodri Davies, who is a based in Swansea, South Wales. He plays harp, electric harp, live-electronics and builds wind, water, ice, dry ice and fire harp installations. Rhodri has released five solo albums and is also working in different constellations with artists like John Butcher, John Tilbury, Michael Duch and many others. Gunnhildur and Rhodri both studied with the Welsh harpist Sioned Williams and it was through her that they first heard of each other. The two harpists have both been doing pioneering work in order to invigorate the harp repertoire with new pieces. They also share an artistic approach that is very much based on collaboration and cooperation. Their conversation is about choosing collaborators, about ego and trust, about Rhodri’s collaboration with Eliane Radigue, who wrote the first of her OCCAM pieces for him, about verbal transmission of interpreters‘ knowledge, about the grey area between improvisation and composition, and about diving into a composer’s world and inhabiting in it with one’s own ideas and sounds.

The New York based, Chinese born composer, multi-instrumentalist, vocalist and performer Du Yun will be teaching composition at the next Darmstadt Summer Course for the first time. She hosted the 11th edition of the Darmstadt On Air podcast and invited Raven Chacon to the talk, her collaborator in the opera production “Sweet Land” which was premiered in the beginning of 2020. Raven was born in Fort Defiance, Navajo Nation, Arizona, and is now working and living in Albuquerque, New Mexico as a composer, performer and installation artist. From 2009 to 2018, he was a member of the interdisciplinary arts collective Postcommodity, and since 2004, he teaches composition at the Native American Composer Apprenticeship Project (NACAP). In 2018, Raven visited the Darmstadt Summer Course as a lecturer and panelist. He and Du Yun met online on 13 August 2020 and talked about their composer collaboration, about dealing with traditions, with representation, lazy curation and about the fluidity of identity.

The 9th episode of Darmstadt On Air is dedicated to composer Annea Lockwood who is interviewed by music journalist and Darmstadt tutor Kate Molleson. Annea was born in Christchurch/New Zealand in 1939 and moved to England in 1961to study composition at the Royal College of Music in London. In the same year, she took part in the Darmstadt Summer Course for the first time. Registered as Anna Ferguson Lockwood in 1961, 1962 and 1963, she attended classes by Olivier Messiaen, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Luciano Berio and others. In Darmstadt, Annea also met Franco Evangelisti who became a close friend and it was him who recommended that she asked Gottfried Michael Koenig if she might study with him which she went on to do from 1963 to 1964. A decade later, she moved to New York where she was in touch with Pauline Oliveros, John Cage, La Monte Young and members of the Sonic Arts Union. With Kate Molleson she talks about her life as a composer, her early important experience in Darmstadt, about her glass concerts and long durational river recordings, about DIYness and the small scenes in New York. Kate is a journalist and broadcaster, based in Edinburgh. She presents BBC Radio 3’s New Music Show and Music Matters. Her articles are published in The Guardian and The Herald, BBC Music Magazine or Gramophone. She teaches music journalism at Dartington and Darmstadt. Kate recommends: "It’s so worth spending time with Annea's music. 'Tiger Balm' is just wonderful, and the 'Glass World' album, and her later river maps. Also more recent pieces like 'Wild Energy' and 'Dusk'."

In the 7th episode of Darmstadt On Air we are witnessing the start of a new artistic collaboration between two extraordinary musicians: Marco Blaauw, trumpet player of Ensemble Musikfabrik, soloist and Darmstadt brass tutor has started a series of seven commissions that take the human breath as their main idea and inspiration. Ayanna Witter-Johnson will contribute one of the new pieces for trumpet. Born in London into a family with a Jamaican background, Ayanna's musical expression is taking many different shapes: she is a singer-songwriter, composer, cellist, pianist and performer who embraces various musical cultures and, as she names it, navigates transnational identity within her music. After a first e-mail and Skype exchange, they met in person on 4 September 2020 in Cologne on the occasion of the premiere of Ayanna's commission for Gürzenich Orchestra and conductor François-Xavier Roth. Sitting in the Musikfabrik studios (with musical rehearsals in the background), they had also listened to Marco's interpretation of Georg Friedrich Haas' lament in the memory of Eric Garner from 2015 with the title "I can't breathe". In their conversation they touch topics like belonging and background, everyday experiences of being a black woman, being a black female artist and the burden of having to represent that group. They talk about white privilege, about one's personal sound, about being on the fringes of may worlds and about bringing other people into the space.

Stefan Prins, composer, performer, co-director of the Nadar Ensemble, Professor of Composition & director of the Hybrid Music Lab at the Hochschule für Musik “Carl Maria von Weber” Dresden, talks to Beth Coleman. Coleman is not only the author of the book “Hello Avatar!, Rise of a networked generation”, electronic musician and digital art creator, but also holds a PhD in comparative literature and is currently associated professor of Experimental Digital Media at the University of Waterloo Toronto and director of its City as Platform Lab. Starting with “Hello Avatar”, the conversation quickly covered the current state-of-affairs of X-reality, and ran through themes ranging from the death of “Second Life”, “A.I”, “Machine-to-Machine communication” and the “Technology of the Surround” to the importance of art in society.

The third episode of Darmstadt On Air, the audio podcast of the Darmstadt Summer Course, is hosted by Antye Greie-Ripatti, also known as Poemproducer or AGF. Antye is a German electronic musician and composer, now living in Northern Finland. She chatted with YATTA, a Los Angeles and Brooklyn based interdisciplinary artist and musician. YATTA has shared the stage with musicians like Cardi B, William Basinski and The Sun Ra Arkestra. Improvised poetry is an important aspect in YATTA’s drone based performances on stage. Antye and YATTA met for the first time some years ago when they had both been invited to a festival curated by Moor Mother. In this podcast, YATTA and AGF chat about whiteness, white nights, black lives in the US in relation to music making, and the voice in 2020. Many thanks to AGF and YATTA, to Antye also for the editing, Stefan Prins for the jingle, and Olaf Mielke!