“When you put yourself at stake, you will always find a way to do it, no matter the framework.” – Du Yun
Change is coming to European art institutions. And Darmstadt Summer Course, one of the oldest, most prestigious and historically most important institutions for western art music, is evolving rapidly. I’m visiting Darmstadt shell shocked, still redefining my notions of curation after a life-altering visit to another German festival last year. documenta, the 100-day long art festival held once every five years in Kassel, had for its fifteenth edition in 2022 been led by Jakarta-based artists’ collective ruangrupa. The collective had built the festival’s foundation on the core values and ideas of lumbung – the Indonesian term for a communal rice barn. Transformed into an artistic and economic model rooted in principles of collectivity, communal resource sharing, and equal allocation of funds, the values of lumbung had been embodied in all parts of the artistic collaborations and the exhibitions. The entire production budget of documenta 15 had been gathered into a pot, and distributed following decisions made at majeles – assemblies involving all of the artists present at the festival. No overarching curator working with a small curatorial team had been present and the curatorial role had been understood as a facilitator of processes, structures and collaborations. Yet for me, someone who usually resonates the strongest with singular artistic visions, documenta 15 had been more aesthetically and intellectually enriching than any other festival I had been to. Not only had it made me start an ongoing process of reevaluating my idea of curation and the possibilities of the curator, but there had also been so much fantastic, thought-provoking and socially-empowering art, made by artists that I had never heard about. On the flip side, documenta 15 had also found itself as instigator of international controversy, as it sparked a metaphorical political fire in Germany, centering on antisemitism and post-colonialism. So as I spend my days at Darmstadt Summer Course, another German festival uniquely focused on fostering communities, a paramount question is constantly on my mind: How is Darmstadt Summer Course curating diversity?
A NEW KIND OF MUSIC, THAT WAS PERHAPS UNWELCOME 10 YEARS AGO
When she performs, the celebrated Irish composer/performer Jennifer Walshe has an overwhelming stage presence. And her vocal and theatrical performance in the new co-composed work Minor Characters was nothing short of astounding. Accompanied on stage by Ensemble Nikel – a new music rock band consisting of keyboards, saxophone, electric guitar and drums – the work unfolded as a bizarre cabaret show with musical references to rock, fusion jazz and all sorts of other good sounding things.
Composer Matthew Shlomowitz, the other half of the artistic team behind Minor Characters, tells me that the idea of the work started as a reference to the Twitter phenome major characters, in which an unexpected person’s tweet would go viral for a day (the minor characters are all of us), but it would develop to rather end up being Minor Characters in the face of the climate catastrophe. The work spans the silly, a special kind of lightness, but also engages with serious topics – mediated through humorous texts deftly depicting the madness of the internet and contemporary society.
“Maybe,” says Shlomowitz, “10 years ago Minor Characters would have been booed at Darmstadt for representing a kind of new music that was unwelcome. These days I hope everyone is pretty much on board with the pluralism and can just experience and evaluate different kinds of work outside territorial notions of what constitutes the right kind of new music.”
Minor Characters was also strikingly political, done in a superbly subtle and engaging way, as it balanced such disparate text material as a stupendously silly “Am I the Asshole?” Reddit post (about a women who’s upset that her boyfriend is lying to her, as he falsely told her for years that he did indeed add tomato sauce to her pasta before rinsing it off anyways) and very serious topics, such as abuse of power and sexual violence.
“I want to be direct,” Shlomowitz continues. “I like things which are bold and strong and clear. But, of course, that can also make things too simple and reductive. The question really is, if you’re going to be direct then why aren’t you writing an essay? Why are you doing art?”
Matthew tells me about the analytical philosopher Vid Simoniti, who has been investigating the question: how does art do activism or political commentary in a way that’s different to discourse? He points out that one of the limits of argumentation, is that when people are confronted with a position that is the opposite of the one they hold, most people don’t change their opinion – they double down on it.
“Since arguments and facts aren’t always very good at convincing people, we can hope art can be persuasive in a different way. And one thing about art is that it makes you spend time with things you don’t want to spend time with.”
WHAT IS ‘NEW’ IN NEW MUSIC ANNO 2023 ANYWAYS?
While Matthew Shlomowitz, and the artistic qualities of Minor Characters, make a compelling argument for how art’s political potential can be efficiently used in combination with a sensorial and emotional connection to its audience – effectively taking them for a proverbial ride – such subtlety seems to be an ill-suited strategy when it comes to dealing with the massive structural and geopolitical issues that must be tackled by curators and artistic directors if they want to change the institutions they represent to be more inclusive and equitable. Boldness and assertiveness towards boards, funding bodies and politicians has to go hand in hand with a humble willingness to look inwards and ask the tough questions about their own bias – and listen to expert advice. And, perhaps most crucially, it seems important to make room for other curators in the heart of their institutions.
I met with Thomas Schäfer, artistic director of Darmstadt Summer Course, to put some of these issues to him. We start out by talking about the unique institutional constellation that Darmstadt is – a festival, an academy, a facilitator of research activities and a host of an expansive discourse program. Schäfer tells me that a key focus this year is to investigate ways and types of cooperation and to re-establish a more intensive dialogue after a time in which musicians and composers were deprived of the basic conditions for their work.
And another key focus is the continued aesthetic and cultural diversification of Darmstadt – a process that really took off after the Summer Course in 2016 and the Defragmentation conference in 2018.
“This year we have different projects with and around Anthony Braxton, and we also invited artists to Darmstadt such as Elaine Mitchener, Tyshawn Sorey, Alvin Singleton, George Lewis and Marshall Trammell. Antye Greie Ripatti and Cedrik Fermont are leading a workshop with young electronic artists from the Global South – so very different people/artists of colour who bring in very different artistic and musical perspectives.”
The institution of the Darmstadt Summer Course is more than 70 years old, its name is synonymous with a ‘Darmstadt School of Composers’. Its history and importance is taught in most music colleges and conservatories around the world, and it’s generally considered a bastion of Western art music. Now things are changing – both the concert programming and the value system – and it seems pertinent to put the last ten years of Darmstadt’s development on the school curriculum.
“What I would like to avoid here in Darmstadt,” says Schäfer, “is being identified as the place for just one concept. I don’t like to have just one generation, one aesthetic view, one concept. I think it’s much more interesting for both the participants and my own work to bring in many different perspectives and aesthetics. And I think and hope that the festival program is going to be read as an invitation to recognize many different positions in contemporary music.”
A break with traditional hierarchical structures, a multiplicity of perspectives and a focus on process. It all sounds good but I can’t shake the feeling that it’s a far cry from the level of structural and systemic evolution that ruangrupa brought to documenta. Nonetheless, it seems crystal clear that the values informing the curation of Darmstadt have fundamentally changed. An interesting example of this is that the idea of ‘newness’, long heralded as a raison d’etre for Darmstadt, wasn’t touched upon in my conversation with Thomas – rather a multiplicity of aesthetic viewpoints and approaches to art takes centre stage. The Summer Course wishes to embrace a broader community where what’s ‘new’, ‘important’ or ‘good’, has to be redefined. But are they truly up to the task?
SONIC WRITING
I meet up with Farzané Nouri. Classically trained in her childhood, she decided to move to the Netherlands from Iran after becoming interested in electronic music in 2015. A recent graduate from the Institute of Sonology, her current research focus is on composing with artificial improvisers and she mainly works with live coding. Farzané tells me about the electronic music scene in Iran and how it changed drastically after the revolution in 1979, when events not conforming to Islamic rules got categorised as underground music. At Darmstadt, Farzané is taking part in the curated residency program Sonic Writing & Soundings facilitated by Antye Greie-Ripatti and Cedrik Fermont,together with invited artists from Palestine, Zimbabwe, Indonesia and Kenya.
“I talked to them [the curators of Sonic Writing] about how it all got started, and they acknowledged that Darmstadt had, for a long time, been very white-male oriented,” Farzané tells me. “So they wanted to plan something to influence Darmstadt’s itinerary in this regard. They were searching for specific people who were doing music in places that had not received adequate historical representation.”
The residency is set up as a collective workspace in which the invited artists get together, play together, and talk – about works, processes and different social and political points of view. At the end of it, they will present a concert of collectively-made works.
“I think how the works are presented is very important,” Farzané continues, “especially with groups like ours. Historically, such works have often been presented through an exocitizing lens that is paternalistic and condescending, rather than a lens that appreciates each work independently and on its own merit.”
In our talk we touch upon crucial – but precarious – topics such as tokenism and financial inequity. My opinion is that a crucial step forward for organisations valuing cultural diversity and social justice must be transparency, for instance about budgets – income, expenses and artist salaries amongst other things, but also about curatorial decisions. All of this is impossible to unveil at Darmstadt, its inner workings akin to a ‘black box’, and even the well established academy teachers, commissioned composers and performers seem extraordinarily tightlipped about their salaries. I wonder why? A cultural difference or a fear of not being invited back if they say something critical? Everyone says they want financial and social equity to happen but nobody wants to talk about their salary. There has to be a paradigm shift – if everything is a secret, then no one is accountable.
And while Darmstadt’s programming is more culturally diverse than ever, the festival doesn’t have an open call for its concert program. Rather, it relies on a curatorial team travelling around and making the calls – hopefully combining intense research with a busy travelling schedule – but it still begets the question, how does Darmstadt avoid nepotistic curating? An organisation this important, able to facilitate a wide range of international projects with a strong focus on inclusivity and diversity, should be facilitating a variety of open calls for its main stage program. If the hard work to disseminate the open calls outside of the well-established new music scene is done right, Darmstadt has the potential for presenting truly groundbreaking work from artists not present in the broader, Euro-centric ‘new music environment’. Wouldn’t that be an idea worth trying out?
“I think it would be great if the course incorporated more diverse forms of media into its programme,” says Farzané. “The incorporation of more experimental and interactive multimedia could go even further in activating novel ideas and stimulating dialogues with the audience, and new levels of awareness about performance space and innovative forms of presentation. For example, having a larger presence of more experiential forms of media like sound installations, sound walks, and immersive digital exhibits/performances could facilitate a more participatory atmosphere around the festival. That is, with regards to a deeper engagement with the showcased works and discourses surrounding their creation and the course more generally.”
There’s no doubt that residency programs, such as Sonic Writing & Soundings, have the potential for just that – creating diverse works exploring a variety of media, topics and listening experiences. And the Summer Course does seem keen on exploring a wide range of formats, a good example of this was the academy program Local Music in which artists created new site specific works for locations around the city.
And there were some concerts at the festival that played with format, topics and content, in a way that made it very popular with the young crowd present at Darmstadt. One such concert was the world premiere of adolescência by Ricardo Eizirik. The work was described as a “celebration and (meta-)reflection on archetypes of aggression in youth culture and music (specially focusing on the period around the popularisation of the internet: 1990s-2010s)”. Whether it was because of the message or the way it was disseminated, the fact remains that the concert was so popular that more than 100 people stood in line for an hour hoping to get in. A surreal, and actually much welcome, experience at a new music festival. I was one of the people who didn’t manage to get in, but I did manage to catch percussionist Jennifer Torrence for a quick question after the concert. I ask her if she thinks the concert was so popular because the aesthetics and content of the work really resonate with young people?
“Absolutely,” Torrence agrees. “And I think that’s what Ricardo Eizirik is trying to do with his work. Being more honest with the music that he loves to listen to and make, and to show that work within the context of Darmstadt and the community of new music. To suggest that it doesn’t have to be separate. I think it resonates. Both because of the music and because of the honesty. And I’m really excited when Darmstadt does what people want to do.”
PERSONAL SELECTION BIAS & THE TRAP OF BEING EXPOSED TO THE SAME THINGS OVER AND OVER AGAIN
At Darmstadt 2023, one person I was particularly excited about meeting in person was German philosopher Harry Lehmann. On Saturday of the first week he presented a lecture, in which he expanded upon his theory of ‘Western art music’ entering a period of ‘Reflexive Modernity’. He argues that the digital revolution and the ubiquitousness of personal computers, which has led to the compositional integration of field recordings, videos, networks and other digital media, has led new music to a content-aesthetic turn in which material progress, such as reinventing instrument playing techniques like Helmut Lachenmann did, has run its course. A while back Lehmann coined the term Relational Music, a composed music in which direct references to real world material through text, field recordings, video and theatrical performance is incorporated in the musical work. He argues that new music must look beyond self-referentiality and material progression to enter a reflexive period in which its ‘newness’ can be evaluated through its ideas, content, substance and reflexive use of concepts. Essentially for new music to enter into a broader art world context.
On a more practical level, I consider these developments powerful liberating forces. A break with media specificity (who’d like some new music for a rock band or new music for silent performers moving their bodies?) and a break with the censorship of ‘good taste’ (an integral characteristic of reflexive modernity is its liberal approach to material, as long as this is done knowingly) is long overdue in a scene where Western classical instruments have reigned supreme for far too long. And anyways, how could anyone possibly write something interesting for a symphonic orchestra these days? The most rigid of all classical music institutions, with in-built rituals that are hundreds of years old and no time in the rehearsal schedule for experiments. Of course, that’s just my personal opinion. But the field of experimental music is exciting and there are so many artists creating engaging works situated at the fringes of music, other art forms and the real world.
After many years of being involved with new music, I have become painfully aware of my own selection bias and assessment system. Sadly it often makes going to festivals a somewhat predictable experience. And during the first week of Darmstadt 2023, I did indeed appreciate most of the works I expected to. In addition to Minor Characters, I liked Polka is a Czech dance by Nina Fukuoka (a video work presenting various creepy interactions with digitally generated sales persons, customer service and similar). Birdsongs by Rafał Ryterski (a half hour long very unapologetic and in-your-face video piece about climate change, war, human escapism and birds). Plans for Future Operas by Øyvind Torvund (a poetic, intelligent, and brilliantly inventive musing on impossible opera situations for car parks, collaborations with the muppet monster, communications with the dead and all sorts of improbable scenarios brilliantly performed by Juliet Fraiser and Mark Knoop) and Fluktuation by Alexander Tillegreen (a very intelligently conceived exhibition with sound art influenced by his research into psychoacoustic phenomena).
At the beginning of this week, one of the first things I said to my fellow course participants was ‘I hate abstract music’. It was to provoke a discussion of course and it was said half in jest, since there’s a lot of abstract music I like – even a few things at Darmstadt, such as the ensemble work Motor Tapes by Sarah Hennings and a gripping performance by Elaine Mitchener. And there’s obviously also a lot of other abstract music I like, from instrumental prog rock, jazz, noise and all sorts of electronic music. But when it comes to new music, I’m just more excited about art with clear ideas and with something at stake. Music that transcends the like/dislike dichotomy.
The performance of the artists Lindatumune Mudimba, Farzané, Sabrina Eka Felisiana, Annisa Maharani, [M], Mira Tulenova, Zelal Ekinci, Cedrik Fermont & AGF at the concert of Sonic Writing & Soundings was gripping. It touched me and resonated with me in ways that I hadn’t expected. It was also one of the most experimental concerts of the whole festival as it combined a plethora of different musical practices in a vulnerable live setting that was simultaneously polished and raw, immediate, emotional and conceptually intelligent. And I could feel on my skin during the concert how much there was at stake for all of the artists. For a moment Darmstadt had reached the artistic height, urgency and immediate socio political relevance of documenta. It had shown me a glimpse of a potential future, where ‘multiethnic, international, rhizomatic, poetic and conscious entities, whose realities have lead them to engage into important discussions while creating and performing: politics, socio-economic realities of the non-Western world, feminism, ecology’ (as described in the concert’s program notes) were taking centre stage at a major new music festival with vibrance and urgency. A potential future in which ‘Western Art Music’ has become ‘Art Music’, and in which a cursory look at the schedule of new music festivals will no longer be enough to identify and predict exactly what I will like and what I won’t. A potential future much more interesting, diverse and just, in which a much broader group of human beings come together to collectively shape the institutional and artistic value systems and enrich the aesthetic discourse.
About the author: Mikkel Schou is an artist based in Copenhagen, Denmark. His work is contextualised as curatorial and situated in between two central positions. One as co-director of MINU, a yearly festival in Copenhagen presenting radically experimental art on the borders of music and other media, and the other as artistic director of Ensemble K!ART, a group of artists equally comfortable with instrumental music, post-instrumental performance practice, and co-creative collaborations. And a platform which commissions, produces, and presents almost all of its own events, insisting on artistic freedom gained through an uncompromising DIY-attitude.
Words On Music 