Sonic Matter: Improvise and install, sound and wander

Founded in 1986 by the two Swiss composers Thomas Kessler and Gérard Zinsstag on their own initiative, continued by various successors and finally taken over by the city government's culture department, the "Tage für Neue Musik" was a festival focused on international contemporary avant-garde music. After local officials had taken over responsibility for the financing, public relations and organization of the festival since 2012, but the curators they appointed changed every year, the festival eventually ran out of ideas. In 2018, the mayor also threatened to turn off the financial tap.

However, when the trained music teacher Diana Lehnert became the city's head of serious music in 2019, she decided to reorganize the festival. However, this should - understandably - involve a repositioning in terms of content and form. The city promised a considerable sum of around one million francs for the three-year trial run. In addition, the Tonhalle Orchestra Zurich, which is well-funded by the state, promised its annual free contribution in the form of its own concert. The package would also include the concert hall, which would otherwise be exorbitantly expensive for third parties. It was also decided that the city would relinquish its sponsorship, reports Lehnert. With the task of finding a future director, it appointed Björn Gottstein, the previous artistic director of the Donaueschingen Music Days and, since this year, secretary of the board of trustees of the Ernst von Siemens Music Foundation in Munich, in consultation with the cultural directorate, the performer and lecturer at the Bern University of the Arts, Cathy van Eck, the oboist and music mediator Catherine Milliken and the double bass player and director of "Sonic Space Basel" at the Basel University of Music, Uli Fussenegger - heavyweight practitioners and advocates of experimental creation.

As a worldwide blueprint and reservoir for all kinds of performative sound art, the Berlin Festival MaerzMusik can be described as such. The "Festival for Time Issues" thus proclaims with corresponding self-confidence on its website that it sees itself as a place for artistic experiences, encounters and joint reflection on how we deal with time. And further: Developed from the perspective of listening and supported by contemporary music, the festival opens up a space in which life, art and theory can converge with concerts, performances, installations, film presentations and discourse formats.

After a two-stage application round, a collective consisting of Zurich composer Katharina Rosenberger, Valais choreographer Julie Beauvais and Berlin ensemble manager Lisa Nolte was finally entrusted with the organization of the new festival in Zurich. Under the name "Sonic Matter"The award was given to a concept that aims to unite a whole range of different undertakings. On the one hand, it wants to create a platform for cross-disciplinary experiments, on the other hand it wants to open itself up artistically to interdisciplinarity and commit itself to diversity in gender orientation and sustainability in curating. The new management also wants to present its international offerings not only on the extended festival weekend, but also via a supervised web stream throughout the year in order to stay in contact with the audience on the one hand and to offer space for acute contemporary issues on the other. There are also plans to invite a different festival with exponents and examples each year in order to listen beyond its own borders. In 2021 it was the "Novas Frequências" from Rio de Janeiro.

In a potpourri of events, various instrumental, music-theatrical, performative, installative, multimedia and participatory productions were performed on the first weekend in December. The program focused on North and South American productions. An audio and video lounge, which was always open, offered the opportunity to listen to Brazilian electro-acoustic works that were performed at the guest festival Novas Frequências.

The theme of the first festival edition was "Turn". As in Berlin, where the festival organizers explicitly point out on their program pages whether a performance is composed, improvised music or even something completely different, the Sonic Matter organizers refer to who a performance is suitable for on their program sheet in the concert entries, such as "for people aged five and over who are good on their feet" or "people with impaired hearing". Before the actual opening concert, the Migros Museum of Contemporary Art hosted the concert installation "recommended for people aged ten and over". White Line with Zurich-based electric guitarist Samuel Toro Pérez. On three screens, flickering video images of a hand feeding a cigarette to a mouth by US artist Marina Rosenfeld could be seen. White lines appeared over and over again. The sequences also served as a score for the guitarist, who went through a lengthy exercise in noise music. This was followed by a performance in the storerooms of an off-gallery with the improvising French violist Franz Loriot, who virtuously beat "critical listeners" around the ears with never-ending cascades of harmonics.

In the amphitheater-style Schiffbau Box of the Schauspielhaus, the following music was performed under the title Connectivity an exciting opening concert for "all those who like to sit, watch and listen for 90 minutes". The members of the International Contemporary Ensemble (ICE) from New York and Chicago impressively demonstrated that improvisation can meet the very highest musical standards and that there no longer has to be an artistic antithesis between composing and improvising. When John Cage and his American comrades-in-arms confronted the European music avant-garde over 70 years ago, the gulf seemed insurmountable until recently. The ideologies of mastering time through strict organization or focusing on the intrinsic time of sounds were irreconcilable. The pieces played with the utmost mastery Thistledow for piano trio and percussion and the situational Creative Construction SetTM for open form and instrumentation by the legendary improvisation grandmaster George E. Lewis and Nicole Mitchell's Cult of Electromagnetic Connectivity for flute, clarinet, percussion, violin and cello proved the opposite. The pit is a thing of the past, as long as the musicians here are able to promote something completely new in terms of form and content. This also included the performance of the multimedia and multi-part I See You by the Spanish composer Helga Arias, born in 1984. A string quartet with video projections, a highly musical piece. The Furrer student was ICE's Composer in Residence 2021, but was never able to be on site to work out details with the musicians during the development of her commissioned work due to the pandemic. She is currently in the process of writing up her experiences of communicating at a distance in a dissertation entitled Composing the politics of musical creation: a proposal for alternative working interactions for the Anton Bruckner University in Linz. The trained music teacher and composer currently lives in Samedan, where she teaches at the Academia Engiadina.

By contrast, the performance Ear Action by Berlin composers Neo Hülcker and Stellan Veloce may have been too under-complex even for five-year-olds, as recommended. The performers were the musicians Philip Bartels, Simone Keller, Moritz Mühlenbach and Lara Stanic. The audience had to sit in a row in a darkened hall facing a wall. As soon as everyone was fitted with hearing protection, the performers began to rub various objects such as a violin bow against it - analog musique concrète with the means of arte povera, so to speak.

Afterwards, the Tonhalle Orchestra, conducted by Pierre-André Valade, kept its promise in the main hall. His extra concert began with the work written for large orchestra and premiered in Lucerne in 2010. TURN for orchestra of the currently omnipresent Dieter Ammannwhich lent its name to the first edition of the festival. "Turn" means turning point and refers to the contrast and change of perspective that takes place after around two thirds of the piece. After many Boulez-style arpeggios and chords and with a steady basic impulse, the piece unexpectedly almost comes to a standstill. The rhythm is suddenly restrained, so that TURN threatens to disintegrate into disparate parts. Sarah Nemtsov, who was born in Germany in 1980 and is the author of the equally large-scale dropped.drowned from 2017, is currently being played everywhere. Everything is "well done": large-scale textures develop from the non-soloistic, prepared piano and an amplified harp, which is also prepared. This is then mirrored by the strings and percussion, followed by wind instruments. Eclair by French composer Eric Montalbetti was performed at the suggestion of his compatriot, the conductor in Zurich. Montalbetti was primarily active as artistic director of the Orchestre philharmonique de Radio France for 18 years until 2014, before venturing into the public eye with his compositions. He, too, relies on large-scale textures, but unlike Nemtsov, they almost never get off the ground and do nothing more than bore the listener dramaturgically.

The installation Under the Klopstock meadow demanded unshakeable perseverance. According to the program, it would be suitable for anyone who enjoys exploring underground spaces. As poetically named as the park above the cavern is, the diesel plant below it, which has long since been demolished, is all the more banal. The remaining empty space was simply amplified tel quel and the result was an installation declared to be a sound trail. The fact that Zurich-based Kaspar König had the guts to lure festival visitors there in the first place is more of a brazen piece than a sad one. For "people aged five and over who are good on their feet, including those with impaired hearing", there was a short excursion to experience the acoustically polluted Limmat Valley. According to Zurich sound artist Andres Bosshard, this works best on the valley slopes and along the river.

The following day, the twelve-piece Madness Ensemble, based in Zurich, improvised freely for "everyone with 150 minutes of sitting, fumbling and standing". It organized a so-called workout jazz marathon on the stage of the Kunstraum Walcheturm. The "indeterminate meta-composition" developed along the level range of a jet taking off at just under 100 dB, whereby most listeners were hardly given a real chance to perceive the clash of new music and improvisation, of visual art and performance, in a differentiated way as promised.

In today's dance hall of the Alte Kaserne, the Geneva ensemble Batida performed with Diĝitawhich means digital in Esperanto, presented a minimalist homage to the digital world for "everyone aged ten and over". Four musicians equipped with synthesizers and samplers and a sound director were shielded inside a cube of screens. Graphics with abstract landscapes in black and white by the drawing collective Hécatombe were projected onto them. With Glenn the festival finale was celebrated in the "border line club culture" between 8.30 and 10.00 pm. It was intended for "people aged twelve and over who like to dance". The two creators, Nicolas Kort and Ricardo Eizirik, focused on "industrial and dark electronic" and promised that their concert would be loud. It was very, very loud.

The other two festival titles have already been decided. Turn" will be followed by "Rise" and "Leap". Both are very much to be wished to the management collective. In order to increase quality and topicality, it would be urgently advisable for the Tonhalle management to stay out of the programming and for the Collegium Novum, which is also well-funded by the city and specializes in new music, not to be absent due to its participation in a competition for young talent, but to participate without any ifs or buts.

Market researchers from Econcept are conducting surveys on "Sonic Matter" 2021 on behalf of the city of Zurich in order to record the preferences and reactions of the audience as well as their views on diversity and inclusion. It remains to be hoped that, in the interests of successful location marketing, the city authorities will not draw the wrong conclusions afterwards, as in the case of the Bührle Foundation ... Of course, a total of 973 visitors for all live events raises the question: Will the city's expenditure of three quarters of a million francs for three editions remain available for advanced music if "Sonic Matter" goes belly up one day in the distant future, or will it then be relegated entirely to underground music with the argument that it too can be experimental?