Women's stories from today's music business
The project "The Conductress" by Sophia Martell and Silke Strahl wins this year's "Soundzz.z.zzz...z" competition, which has been held annually since 2013 in collaboration with the Lucerne Art Museum and the Lucerne Festival.
How does the violist of the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra experience her daily rehearsal routine? What does the Lucerne carpenter say about her professional life? And to what extent do their experiences overlap and differ? Such questions are the starting point for the project by Sophia Martell and Silke Strahl. For The Conductress, the artists will conduct interviews with musicians and guests of the Lucerne Festival as well as women from Lucerne. These form the basis for their experimental documentary-artistic work.
Together with atmospheric image and sound recordings of the festival and the observations of women in their everyday working lives, a wide variety of women's stories are woven into a multi-media performance. The stories are both narrative elements and the starting point for abstract sound material with which the musicians improvise. The visual and audio levels oscillate between documentation and abstraction, between personal experience and generalized statements. The result is a multimedia performance by VJs, electronic musicians and musicians under the direction of conductor Sophia Martell, which will be performed twice in the last week of the festival.
Sophia Martell, born in Berlin in 1988, studied orchestral music (violin) at the Hochschule für Musik Saar and the Hochschule Luzern, philosophy at the Freie Universität Berlin and instrumental music (violin) at the Hochschule Luzern. She also attended the Film Academy in Halle. She is currently studying Music and Art Performance at the Lucerne University of Applied Sciences and Arts and Journalism at the MAZ School of Journalism. She has been part of the 21st Century Symphony Orchestra since 2014.
Silke Strahl, born in 1988 in Bad Saulgau, studied elementary music education and classical saxophone at the Stuttgart State University of Music and Performing Arts and the Lucerne University of Applied Sciences and Arts. She is currently studying for a master's degree in contemporary music at the Lucerne University of Applied Sciences and Arts. She is co-founder of the improvisation quintet Siqui and the saxophone quartet Kaleido.
