BESTIARIUM – Rational Animals
This program’s individual works are all inspired by nature and its inhabitants. Acoustic phenomena emancipate themselves from their original connotations and build new musical organisms.
Frankfurt-based composer Volker Staub reflected intensely on with the works of John Cage, Morton Feldman and Joseph Beuys. His own compositional work is inseparable from his activity as an inventor and constructor of string and electronic instruments, as well as experimental musical instruments made of wood, fur, metal, stone and glass. The fruit of this lengthy research, Staub created his virtuoso work Nr. 19 Teil VII for this program in a new version for Manufaktur für aktuelle Musik’s instrumentation including alto trombone and Witterungsinstrumente (weather instruments).
“Who’s really luring who here? Is it the hunter who calls the blackcock into the path of his shotgun? Or when he lures the bird out from behind the bush with his whistle, is the huntsman simply obedient to nature? - compared to who’s sound all the arts of self-proclaimed rat trappers pale. Equipped with this huntsman’s tool, Robin Hoffman paints an overpowering work of symphonic complexity: a “blackcock biotope in the concert hall”.
In his music Peter Ablinger often engages with acoustic phenomena and the imminent rhythms of nature that he transcribed here as individual parts: a highway, the ticking of a quartz watch, the wind in a double window, drops of water, a car starting.
In his own contribution and commission from MAM, Mathias Monrad Moeller chooses to focus on the pets of American presidents, offering an entirely different glimpse into the relationship between human and animal. Maximillian Marcoll in his short electronic study, however, is preoccupied with the processing of dead organisms.
Mauricio Kagel, the enfant terrible of Germany’s avant-garde, privately collected more than eighty types of bird whistles and lures. Recording for the label Ensemble Modern Media, MAM recently played his piece Exotica for six instrumentalists playing non-European instruments. In the same vein, Bestarium for three soloists with nearly thirty whistles sees Kagel ironizing foreign musical “languages”: animal cries and noise sounds converse and awake all sorts of associations in the listener - an exciting musical experience performed all too seldom. |
Volker Staub (*1961)
Robin Hoffmann (*1970)
Peter Ablinger (*1959)
Mathias Monrad Moeller (*1988)
Maximilian Marcoll (*1981)
Mauricio Kagel (1931-2008) |
