The sounds of a city
As part of an exciting new music project sponsored by the Siemens Arts Program, composers are exploring the essence and moods of various cities.
For “into…” – compositional impressions of Istanbul, Dubai, Johannesburg and the Pearl River Delta – 16 internationally renowned composers are living one month in one of the selected megacities to explore and absorb their personal perceptions of the cities and express them in 20-minute compositions.
A sensual experience and objective analysis
“As a composer, I live from personal experiences and must always assimilate everything around me… traveling and being somewhere else is pure excitement for me and is essential for my existence,” are the words used by Hungarian composer Marton Illés to describe his decision to take part in the “into…” project. Together with a group of other composers, he set out to explore the essence and moods of a major city.
With this project, the Siemens Arts Program is taking an artistic approach to a theme that is increasingly capturing the interest of the public, the scientific community and business: Now that half of the world’s population lives in cities, the urban environment is a growing challenge – and one for which Siemens offers innovative infrastructure solutions.
Marton Illés is one of four composers visiting Dubai, and is in the city for the first time. In his first impressions, he describes the city as kitschy, sanctimonious, grandiose, stunning – and repeats the word stunning. While Illés is there to see, hear, smell and touch the city, German composer Markus Hechtle is concentrating instead on exploring aspects of urban planning and architecture, and is also reflecting on religion and the cultural heritage of the Emirate. Similarly, Lithuanian-born Vykintas Baltakas is particularly interested in the city’s architecture, history and social structure. For the fourth Dubai visitor, German Jörg Widmann, also in Dubai for the first time, smells and the city’s general atmosphere are more important than looking at specific aspects.
Four composers – four different ways to perceive an environment and process impressions, and four different ways to express them artistically.
Individual encounters
The four composers staying in Johannesburg, South Africa – Britain’s Luke Bedford, Germany’s Jörg Birkenkötter, Norway’s Lars Petter Hagen, and Italy’s Lucia Ronchetti – are having similar experiences. This is also the first time these four have encountered “their” city. Although each of them is experiencing the city in a completely personal way, they are finding the great variety of elements clashing in the city to be particularly exciting: African and Western ways of life, the traditional and the modern. They see these elements as nurturing enormous potential for growth and development.
Istanbul, the city that connects two continents, is considered to be a metropolis combining three empires and as a melting pot of a wide variety of cultures and beliefs. “into…” Istanbul welcomes the Palestinian-Israeli composer Samir Odeh-Tamimi, the French composer Mark Andre, the Austrian-Swiss composer Beat Furrer, and Vladimir Tomopolski, born in the Ukraine. While Odeh-Tamimi is focusing on the architectural specialties of Istanbul, Mark Andre is using first names as a way to access life the history and religion of a person at the center of interest. Vladimir Tarnopolski is directing his attention to the Bosporus as the interface between Europe and Asia, and between Christianity and Islam.
The German composers Heiner Goebbels and Johannes Schöllhorn, Britain’s Benedict Mason and Korea’s Unsuk Chin are visiting China’s Pearl River Delta, a huge metropolitan region embracing the cities of Macao, Shenzhen and Guangzhou. Schöllhorn is beginning his studies with the question of water and its regulation in the booming region’s major cities. Heiner Goebbels is interested in the phenomenon of social rootlessness in southern China’s population centers.
Artistic expressions
The composers’ initial impressions show how different their approaches are, and how unpredictable their results will be. During their stay, the composers’ music sheets are usually still bare. Most of them want to let their gathered impressions and feelings set and ripen for a while. Each of the cities obviously has its own sounds shaped by its languages, religions, typical everyday noises and transportation means, and by its unique geographic location. But will the composers be able to distill a specific essence from these four so vastly different cities, and transform this essence with their personal musical sensitivities and experience into music? The composers are just as excited as the initiators of this experiment about the upcoming results.
The Siemens Arts Program, which focuses on current social trends and interprets them artistically, is once again exploring an important theme with this project. The resulting compositions will be performed by the Ensemble Modern from the fall of 2008 to the summer of 2010 in cities like Frankfurt, Berlin and Essen, Germany – as well as in the inspiring cities of Istanbul, Dubai, Johannesburg and the Pearl River Delta. The Ensemble Modern, formed in 1980, is one of the world’s leading ensembles for contemporary music.
You can read more about this project at the Siemens Arts Program website.