A deconstruction of the musical heritage

Ensemble Recherche and the SWR Experimental Studio have long and illustrious histories. But as L.P. Hartley wrote, “the past is a foreign country; they do things differently there”. In recent years, Ensemble Recherche has become increasingly engaged in the broader trend of questioning the meaning, relevance and potential burden of the heritage and structures that underpin our activities as performers and producers of contemporary music.

In Performing the Archive, Ensemble Recherche, together with the SWR ExperimentalStudio, presents a multimedia performance based on the deconstruction of historically significant repertoire. Far from simply expressing a post-modernist disdain for history, this endeavour is intended to be an intellectually honest response to the ideological evolution that has taken place in the fields of sociology, contemporary art and music criticism over the past four decades. Students of composition from the Hochschule für Musik Freiburg and the Musik-Akademie Basel were tasked with fragmenting and reassembling works by Stockhausen, Boulez, Ferneyhough, Rihm and others in a framework that seeks to offer a new perspective on the legacies of major musical and cultural institutions in Germany. At the core of this project are the questions: What does it mean to alter a masterpiece? Is it necessarily an act of provocation or is it potentially constructive, useful, beneficial, even necessary? Is it possible to reconcile a work of art from the past with the values and norms of today?

With works by
Dakota Wayne, Dina Ahmadi-Jooghi, Doyoon Yoon, Errikos Sidiropoulos, Valeriya Vinogradova and Vili Polajnar