Club room 7 in the Kunstmuseum Luzern is currently a protected space for hard words.
They do not apply to people, but to their works.
Wolfgang Rihm leads the composers seminar of the Lucerne Festival together with Dieter Ammann and Mark Sattler.
Eight young authors expose themselves to the judgment of experienced colleagues.
"Will that still change?" Says Rihm about a piece of purely electronic music.
“I get bored after just twenty seconds.
It's not a composition, it's sound design.
Old-fashioned radio play aesthetics of the sixties.
I don't see any compositional will in it, nothing that would prompt interpretation. ”And one quickly discusses a controversial question in the age of artificial intelligence: Where does the subject relinquish its authorship to an algorithm?
Jan Brachmann
Editor in the features section.
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The main purpose of this seminar is to be clear about what you are doing. "It is a good gift for a composer to know where the music begins and where it ends," says Rihm. “Often we write things that are not alive; they just work. ”There are no recipes for pieces, he continues. “You have to sit inside the piece like in a prison and wait to see what happens next.” Whether such a prospect of humble dwelling in their own work gives young people courage? Maybe so, if it comes from someone who can refer to a work in the eminent sense.
Wolfgang Rihm heads the contemporary music division at the Lucerne Festival. He also suggested the revival of Pierre Boulez's “Polyphony X”, which will be performed on September 3rd with the Lucerne Festival Contemporary Orchestra and the conductor Lin Liao. One day later, Rebecca Saunders' “Solitude” premieres in Switzerland. Saunders, Siemens Music Prize Winner 2019, is a festival composer in Lucerne this year. Michael Haefliger, the artistic director, has again managed to find support for contemporary music from the industry. In any case, more than 57 percent of the festival lives from the money of private sponsors and supporters. The share of public grants is 17.8 percent, plus a loss compensation due to the pandemic of 7.1 percent.The rest must be generated by yourself.
The festival edition last year was very reduced, but artistically haunting because of the wondrous installation by Peter Conradin Zumthor with the muffled bells of the Lucerne churches, which still reverberates in every soul that was there. Now Haefliger is happy to be able to offer four weeks of full program with large orchestral concerts until September 12th. But he also knows what has changed over the past year: “The pandemic has led us to think very differently about ecological issues. Large orchestral festivals such as the Lucerne Festival will continue to be needed in a European festival landscape in order to make tours for orchestras meaningful in terms of sustainability. But forms of travel will change. The orchestras try where they canto change from plane to train. "