“Composition is a way of bringing people together”, is how Catherine Milliken defines her craft in a refreshingly unconventional way. The oboist, who was born in Brisbane, Australia, lives in Berlin and has won several awards, has a lot of experience in encouraging people to be creative. For example, she has already worked on musical theater pieces with juvenile prisoners and Japanese flood victims, in which they were able to develop a creative perspective on their life situation. And from 2005 to 2012 she directed the “Education” program of the Berliner Philharmoniker.

Now her piece “Night Shift” from 2021 will be performed in February as part of the “cresc… -Biennale for Current Music”. And here the listeners are asked as contributors. The composition commission for “Night Shift” is part of the international project “Connect - The Audience as Artist”, which for several years has been looking for ways to soften “the fourth wall”, that between the artist and the audience. Musically, “Connect” is carried out by the London Sinfonietta, the Ensemble Asko Schönberg Den Haag, the Remix Ensemble Casa da Música in Porto and the Ensemble Modern. The relationship between Catherine Milliken and Ensemble Modern is a very special one: Milliken co-founded Ensemble Modern in 1980. In one of his rooms in the Deutsche Ensemble Akademie, she now talks about the challengesin front of the "Night Shift" she put.

Lay choir as mediator

“I wanted everyone in the room, that is, soloists, ensemble and audience, to be equal and to have a very intense musical experience,” she says.

“But how do you involve listeners so that they are really a very serious, important part of the composition?

How do you manage that they don't have to prepare too much for it?

What kind of structure do you give the evening?

And of course: What kind of music can I achieve this with? ”She asked herself these questions and, for example, had the idea of ​​giving everyone who comes to the concert a bag of materials with which to make sounds.

When you make sounds yourself, you listen to others much more closely.

That creates a wonderful and intense atmosphere.

In order to mediate between the unprepared concert-goers and the professional musicians, she also had the idea of ​​using an amateur choir. For the Offenbach performance, “Der Chor Frankfurt” is preparing in workshops. Soloists and ensemble - in the Offenbach performance this will be the contralto-alto Helena Rasker, the tenor Michael Schiefel and the Ensemble Modern - will be “ensnared” by the actions of the audience, as Milliken calls it.

The play deals with "subjects that are relevant today" in Shakespeare.

“In the second act of his 'Midsummer Night's Dream', Titania reproaches her husband Oberon for causing contagious diseases, floods, droughts, fires and the chaos of the seasons.

“With it she lists what is also happening nowadays.

Precisely.

Then in the 'Midsummer Night's Dream' there is the play in the game, the craftsman's play.

In 'Night Shift' we are all such craftsmen, "says Milliken:" In this game in the game there is 'the wall' that separates the lovers and then disappears.

I took this as an opportunity to think about walls ”.

“The Frankfurt Choir” has already created a few songs for this, such as “Wall in the head separates people from people”.

Music as architecture unfolded in time

The third chapter ties in with the dream of Weber's Zettel, the composer describes: “Why shouldn't one dream seemingly impossible dreams?” She asks and spins the thought into the fourth chapter: “We all in the audience imagine a wonderful place and describe it on a card. Michael Schiefel and the ensemble musicians will improvise on these cards. ”The last part is then inspired by Shakespeare's Sonnet 43. It is about love, which you can feel even more clearly in your absence than when you are together. "This is also very relevant in our time, in which many people do not find each other, I think."

The structure of the evening was a particularly demanding task for Milliken. It should be open to the unpredictable impulses of the participants and at the same time give the whole thing its proverbial shape. For Schopenhauer, architecture was “frozen music”; Milliken sees music as architecture unfolded in time: it reflects the thoughts, whose space it is, and at the same time reshapes them. Milliken reveals that the golden ratio plays a role, as do other rules of proportion, such as the 4-7-11 rule. Debussy and Bartók also reflected on its importance in nature and composed according to it.

The piece was already performed in Berlin in September. Milliken talks about “wonderful moments”, for example when everyone in the room made noises with stones. The actions of the musicians and listeners merged casually, overlapped for a while, and gradually one group stopped to listen to the other and vice versa. “This is how the energies flow from the stage into the auditorium and back like a sea,” Milliken describes it. Conductor Jonathan Stockhammer will help determine the strength of the waves and tides.

"At the beginning I had a lot of questions and found the task very difficult," says Milliken of her piece.

Over time, however, she noticed: "It has to be done, and you can even create something completely new, a kind of concert installation, a generally accessible listening room in which everyone is as equal as possible."

Night Shift will be performed on Sunday, February 27th, at 7 p.m. in the Capitol Offenbach, Kaiserstraße 106.