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FormalPara Christian Grüny:

You have been working in very different institutions and contexts in recent years. There was a piece that took place in a refugee shelter, another that was staged in a park, one that was placed in a visual arts institution, as well as often working in performing arts institutions like Mousonturm in Frankfurt, Sophiensäle in Berlin, and others. What all these different places have in common is that they are not the concert hall, to put it bluntly. Maybe you can tell me something about how these projects came about.

FormalPara Hannes Seidl:

Yes, it is important that they are not the concert hall, but I wouldn’t say that they are not within the institution of New Music. For instance, it was essential that the radio project Good Morning Deutschland that was installed in refugee shelters was tied to artistic institutions. I think it would have developed differently and also would have been received differently if this hadn’t been the case. If we had just approached the refugees with the idea of creating a radio programme where they could exchange information, music, stories, etc. in their own languages and create a network between different shelters, which we did, without any connection to art institutions, this would have been considered exclusively as a social project and might have drawn the attention of a few local newspapers without anyone else taking notice.

Because it was also part of the Donaueschinger Musiktage and was presented in the context of New Music, it automatically led to a reflection of the institutions of contemporary music itself and posed the question whether it might not have to be considered contemporary music as well. That only works when it doesn’t position itself completely outside the institution.

The same is true for the music theatre projects I did with Daniel Kötter that took place in Mousonturm, Sophiensäle, etc. We always tried to find a way to also have them performed in the context of New Music so that they could have some effect there. Some were originally performed at MaerzMusik in Berlin, were invited to the KLANG festival in Copenhagen, etc. So there were always points of contact. I think that’s very important because these institutions need some flexibility, they need to periodically ask themselves whether they are still adequate to what is being created and presented. I don’t think there is such a thing as the one perfect place where you can just continue to present art for the next hundred years. You get an art that is perfectly geared towards this place, and the whole thing appears to run smoothly but has in fact died long ago.

You can see this in many sclerotic areas in contemporary music: they take place, they have their audience, they have their funding but they don’t move anything anymore. This raises the question whether the institutions, including the artists who work there, might be fooling themselves when they think they are still radical and therefore important. Of course, there is always an interplay between the institution and the artists that are working within it because they move in other contexts as well. Even if they don’t work in other artistic fields but exclusively write scores for New Music ensembles, they live in our common world, so there’s always some movement. But that doesn’t change the general situation.

FormalPara CG:

I see several different points there that we could follow up on. First of all you made a distinction between the real, physical but also institutional place that provides a framework and has some implications for the work, and the institution in the sense of a discourse, funding structures, recognisability, categorisation, etc. that may remain in place even if the work physically takes place somewhere else. The second point is the difference between leaving the art institutions altogether, like with Good Morning Deutschland, and moving into institutions of another artistic discipline, which leads to certain frictions and interferences that can be worked with. You have done both, and sometimes the two are connected.

We could distinguish three ways of critiquing art or music institutions: working within them in order to change them, simply leaving them and moving somewhere else, and inventing or postulating new institutions. From what you’ve said it seems that you don’t want to consider them as alternatives. You are saying that even when you’re leaving them you remain within their purview, and when you invented a new institution it always meant to reflect back on the traditional ones and change them. Is that a good way of putting it?

FormalPara HS:

That’s my approach, yes. That’s what I wish for. But it had a much more pragmatic starting point. It’s not that I set out to critique New Music as an institution because I thought that was necessary; it was more of a feeling of discontent with the working conditions in the New Music scene, this particular division of labour. For instance, I’m too slow for the usual rehearsal routine. I cannot assess a piece that I wrote after three rehearsals just before a premiere without the chance to make any major changes. I need time to react to what I’ve heard, time to understand why certain sections don’t work, whether it’s because of the composition, whether the performers simply haven’t mastered it yet, or whether there was a problem in the communication. I found that when I have more time to rehearse with the musicians and also more time between rehearsals, I get completely different and much better results.

The other thing is that in a standard concert setting where four or five pieces are played whose only commonality is the instrumentation, my pieces sometimes didn’t work at all. Obviously, the pieces impact each other, and not always for the better. Sometimes I directly reacted to that, like in The Art of Entertainment, which is distributed over the whole evening, takes something from the other pieces and intermittently intervenes into this strange dramaturgy.

I found that these two aspects, rehearsal time and the dramaturgy of a show, work much better in theatre venues where it is common to start half a year in advance with tryouts and then rehearse for 2 weeks. Also, you have the evening to yourself. The show can be five hours or less than an hour long, and everyone works together on the format of the evening. Those were the fairly pragmatic reasons why I entered that field.

Once you do that, you see that you have to make all kinds of decisions: will the audience stand, will they sit, will they move around, are they placed in front of the performance or around it, what about light, video, text, what media will be used, etc. This process of finding the appropriate form for each piece became quite central to my work. I found that formats like Good Morning Deutschland don’t have to be theoretically devised in order to produce something that is a far from the classical image of New Music as possible. Rather, I asked myself how I could react to the situation in 2015 where all these refugees from Syria and Afghanistan came to Germany and found it completely inappropriate to express my feelings about that in a conventionally composed piece of music.

So I thought about what could be a situation that makes sense coming from what I’m interested in, namely, hearing and listening. That’s how the idea of creating a radio station came about. When we started working we walked around Donaueschingen looking for a suitable place, and we found this old casino in the refugee shelter with a sunroom that was just perfect, like a campus radio that even had a kind of stage. It was always important to me that the programme was produced at a visible place that you could visit and see it as a kind of stage play.

For all this I didn’t have to invent an institution but could say that this is New Music, at least as I understand it, as a process of reflection about music, about listening to music, and the expectation of what music can be. Again, the origin is rather pragmatic, and actually founding an institution would need a kind of momentum that you couldn’t produce as a single person and also it wouldn’t be that interesting in terms of communication.

FormalPara CG:

I wasn’t thinking of permanent institutions but rather of a kind of ad hoc institutions, small organisational units that don’t quite fit into the standard institutions and that you dissolve again after the fact. You once wrote about music as a social situation, and this could be a temporary institution as a social situation. And the way you wanted to react politically and artistically to the current political situation didn’t fit well into the institutions of New Music, so there had to be some kind of transformation.

FormalPara HS:

Right. My hope was that this kind of approach would have some effect on the predominant institutions and the New Music scene so that there would be an irritation that triggered a different way of looking at the calcified structures. There are plenty of examples in music theatre that took place within the conventional frame with the standard structure of rehearsals, staging, etc. and failed because of this and because of the hierarchical structures from classical music where the composer calls the shots, there’s a conductor and a concertmaster and not a team working together. In some of the smaller ensembles things are a bit more flexible but still there’s this crass pragmatism of ‘now we have a rehearsal, which lasts three and a half hours and that’s it’. Of course, there are some advantages to that too, especially when you have a family. But you could also say that a working day lasts six hours and then we’ll see how far we get. The pieces that try to create something new within these structures tend to primarily reproduce them politically and artistically.

In this context the piece we did last year should be mentioned, We Can Be Heroes, where I withdrew as a composer and took the role of artistic director or curator. I hadn’t planned it that way, I thought I’d compose something as well but it became apparent that that would have created an imbalance. What was particularly important to me was to create a performative project that retained its own temporality, not like an exhibition where you can spend as much time as you want but as something that lasted an hour.

FormalPara CG:

But it did switch between the two models depending on the room.

FormalPara HS:

Yes, there were two rooms where you could stay as long as you wanted while the others were only activated for a specific time. The format was meant to be hybrid, but it was also clear that we need an exhibition space to realise it. We couldn’t have done it within a music festival. Firstly because it called for the infrastructure of an exhibition space, eight rooms, white walls, etc., but also because it needed to last for some weeks as people were only allowed to go in one by one. Of course I still want the piece to be received within the contemporary music context, which doesn’t always happen. In a way it’s a bit absurd: I position myself somewhere else, on the outside or between stools, and then want everybody to follow me and praise what I do.

FormalPara CG:

You want it to be perceived as a statement within New Music, as something that is relevant for its own practice.

FormalPara HS:

Exactly. That is one of the reasons why inventing ad hoc institutions only makes sense to me when they have some connection to those larger structures so that there is some communication. Artworks that aren’t seen or heard are a bit pointless. There are works that you can still perform and listen to in 50 years so things might not be quite so urgent there, but these performative works are just gone once they are over.

FormalPara CG:

When you described the standard structures and workings of the traditional institutions it reminded me of McLuhan’s ‘the medium is the message’: the works that remain within these structures turn into mere actualisations of the structures themselves so that really the institution is the message.

FormalPara HS:

Most of the time I think this is true. But I’m still surprised that sometimes there are people who manage to neutralise the framework, as it were, so that the institution becomes irrelevant. For me the performance of an orchestral piece by Iannis Xenakis in Darmstadt 2006 or 2008 was such a moment. For this piece—I think it was Jonchaies—the orchestra didn’t matter so much because the piece had such a strong, autonomous musical language. For him it’s about the structure as such, and if it’s three flutes who can play it, fine, if it had been three synthesisers it would have worked just as well. The music sounds like it doesn’t care that there’s an orchestra because it aims at something else, like thinking about rhythmic proportions, about pulses or something like that. But it’s very rare that this works.

FormalPara CG:

There are a lot of people who situate themselves inside the institutions of the concert, of New Music and listen to the pieces without perceiving the institution itself. The prerequisite for this is neutralising the frame and only noticing what appears inside it. Couldn’t it be that someone for whom the institution constantly gets in the way is already halfway out?

FormalPara HS:

That’s not something that I chose. I simply never felt completely at home. In my early experiences in clubs listening to ska, hip hop or funk I really liked the frame and found it completely appropriate but it was just half of my world musically, I never found a band I was comfortable playing in. On the other hand I found the music I heard within the New Music institutions really fascinating, Xenakis in particular but also Beat Furrer, Bernhard Lang, Nicolaus A. Huber, also Lachenmann for a while. It is not this was foreign to me, otherwise I would never have entered this world. It’s more of an ambivalence. The unease came automatically when I couldn’t forget that I always have to behave in a certain way. This world is so closely tied to the world of classical music and its norms of behaviour. Sometimes I managed to forget it for a while, but then I went to a concert with friends who weren’t from the New Music scene and who were shocked by the rigidity of it all. All this leads to the strange situation where for people from other areas the frame is so strong that they cannot enjoy a concert musically at all. That includes the instruments, the fact that you have an orchestra, the whole classical apparatus. All these sounds, instruments, clothes, behavioural rules mean something and still point towards a bourgeois nineteenth-century society.

In the last project I did, Die Flexibilität der Fische (The flexibility of fishes), for example, we tried to use the language of a singer-songwriter evening concerning stage, light, volume, etc. The evening consists of two ballads, one twenty minutes and the other little over half an hour long, so it’s not a long concert. Still, I wanted a break in between to catch some air, get a drink… Also, Diamanda La Berge Dramm, the violinist performing the first part, addresses the audience directly in the beginning as if she was on stage in a bar or somewhere like that. It was important that Diamanda would establish contact with the audience so she as a person wouldn’t disappear behind the music. As everything was amplified, the audience didn’t need to be extra quiet and didn’t monitor their behaviour so much.

FormalPara CG:

But the two-part concert with an intermission in between is a very traditional format in classical music, unlike in the performance world. In a way what you did was cross two formats.

FormalPara HS:

Yes, that’s true, the intermission itself is very common in concerts. It was more the luxury of time I was seeking for. To have a concert with ‘only’ one hour of music but still with an intermission. I have seen the complete overload in music festivals often enough, which makes them turn into a kind of discounter of music. It seems like that’s the institution itself speaking and saying ‘look how big I am!’ Often there is no recognisable motivation for placing things side by side, which devalues the individual pieces. So I thought why not take a break after twenty minutes and not have two or three more pieces, which would only make me forget what I heard.

FormalPara CG:

Of all the pieces we mentioned, We Can Be Heroes was the one that most explicitly worked with the different frames and dispositifs of the institutions it situated itself between, namely, the gallery space that normally houses exhibitions and New Music, which is where you and most of the people you invited to participate come from. What was your experience regarding the realisation of the piece? In each of the different pieces you confront the institutions with unusual demands, you ask them to do things they wouldn’t normally do.

FormalPara HS:

Interestingly, the two pieces I thought would be most problematic in this context worked best, Michael Maierhof and Christoph Ogiermann’s pieces. They were the ones who paid almost no attention to the institution in terms of how they worked but did what they would have done in another context as well. Maierhof composed a ten-minute piece for one performer and video and introduced an interactive element by letting the audience choose between five variants. But that remained virtual for most of the visitors because very few went through the exhibition more than once. Still, it was nice for the performers who had to do it for 10 or 11 weeks.

Christoph Ogiermann had additional walls installed with mirrors on them and subwoofers behind them so that everything shook and rattled. I thought this wouldn’t work for the 9 weeks because it was based on an erosion of the material, screws coming loose, glue failing, so we had to constantly repair it. But the people at basis Frankfurt had no problems with that at all.

Also we had to find fourteen performers, three for every day, which they really helped us with. And when it was up and running, it only took some problems with public transport or a performer becoming sick to cause serious problems. In situations like that the institution has to react quickly, which they did. There is always somebody there to take care of these things, and the performers also organised themselves really well. There was constantly something that needed to be fixed, mirrors crashing, projectors or robot vacuum cleaners breaking down, and they had no problems dealing with that. I think everybody involved kind of identified themselves with the project and made it partially their own. This way it becomes much easier to solve problems because everybody feels responsible. I guess that is an important thing in collaborative works—to take everyone involved seriously and to trust them so they will take their work seriously as well.

One thing that was really difficult was communicating the project to the public. People who go to a gallery are just not used to something starting at a specific time, so that when someone came spontaneously and would have had to wait for the next time slot, they just left again. It really runs counter to the expectation of being able to visit an exhibition at your own autonomous time and speed, and with larger groups as well as you were only allowed to go in alone. We were asking a kind of flexibility that seemed unreasonable for a lot of people. On the other hand, hardly anyone came who didn’t know the institution.

FormalPara CG:

You mean basis Frankfurt as an institution.

FormalPara HS:

Yes, and people like the New Music crowd just don’t take notice of these things. In a relatively small city like Frankfurt where the arts scene isn’t huge, you should think that it should be possible to follow what’s going on in different fields. But everyone is in their own bubble, myself included. So maybe what I’m asking for artistically is something that I couldn’t fulfil as a viewer. Outside communication is the most difficult task.

Interestingly, the parts that I thought would be difficult like introducing a concert format into the white cube worked really well. But they needed to be complemented by others who were closer to the visual arts, like the pieces by Christina Kubisch, David Helbich, and Lea Letzel. I was glad that there were all these different formats because just having a series of concert pieces would have raised the question why they had to be in different rooms at all.

FormalPara CG:

Outside communication is a really interesting topic. There are a lot of different things involved like audience expectations and attitudes, very concrete questions like the need to book a ticket in advance for a specific time slot, which is common practice for a concert but very unusual in a museum (except maybe places like the Louvre), and then the fact that only one person per half hour can enter at all, which is unusual for both institutions. In a way you are placing yourself between two (or more) stools.

Besides those formal aspects there is the problem of criteria and evaluation. You necessarily ask yourself what is the benchmark for this, or do I have to have a whole range of different benchmarks depending on which room I am visiting because they were all so different. How do I have to watch this and listen to it? How do I judge it? That’s an obvious challenge for the visitors no matter which field they’re from. In a way the problem that people just don’t take notice of a piece like this at all because it takes place outside their own bubble should be the easiest one to tackle.

FormalPara HS:

Funnily I always thought that that is precisely what New Music is there for! Challenging people’s frames of reference and judgement. I always loved coming out of concert completely confused, not thinking ‘that was a great concert’ or ‘that was a lame concert’ but rather ‘I don’t even know what that was’. That’s what engages me most and longest.

I found the question how people perceived and judged the pieces really interesting. I think some were a bit anxious to be on their own with a single performer in this really intimate situation. And then it lasted 70 minutes and you couldn’t just move in an out as you please. In a way these are strange attitudes because what they seem to say is ‘I don’t want this to have anything to do with me, I just want to judge it from a distance’. But that is precisely what the piece makes impossible.

FormalPara CG:

Traditionally, there are two types of freedom for an audience: in a museum or a gallery it’s your own choice how you move and what you look at in what order, in a concert hall you can retreat and become invisible as a person. You made them both impossible, and it’s no wonder people reacted to this with a bit of reservation.

FormalPara HS:

It doesn’t surprise me either. I don’t know if I would call this freedom but you certainly have to give up some independence. You have to trust the artwork to treat you right. These are the things I am working with, and what it basically means is that there is an increase of intensity. Interestingly, most people felt really relaxed once they were inside the piece. Once the performers had a certain routine, they acted more like stewards or stewardesses who guided you, which led to an easy acceptance by the audience. When people where in the piece the questions tended to recede; it is only once they came out and asked themselves what had happened that the questions reappeared. I think it actually made it easy for the visitors—only entering it was difficult.

FormalPara CG:

I’d like to stay with the question of criteria a little longer. Saying that New Music is precisely the place where criteria are questioned or subverted only works within a certain frame that remains stable. Even questioning the frame somehow remains within it because it calls for a revision of its criteria, not criteria in general. When you move between institutions like you do, these criteria or meta-criteria become a problem because you don’t know what to compare the piece you are seeing and hearing to. That’s precisely what makes it interesting because it really confronts the audience with this problem.

We all know the situation where people from the performance world come to a concert and find it uninteresting because for them ‘nothing happened’, just some people playing music, and on the other hand people from the music scene going to performances that use music and then disregarding the performative dimension and listening to the music formally, also finding it uninteresting. You systematically produced such a clash of norms and modes of attention.

FormalPara HS:

Even though I don’t aim at raising these kinds of questions, I often had situations like that. In the music theatre pieces I did with Daniel Kötter there were people from New Music who said ‘but there wasn’t any music!’ and others from the performance scene finding the pieces ‘incredibly loud’ when what they meant was a certain polyphony or just many things happening at the same time. For instance, Kredit [credit] is a chamber piece with three musicians and two speakers plus a choir on stage, and it’s mostly very quiet but there are always many layers. A lot of people translated this into a strange understanding of ‘loud’, so there is some confusion there. The musical complexity produced a stress level to some people it didn’t foresee at all.

Actually when I go to a concert or a museum show, even bad ones, I feel like the whole situation is so carefully designed and constructed that it is much less threatening than, for instance, walking through the city. Here I have to make all these decisions, choose what to perceive and how, etc. I find the everyday much more stressful than any art. Do I answer all these emails? Then I won’t have time to compose. And if I compose I’ll probably get a dunning letter from the revenue office because I failed to do my taxes. In perceiving art I have to make none of these decisions, and if there are decisions to make, they don’t have such serious consequences.

FormalPara CG:

I don’t mean that you’re placing an excessive demand on the audience but rather that you create the need for a certain flexibility in your judgement. People might not even notice that as a specific challenge and just continue applying the criteria they are used to, never actually doing justice to the pieces.

FormalPara HS:

That’s true, and I know it from own experience as well. For instance, it took me a long time to appreciate Heiner Goebbel’s works for the stage because I found them musically so daft without even noticing what kind of interesting constellations he produces and what I can take from them. Recently I analysed Steve Reich’s Music for 18 musicians, which I used to discount as formally uninteresting minimal music, with students in a seminar. What’s interesting about it is not the constellations of pitches but other things that concern the institution. There is no conductor, which is really important because it raises the question of how to organise such an hour-long piece, what kind of cues there are, what ideas of playing together, etc. It has a lot of very productive aspects, which I used to completely miss because of my own limited perception.

So when you address the frame and the institution it becomes a lot harder to process. I used to think that festivals would be happy about pieces that worked differently but found that they really aren’t. For most of them, especially in Germany, it’s a lot less hassle to have three more orchestra pieces because the orchestra is there, rehearsal times are set, nothing else needs to be done. You have to put a lot of extra work into doing something differently, communication included, which is a real challenge to institutions of New Music.

FormalPara CG:

What we’re talking about aren’t grand gestures of transgression but rather a kind of flexibility that doesn’t take everything for granted. In the institutions of the performing and the visual arts there seems to be less resistance against this kind of flexibility because they’re more used to reorganising and rebuilding. Of course it’s not like there is complete openness on one side and complete closure on the other.

FormalPara HS:

Even in the performing arts there aren’t many institutions like Mousonturm where you have this degree of freedom where there are all these rehearsal spaces, the technical team that supports you, etc. There is a different standard there: you have a certain space to yourself for a certain time, not a rehearsal room you have to rent on an hourly basis and then vacate again. And it seems to me that the people who work there are just waiting to be challenged because that’s where the fun part of the job starts. It’s really important to have a good relationship with the technical team because then they actually enjoy solving difficult problems.

That’s actually similar in New Music: Doing Good Morning Deutschland at a festival and presenting it as New Music must have been very difficult for the communications team, but the technical team was having a blast. They could build radio studios and were really happy about it because it revitalised a certain urge to try things out. Wherever you are, you have to find accomplices for what you want to do.

Like I said, the reason why I don’t want to write for an orchestra isn’t because I don’t like the sound of it but because I don’t want to deal with the rehearsal situation, and I don’t see why I should work with a group part of which isn’t interested in playing New Music at all. It would mean perpetuating alienated labour, as it were, even for myself. I find assembling a coalition who really want to work together much more interesting, maybe including untrained people. This can turn an institution inside out rather easily. At least that’s what I experience in those smaller, independent venues for performing art like Mousonturm.

FormalPara CG:

So there’s a difference between challenging the institutions and challenging people. Instead of forcing something on them they don’t want to do you assemble a different group of people, kind of like building ad hoc institutions within the institution similarly to what we talked about earlier.

FormalPara HS:

Yes, exactly. But it’s the communication for potential audiences that only actual established institutions are capable of. I can do things I find artistically completely convincing in my hood or my garden, but without anyone who convinces others to listen to it and talk about it becomes very frustrating. Only in an institution there is an exchange of different positions and a way of framing it so it can find an audience. There is an alarming tendency of individualisation and solitude, artistically and also politically, and we need institutions to counteract that.