Concerts

SÉRIE ROSE | new music & erotica

Women should be allowed to like sex, porn, casual sex, and being kinky just as much as men do. They might not want to do this things, but they should be options. In fact feminism can’t be considered a success until that’s accomplished.

Jennifer Keishin Armstrong, Heather Wood Rudúlph, „Sexy Feminism: A Girl’s Guide to Love, Success, and Style”, Mariner Books 2013.

After three emancipations in 20th century music (serial, indeterministic, actional…) I have found that there is still one more chain to loose… that is… PRE FREUDIAN HYPOCRISY. Why is sex a predominant theme in art and literature prohibited ONLY in music? How long can New Music afford to be sixty years behind the times and still claim to be a serious art? The purge of sex under the excuse of being >serious< exactly undermines the so called >seriousness< of music as a classical art, ranking with literature and painting. Music history needs its D.H. Lawrence its Sigmung Freud.

Nam June Paik, in Programm to „Opera Sextronique” (1967)

In the twentieth century a glut of eroticism in popular culture and music, as well as daring experiments in film, theater and visual arts, broke the last taboo on the presence of sex in the public space. However compared to other arts, new music takes up the subject of sexuality – in both critical and personal perspective – far less. Sexuality and eroticism have not created an independent discourse in new music.

Nevertheless sound and music have always been recognized as related to sex (Darwin). Also, new music is not without erotic connotation. Even if the audience does not associate noisy, bizarre avant-garde sounds with eroticism (or perhaps that is not so?), composers were always interested in it when trying to compose their ideas, feelings, experiences, obsessions and critical thoughts about sex in new music.

The project sheds light on this aspect of new music, which usually remains in the shadow of its abstract form and intellectual content, and presents works directly related to eroticism, sex and love. Let's try to listen to new music a little differently than in the context of its aesthetic and technical discourse, to discover what has allegedly been suppressed and renounced by avant-garde.

Curator: Monika Pasiecznik

PROGRAM:

Jennifer Walshe (*1974) - (your name here) for voice and electronics 15’
Brigitta Muntendorf (*1982) - Public Privacy #ARIA (2016) for sampler and video 10’
Erwin Schulhoff (1894-1942) - Sonata Erotica (1919) for female voice 4’
Laurie Anderson (*1947) - Langue d’amour (1984) for voice and electric piano 6’
Johannes Kreidler (*1980) - London (2007) for video 10’
Pierre Jodlowski (*1971) - Série Rose (2012) for piano and electronics 14’
Juliana Hodkinson (*1971), Niels Rønsholdt (*1978) - X&X (2017) for voice, electric piano 10’

Performers:

Małgorzata Walentynowicz – piano, sampler
Frauke Aulbert – voice

The program can be arranged in free space as a concert installation, with proper lighting.
 

CONCERT DATES

18.09.2017 - Warszawska Jesień Festival, Warsaw (PL)
22.09.2017 - Klangspuren Schwaz Festival, Innsbruck (AT)
26.09.2017 - Sacrum Profanum Festival, Kraków (PL)
22.12.2017 - Kölner Gesellschaft für neue Musik, Cologne (DE)
24.07.2018 - Darmstädter Ferienkurse für Neue Musik (DE)
3.06.2019 - Klang Festival, Copenhagen (DK)