Time of Music 2024

How does today’s identity politics and our need and desire for attention affect how we present ourselves in public? The digital age turns communication into a self-conscious performance. In a time of change and activism triggered by this, different methods of participation are also of great importance in the art world.

Time of Music will present four pieces by composers Jennifer Walshe, Alexander Schubert, Oscar Bianchi and Laura Bowler that deal with these themes. The pieces will be performed by the ensembles Oslo Sinfonietta, NEKO3, IEMA and Decoder ensemble.

In the Irish piece PERSONHOOD by Jennifer Walshe, the composer explores the concept of the person. How does the individual behave in the encounter with the collective? How does the collective define the individual? How does personality relate to social relationships or performance? In the piece commissioned by the Oslo Sinfonietta, the players subject the accordionist Andreas Borregaard to a series of tests and procedures that he has to perform in front of the ensemble. The big question behind this is: how do you create a connection with the audience?

Laura Bowler’s work follows on from Fukuyama’s discussion of identity in his book on the subject and is divided into three perspectives of ‘autobiographical courtship’ from the viewpoint of thymos, isothymia and megalothymia. It deals with contemporary society’s urge to tell the rest of the world who we are, where we are and why we are via social media in order to secure our place in certain tribes.

The piece by the Italian and Swiss Oscar Bianchi for ensemble and audience is a piece in which participation is choreographed in a classical way, i.e. the audience takes a central, non-ornamental role in the piece. IEMA will perform the piece and collaborate with the students of Viitasaari Music School in public workshops and the participants of the summer academy courses.

The piece written for neko3 is a song cycle by Alexander Schubert that deals with the transhuman state in which the merging of body and technology continues to progress. The songs are a progressive interweaving of the digital and the human. The performers’ expressions become increasingly artificial and technologically stylized, while at the same time addressing very personal, emotional and sexual desires. It is a transitional process, a merging of flesh and motherboard. The artificial and the natural are constantly contrasted and interwoven.

Time of Music 2024 is made possible by the Ernst von Siemens Music Foundation.

Further information:
musiikinaika.org

Dates

July 2 – 7, 2024
Various locations, Viitasaari