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Press information
Press Release from 22 February 2006
Third Conference of the GLOBAL INTERPLAY in the course of MaerzMusik in Berlin
“Without Borders” in July in Stuttgart.
The conference in Berlin is opened with a public concert at the Universität der Künste under the banner “Intonation and Transformation” at 8 p.m. on 14th March.
The ensemble Adapter is playing oeuvres of the GLOBAL INTERPLAY- participants Bassam Nour-Eddien, Wael Sami, Huckleberry John Hodge, Sun Chang and Lu Mang. On the following two days, the composers are holding a lecture on topics like “Approaches to Intonation” and “Phases of Transformation”.
The composer and mentor of the Berlin group Walter Zimmermann is hosting the final discussion. A concert is taking place with oeuvres of the mentors Wenchen Qin and Shi-Rui Zhu from China, Amr Okba from Egypt und Marcelo Toledo from Argentina/USA and further participants in the course of MaerzMusik at 4 p.m. on 17th March.
The composer Oliver Schneller hosts the closing panel discussion with the title "Composing in an intercultural dialogue” at the Haus der Berliner Festspiele from 11 a.m. to 1 p.m. on 13th March. The conference in Berlin is the third of five meetings of the participating cities, in each city; delegates from other teams are invited.
The next conference is taking place from 24th to 28th May in New York. Musik der Jahrhunderte considers the project as a contribution to the cultural dialogue which has been demanded everywhere today.
The project GLOBAL INTERPLAY is realized by the support of the Deutsche Bank Stiftung, DaimlerChrysler AG and the Ernst von Siemens Musikstiftung, while the conference in Berlin is supported by the capital’s cultural funds. Further information: www.berlinerfestspiele.de.
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Press Release from 3 February 2006
Second Conference of the GLOBAL INTERPLAY
Intercultural Composition Workshop in Cairo
The second GLOBAL INTERPLAY Conference is taking place in Cairo in Egypt from 12th to 17th February. It is designed to enable budding composers from diverse countries to get to know one another personally and to reflect on their artistic efforts. The program includes lectures from German and Egyptian speakers, contributions from students from China, the USA and Egypt, practical workshops on Arabic music as well as two concerts.
The concerts present 20 works from various international composers taking part in the GLOBAL INTERPLAY project. They shall be staged on 13th and 15th February with the support of the Cairo Opera. The concerts will be performed by six young musicians from the Stuttgarter Musikhochschule under the direction of Hans Christoph Bünger together with soloists from Egypt.
GLOBAL INTERPLAY is organised by Musik der Jahrhunderte, a German institution for new music.
The lectures from the invited speakers Oliver Schneller (composer) and Rolf Elberfeld (Japanologist) from Germany and Azza Madian, Safwat Kamal and Shaima Salah from Egypt, shall deal with the themes of folklore, migration and plurality of modernity and the influence they have on contemporary creativity and artistic endeavour. During group periods, each of which shall be directed by a participating student from Ghana, China, the USA and Egypt, the participants shall relate these themes to the situation in which composers from various cultural environments find themselves.
Alongside the members of the Cairo GLOBAL INTERPLAY group and their mentor Amr Okba, others taking part in the conference are Huan Liu and Huang Lei from China, Victor Adan from New York, Benedict Sackey and Kofi Ansah from Accra and Nils Günther from Berlin.
Musik der Jahrhunderte has conceived the GLOBAL INTERPLAY intercultural workshop as a forerunner to the ISCM World New Music Festival, which takes place this July in Stuttgart under the banner "Without Borders".
GLOBAL INTERPLAY is orientated towards budding composers from five cultural worlds – the African, European, Arabic, American and Chinese - each with radically contrasting music traditions: since May 2005, groups of around eight prospective composers have been meeting together at Accra, Beijing, Shanghai, Berlin, Cairo and New York respectively. Under the guidance of a mentor each group reflects on its own particular cultural roots, works with various media methods of composition, gains an understanding of the culture of the partner groups and carries on discussions with counterparts in the other cities by means of an internet platform.
The Cairo conference is the second of five gatherings planned for the participating cities and to each of which members of other groups shall be invited. The next conferences shall take place March in Berlin, as part of the MaerzMusik festival.
Global Interplay is made possible by the support of the Deutsche Bank Foundation, DaimlerChrysler AG and the Ernst von Siemens Musikstiftung.
Press Contact:
Petra Heinze, Tel: +49. 711. 65 66 315
petraheinze.pr@t-online.de
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Press Release from 19 January 2006
First Conference of the GLOBAL INTERPLAY
Intercultural Composition Workshop in Accra
The first GLOBAL INTERPLAY Conference is taking place in Accra in Ghana from 19th to 21st January, offering participants from various continents the opportunity to personally get to know one another.
Musik der Jahrhunderte has conceived the GLOBAL INTERPLAY intercultural workshop as a forerunner to the ISCM World New Music Festival, which takes place this July in Stuttgart under the banner "Without Borders".
GLOBAL INTERPLAY is orientated towards budding composers from five cultural worlds - the African, European, Arabic, American and Chinese - each with radically contrast-ing music traditions. Six cities, five countries, four continents and the youngest generation of composers are gathering for an intercultural exchange: since May 2005, groups of around eight prospective composers have been meeting together at Accra, Beijing, Shanghai, Berlin, Cairo and New York respectively.
Under the guidance of a mentor each group reflects on its own particular cultural roots, works with various media methods of composition, gains an understanding of the culture of the partner groups and carries on discussions with counterparts in the other cities by means of an internet platform.
The agenda for the congress in Accra includes practice workshops, concerts with traditional and con-temporary music from Ghana as well as lectures by Kwabena Nketia the Ghanaian composer and music ethnologist, the composers Professor Willie Anku and Dr. Zabana Kongo likewise from Ghana, the German art historian and journalist Dr. Dietrich Heissenbüttel, the west African psychologist and gender expert Dr. Grada Kilomba as well as by the budding composers themselves. Alongside the members of the Accra group, other participants at the congress shall be Tom Rojo Poller from Berlin, Todd Tarantino from New York, Wael Sami from Cairo, Jia Yao from Peking and Liu Kun from Shanghai.
The Accra conference is the first of five gatherings planned for the participating cities and to each of which members of other groups shall be invited. The next conferences shall take place in February and March in Cairo and Berlin respectively, the latter as part of the MaerzMusik festival.
Global Interplay is made possible by the support of the Deutsche Bank Foundation, DaimlerChrysler AG and the Ernst von Siemens Musikstiftung.
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Press Release from 17 October 2005
ZKM's international competition for electroacoustic music:
"Short Cuts: Beauty"
As one of the partners of the World New Music Festival 2006 in Stuttgart, the Center for Art and Media (ZKM) in Karlsruhe/ Germany is putting on the international competition for electroacoustic music ?Short Cuts: Beauty". The competition is meant to deliver an insight into the multiple concepts of beauty from different cultures. The competition is directed towards musically creative people throughout the world dealing with computer music. There is no age limit. The ZKM looks for short pieces of 3 to 8 minutes in duration. The works should represent the artists' concepts of beauty through three of their favourite sounds which can be arranged in any way. The artists are invited to give their fantasy free reign. They can use everyday sounds, voices and what ever they like. It is planned to present all submissions throughout the World New Music Festival, from July 14 until 29, 2006. There will be special audio stations at the ZKM Karlsruhe and the festival's media center at the Theaterhaus Stuttgart. Moreover, the Museum of Art in Stuttgart will exclusively open a late night lounge to present a selection of the most inventive ?Short Cuts: Beauty". Other works will be broadcasted through the internetradio of the German Society for Electroacoustics. The World New Music Festival of the International Society of Contemporary Music (ISCM) is an international forum for the latest artistic projects and technologies in the field of new music. In 2006 the festival bears the title "Grenzenlos/ Without Borders" and will focus on the unlimited possibilities of communication in today's globalized world, namely cross-cultural dialogue and world-wide communication through new media. The German institution for new music Musik der Jahrhunderte is organising the festival in collaboration with the German Society of Contemporary Music and several national and international partners. For further information about terms of participation please see www.zkm.de/musik .
The deadline is June 15, 2006. There is no recourse to legal action.
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Press Release from 8 June 2005
GLOBAL INTERPLAY
An intercultural composition workshop
in five major cities
June, 2005 - July, 2006
In Accra, Berlin, Cairo, New York and Peking/Shanghai
In the foreground of the World New Music Festival, Musik der Jahrhunderte intends to stimulate an exchange amongst composers and musicians from all over the world regarding their differing artistic identities. An important element in this process is the project "GLOBAL INTERPLAY".
It is directed towards aspiring composers from five different cultural worlds with fully contrasting musical traditions, specifically African, European, Arabic, American and Chinese. The composition workshop will take place from June, 2005 through July, 2006 in Accra (Ghana), Berlin, Cairo, New York and Peking/Shanghai simultaneously. The participants will receive composition instruction, get to know their own cultural roots and those of their partner teams and work with the various media possibilities available to contemporary composition.
At the same time they will indulge in a discourse with one colleague from another team. By doing so, questions of inter-culturalism and cultural identity will be, in addition to specific compositional techniques, brought to the focus. The high point of this discourse will be five conferences in each of five major host cities, to which delegates from each team will be invited, to enable personal contact among the young composers. The intercultural "game" will culminate in a composition competition, the winning projects of which will be premiered during the WNMF in July, 2006, in Stuttgart. At least one contribution will be performed from each of the five teams.
The mentors of the teams are "border-walkers" between different cultures: the Nigerian composer Nkeiru Okoye lives and teaches in the USA, Walter Zimmermann, a German composer from Berlin, has worked for years with techniques from diverse cultures, the Egyptian Amr Okba lives and studies in Italy and Austria, the Argentine composer Marcelo Toledo works in New York and the two Chinese composers Wenchen Qin and Shirui Zhu have each studied for several years in Germany. The goal of Global Interplay is to challenge artists to a conscious position within their culture and their society, to incite a discourse on contemporary composition and artistic creativity and to enable this discourse to take place between different cultures of the world.
Through GLOBAL INTERPLAY, the ISCM "World New Music Festival" will be confronting the audience with numerous musical cultures which do not themselves relate directly to the European aesthetic. The intention is to support an interplay of cultures as equals in the sense of a healthily globalised world.
GLOBAL INTERPLAY is, as such, the most significant element of the festival in view of the theme "grenzenlos" (boundless).
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Press information from 8 June 2005
grenzenlos (boundless)
The ISCM World New Music Festival 2006 14. - 30. July, 2006, Stuttgart Musik der Jahrhunderte (MDJ), commissioned by the International Society for Contemporary Music (ISCM), will be organising the World New Music Festival during the summer of 2006.
The Festival with approximately 60 events - concerts, music theatre, performances, installations, and workshops on contemporary music - will take place July 14 to 30, 2006 in the Theaterhaus Stuttgart, MDJ's location and playing venue, throughout Stuttgart and the region as well as open air. For this international festival, in which musicians and composers from over 50 countries of the world will participate, MDJ has chosen the title "grenzenlos" (boundless), paying hommage to the variety found in our different cultures.
"Boundless" has a political dimension, relating to the role of art in a world that is rapidly changing through globalisation and poses the question of cultural identity: how do these changes affect the individual? How can art facilitate the finding of identity? How does art function in different cultures? Can it contribute to overcoming existing boundaries between people or societies? Which boundaries must an artist define for himself?
A young generation of composers is being challenged worldwide to take an artistic position on the challenge of inter-culturalism, of communications without boundaries or restrictions made possible by the Internet and new technologies. The composition competition, which is held every year by the ISCM for the WNMF, is already posing this question.
The foundation of the festival program will consist of works selected by mid-July 2005 from hundreds of entries from all over the world by an international jury under the chairmanship of Wolfgang Rihm and Hans-Peter Jahn with jurors George Benjamin, Unsuk Chin, Pascal Dusapin, Julio Estrada, Olga Neuwirth and Vladimir Tarnopolsky. In addition to this obligatory part there is a "freestyle" programme.
MDJ has commissioned three works for music theatre pieces, from Mexican composer Julio Estrada, Irish composer Jennifer Walshe, and Iranian director Hamed Tahiri: This promises to be an ambitious political statement. The Forum Neues Musiktheater and the Staatsoper Stuttgart contribute with four additional productions, making music theatre the main theme of the festival. In addition, there are sound art projects, installations and performances. With international artists, the sound-art expert Carsten Seiffarth from Berlin is creating a "sound park" in the Killesberg Park, the projects "Stadtklänge" (city sounds), which transports sounds from five world metropolises in real time to Stuttgart, and the "Klangstadt" (city of sounds) which will take place in underground railway stations, pedestrian areas and other public places.
In cooperation with composers and teachers from all types of schools in greater Stuttgart, a variety of school projects are being created. Many schools are using the project weeks shortly before the summer vacation to participate in the festival with concerts and music theatre performances.
MDJ itself has announced a composition competition for works for school orchestras to be premiered during the festival. One notable project is the concert of the Eberhard-Ludwigs-Gymnasium partnered with schools in Cairo and St. Louis Obispo, premiering three works: one German, one Arabic and one American.
A central project is the composition workshop "GLOBAL INTERPLAY", beginning as early as June, 2005. The interactive and intercultural "game" of young ambitious composers will take place in five cosmopolitan cities simultaneously: Accra (Ghana), Berlin, Cairo, New York and Peking/Shanghai. A selection of the pieces which develop during this intercultural workshop will be premiered during the WNMF in 2006. MDJ organises the festival in cooperation with numerous partners in the city of Stuttgart and in the state of Baden-Württemberg.
Besides the State Opera, the SWR Radio is contributing its own ensembles as "Ensembles in Residence".
Further projects will be developed in cooperation with the Akademie Schloss Solitude, the Musikhochschule, the Art Academy and the Kunstverein. Venues will include the Institut Français and the new art museum "Kunstmuseum" at the Schlossplatz. The ZKM and the experimental studio of the Heinrich-Strobel-Stiftung are also participating, along with the various State ensembles, ensemble recherche Freiburg, and the Ensemble Ascolta.
And finally, the Neue Vocalsolisten, the house ensemble of MDJ, is involved in the three large projects of the festival.
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