The IEMA Ensemble Frankfurt consists of current and former participants of IEMA’s one-year master class offered by the Ensemble Modern in close cooperation with the University of Music and Performing Arts Frankfurt am Main.
With Brian Ferneyhough’s La chute d’Icare (1988 – “The Fall of Icarus”) a piece by the “father of New Complexity” from the work cycle Carceri d’invenzione (“Prisons of Invention” – based on Piranesi) has been added to the program: highly sophisticated, subtle music that is very demanding of the musicians. The world premiere of Tawāf by Hakan Ulus presents one of the “youngest stars” of the festival. The German-Turkish composer (born in 1991) is a current scholarship recipient of the IEMA master class in Frankfurt.
Salz by Enno Poppe, with over 70 performances to date, ranks as one of his most successful pieces – a splintering, fragmentary loop-like work, in which at times various threads exist side-by-side and unconnected, and at other times come together – a music of microtonal sounds that are surprisingly unfamiliar, grating, to some extent electronically programmed for the synthesizer.
The South Tyrolean composer Hannes Kerschbaumer already alludes to graffiti in the title of his new work kritzung, 2015, (Kritzeln=scribbling + Ritzung=scratching): a scribbling, scratching, fine cross-hatching that the four musicians produce on their prepared instruments and objects.
Simon Steen-Andersen’s In Spite Of, And Maybe Even Therefore is literally an act of musical deconstruction. A musical ruin is left behind in the end. Two threads – a quasi unison swathe of noise and fragments from one of Beethoven’s Bagatelles, op. 126 – are faced off against each other and at the same time destroyed – even the instruments are taken apart. A wicked musical caricature.
Marcel Beyer, born in 1965, is widely acclaimed and recognized as a novelist and poet. In the 1990s he also wrote for the music journal SPEX. He has shown an ongoing and pronounced interest in acoustic themes (e.g. in his novel The Karnau Tapes, 1995) as well as contemporary music. Beyer, a friend of Enno Poppe, has written the libretti for all of Poppe’s stage works: Interzone (2004), Arbeit Nahrung Wohnung (2006/7), IQ (2012).
Readings and discussion at SPRACHSALZ from 09.09., 1 p.m. and 12 p.m. at Parkhotel
Radio program: Ö1, Zeit-Ton 09/19. 11:08 p.m.