It was in the midst of the challenging COVID years that an idea for a new concert format crystalised at the South African non-profit Music Is a Great Investment (MIAGI), founded by Ingrid Hedlund and Robert Brooks. Seizing on the momentum from their music video production A Bubble Is a Nice Friend to Have, this organisation’s vibrantly diverse orchestra—who’ve gone beyond viewing themselves just as a philanthropic project to begin defining an independent artistic identity—set out to probe the African roots of their own music. They hence took the musical diaspora as their theme, aiming to engage with it as musicians and free of any finger-wagging.
During the ensemble’s work on their recently released video project A Bubble Is a Nice Friend to Have, this was still just an idea—fragile as a bubble. Since then, however, it’s grown into plans for an actual tour that will soon take the musicians and their new programme Searching the African Footprint to Europe’s most renowned stages.
Starting with a concert in the Main Hall of the Amsterdam’s Concertgebouw, the MIAGI Orchestra—led by David Christopher Panzl—will be presenting entirely self-composed and -arranged material that will go on to be heard at venues including the Elbphilharmonie in Hamburg as well as Konzerthaus Berlin. Panzl has been working together with the South African organisation for several years.
The compositions and arrangements in their new programme are owed not just to this ensemble’s extraordinary instrumental forces, which embody a symbiosis of symphony orchestra, jazz fusion band, and percussion ensemble, but also to the project’s good fortune of having exceedingly gifted composers in its own ranks. This has enabled them to work together with help from Markus Geiselhart and David Christopher Panzl of ipop, the mdw’s Department of Popular Music, to develop a tailor-made standalone programme. The overarching objective here is to form a single musical whole out of the group’s mix of identities, styles, and ethnicities.
It goes without saying that projects of these dimensions need strong partners and sufficient time to prepare. For this reason, it was especially important that the mdw already be involved in the preliminary musical work. Intensive rehearsal phases with the mdw Percussion Ensemble and mdw Drumline have therefore been held ahead of time, with certain pieces also receiving public performances. The knowledge gained in these concerts then flowed directly into the ensemble’s repertoire, with the musicians themselves being enabled to follow—and, of course, also influence—the attendant creative process.
The participating mdw students, by being involved as collaborators, are benefitting in multiple respects: in addition to the concerts themselves, they get to experience how there are indeed ways to fulfil one’s artistic potential outside of Europe’s rich orchestral tradition, also coming to realise just how exciting and satisfying it can be to give oneself over to such a labour-intensive process.
Since not all of those who currently study music will land orchestral posts following graduation, opportunities to get familiar with the development and realisation of artistic projects while still students are particularly important. In projects like MIAGI, students gain deep insights into all aspects of a concert tour. At the same time, they’re also confronted with the challenges that arise when one attempts to realise an idea far off from what might seem like a predetermined path. And in this case, such challenges are not only musical and artistic in nature but also quite naturally have to do with fashioning a whole from the social structure of this multi-ethnic and multilingual ensemble.
From Vienna to East Frisia
The tour’s initial concert, in Vienna, is set to take place on 15 August at Casino Baumgarten, a historic cultural centre in Vienna’s 14th district (Penzing) established in 1892. This concert will be held under the patronage of Doris Schmidauer, a political scientist and the spouse of Austria’s current federal president Alexander Van der Bellen. MIAGI will then visit Amsterdam from 16 to 19 August, giving a concert at the Concertgebouw on 17 August. This will be the MIAGI Orchestra’s third Concertgebouw appearance. In 2018, they took the stage there to present their programme 100 Years of Nelson Mandela, which celebrated the South African liberation movement’s figurehead, in a sold-out performance. To go with this year’s Amsterdam concert, the musicians will work together with cultural and humanitarian youth organisations on the theme “30 Years of Democracy in South Africa”.
The orchestra’s seventh European tour will also see the young musicians present Searching the African Footprint at the Hamburg’s Elbphilharmonie on 20 August. Just how renowned MIAGI’s orchestra project has now become can be seen not least in how their concert in the Elbphilharmonie’s internationally acclaimed Grand Hall, built to accommodate 2,100 guests, has already been sold out for weeks. After Hamburg, the orchestra will travel to East Frisia for performances in Emden (21 August) and Papenburg (22 August).
The tour’s grand conclusion will be a celebratory concert at Konzerthaus Berlin on 25 August that will include a special address by MIAGI patron Elke Büdenbender, a jurist and the spouse of Germany’s president Frank-Walter Steinmeier. Alongside 30 years of democracy in South Africa and the MIAGI orchestra’s own 20-year anniversary, this concert will also be celebrating 25 years of the Young Euro Classic Festival.
