Festival at the mdw’s Department of Composition Studies and Music Production

In April of this year, the week-long festival “Balladen für einen Bulldozer” [Ballads for a Bulldozer], the first of its kind at the Department of Composition Studies and Music Production, offered an impressive platform on which to present and reflect upon contemporary music. The festival was conceived so as to embed two inaugural concerts and an inaugural lecture by new professors, who thereby also extended their hands to their former and/or retiring colleagues. Concerning the development of the new Composing/Music Theory bachelor’s and master’s degree programmes, this generational succession brings with it a multitude of questions that were addressed in a roundtable discussion. Ursula Strubinsky, a widely esteemed Ö1 journalist and contemporary music expert and herself an alumna of the mdw’s composing programme, returned to our institution as the moderator.

Inspired by the eponymous 1989 work by former professor Iris ter Schiphorst, the thematic framing of the entire week-long festival shed light on the dynamic relationship between music and society, for which the ballad and the bulldozer served as metaphors. Wolfgang Suppan, in his capacity as the assistant department head and subject area head for composition and music theory, emphasised how essential it is that the significance of contemporary music and its societal anchoring be advanced through constant reflection and performances in proximity to actual practice.

The artistic lead was taken by Jaime Wolfson, musical director of the Platypus Ensemble and likewise a graduate of the mdw’s composing programme, who opened the festival with an emphasis on media composition that also served to introduce the two recently appointed professors—Jorge Sánchez-Chiong and Walter Werzowa—as well as the belated inaugural concert of Judit Varga, which had fallen victim to the COVID-19 pandemic. The starting point was Iris Ter Schiphorst’s aforementioned Ballade, in which the brutish presence of the bulldozer collides with a violin and electronic sounds and thereby unites sonic reality with social commentary. Judit Varga’s Variazioni con Tema (I. Beethoven is fading away), though it embodies a—not least theatrical—homage to Beethoven on his 250th birthday, also embodies an instance of critical engagement with his musical legacy. Walter Werzowa, with the third movement of his reconstruction of Beethoven’s unfinished 10th symphony, brought Beethoven into the present and introduced a project realised with help from artificial intelligence. Jorge Sánchez-Chiong’s audio-visual composition HYPERHYPERDUST, with its hacked security camera footage, 3D chimeras, metamorphoses gone wrong, and experiences both poetic and immersive, referred to crisis-associated constellations of the present.

The second concert featured music by the new composition professors Clara Iannotta, Gerald Resch, and Olga Neuwirth. With his work con moto, Resch addressed aesthetic questions of media composition by associating his study of movement patterns’ transformation with a video by Simon Vosecek. Just like Iris Ter Schiphorst, Olga Neuwirth and Clara Iannotta also picked up on real-life scenarios of sound: Neuwirth’s Magic Flu-idity explores the sonic possibilities and virtuosity of the solo flute in dialogue with the associatively rich audible aura of a typewriter while Iannotta’s echo from afar (II) overwrites the acoustic experience of space in radiation therapy devices with the transforming structure of an α-Helix as it receives such therapy. Martin Lichtfuss then said farewell to the department, heading into retirement with his satirical tribute K*tzbühel – eine patriotische Huldigung.

The theme Geoff Palmers ’News from the Kepler Space Telescope’: Musikalischer Satz einer modernen metaphysischen Dichterin […: Musical Movement of a Modern Metaphysical Poetess] allowed Frauke Jürgensen, the new holder of the founding professorial chair in music theory, to bring up questions contributed to her field by digital humanities while simultaneously linking the technological angle and compositional creativity with her own artistic practice as a singer.

The festival’s concluding roundtable discussion, entitled “Between Counterpoint and AI”, then gave the colleagues old and new an opportunity to approach the entire range of questions raised by the inaugural presentations—questions that will necessarily accompany the department over the next few years as it works to develop the new Composition and Music Theory curriculum.