Darmstadt 2016

David Runge — Tue, 27 Sep 2016 20:00:00 GMT

Summer courses

In its 48th edition, the International Summer Courses for New Music were taking place in Darmstadt this year with a wide program.
Initiated just after World War II by Wolfgang Steinecke (then head of Department of Arts and Culture, in a city that was pretty much completely destroyed during the war), the Darmstadt School has risen to glory not only because of its famous seminarists such as Karlheinz Stockhausen, but mainly because of its diversity, international flavor and rehabilitation of art that was tainted by the Third Reich.
I am happy to have been a part of this year's spectacle, although I didn't really see much aside from the rehearsals and premiere of the piece I came to help establish: Tolerance Stacks by Annesley Black.

Donaueschingen 2015

David Runge — Sun, 01 Nov 2015 14:00:00 GMT

The festival

Due to a fortunate contact through the Electronic Studio of TU Berlin I went to Donaueschinger Musiktage 2015 being the robot kindergarten worker for Orm Finnendahl's piece AST at most likely the "New Music" festival worldwide.
The festival is curated and organized by the SWR (a regional public broadcasting station serving the southwest of Germany). Traditionally it is held in Donaueschingen, a small town in Baden-Württemberg.
As it is a highly publicly subsidized event and genre of music that is presented there, the whole festival is quite an interesting and diverse place to be in.
An additionally very interesting aspect is, that all pieces presented are premieres!
That being said, I didn't have that much time to watch other pieces, but I made it to those two: The dress rehearsal of Michael Beil's "Bluff" (incredible timing!) and Olga Neuwirth's "Le Encantadas o le avventure nel mare delle meraviglie" (literally big production).
The latter made me miss my train on the way back (which was okay, because I ended up with parts of Ensemble Mosaik).

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Darmstadt 2016

Summer courses

Donaueschingen 2015

The festival