SCORES
Saâdane Afif, Christian Marclay, Ari Benjamin Meyers, Jorinde Voigt
Exhibition & Concerts
SCORES, the latest in the series Works of Music by Visual Artists, is an exhibition and concert project devoted to the musical score, a subject that gets constantly reexamined in the visual arts as well as in music. Particularly since the 1960s, the score has been appreciated, above and beyond conventional musical notation, as a multivalent medium of recording which may take the form of spontaneously free drawings, individual symbolic systems, or instructions for activities.
With projects by Saâdane Afif, Christian Marclay, Ari Benjamin Meyers and Jorinde Voigt, the score theme now becomes the focus of an exhibition accompanied by concerts. Despite their differing approaches, all the selected artists are interested in the transformation of one medium into another, a process that is accomplished in close collaboration with the participating musicians. The scores are presented as drawings, objects, lyrics, graphic-photographic-film notation, and as concepts that generate musical events and performances. Almost all of the works presented on a grand scale in the Rieckhallen of the Hamburger Bahnhof have been recently created on commission; they will be performed, piece by piece, in the spaces in which they are exhibited.
Vice de forme: Das Kabarett, a work developed by Saâdane Afif together with the composer Augustin Maurs, will be presented in both an opening event Vice de forme (First Notes) and a concert Vice de forme (In Songs) on the last day of the exhibition. A Yamaha player piano will play First Notes, recorded at the opening, during the exhibition.
Christian Marclay’s new comic book To Be Continued will be performed by ensemBle baBel. Also on view by the artist are the video film collage Screen Play and the slideshow Zoom Zoom, which serve as musical scores for the ensemble and the performer Shelley Hirsch and Elliott Sharp. All of these works are being presented for the first time in Berlin.
The first four chapters of Song of the Earth, a projected eight-part cycle of drawings currently being created byJorinde Voigt, will be on view and partly performed by Ensemble zeitkratzer. Audio recordings from the concerts devoted respectively to the works of Marclay and Voigt will afterward play in their areas of the exhibition.
Ari Benjamin Meyers has developed a series of “Meta-Scores”, inspired by Sol LeWitt’s Instruction Pieces; each day, they will be newly translated and performed by the composer Wojtek Blecharz and the flautist Susanne Fröhlich. On the exhibition’s last day, all the interpretations created and rehearsed during the exhibition will be performed once more, now by heart.
CONCERT PROGRAMME