CThe lubraum 7 of the Lucerne Art Museum is currently a protected hard-word space. They do not apply to people, but to their works. Wolfgang Rihm, Dieter Ammann and Mark Sattler hosted a composer seminar at the Lucerne Festival. Eight young authors put themselves under the judgment of experienced colleagues. “Will that change?” Rihm said of a purely electronic music. “Twenty seconds later I feel bored. This is not composition, but sound design. The aesthetics of old radio dramas in the 1960s. I didn’t see any compositional intentions in it, and there was nothing to prompt explanation.” Someone soon Discussed a controversial issue in the era of artificial intelligence: where does the topic give up its authorship to the algorithm?
The main purpose of this seminar is to figure out what you are doing. “For composers, knowing where music starts and ends is a great gift,” Rihm said. “We often write about lifeless things; they just work.” Recipes without fragments, he continued. “You have to sit in the film like you are in prison and wait to see what happens next.” Does this prospect of living humble in your work give young people courage? Maybe so, if it comes from someone who can cite the work in a remarkable sense.
Wolfgang Rihm heads the contemporary music department Lucerne FestivalHe also suggested the revival of Pierre Boulez’s “Polyphony X”, which will be performed with the Lucerne Festival Contemporary Orchestra and conductor Lin Liao on September 3. A day later, Rebecca Saunders’ “Lonely” premiered in Switzerland. Sanders is the winner of the Siemens Music Awards in 2019 and is the composer of the Lucerne Festival this year. Art director Michael Haefliger once again managed to find support for contemporary music in the industry. In any case, more than 57% of music festival life comes from private sponsors and supporters. The share of public grants is 17.8%, plus 7.1% of compensation for losses caused by the pandemic. The rest must be generated by you.
Last year’s holiday edition was reduced a lot, but it was artistically unforgettable, because the wonderful installations of Peter Conradin Zumthor and the low bells of the Lucerne church still echoed in every soul there. Now, Haefliger is pleased to be able to provide a full program of the 4-week large-scale orchestral concert before September 12. But he also knows what has changed in the past year: “The pandemic has given us very different thinking about ecological issues. The European festival landscape will continue to need large orchestral festivals such as the Lucerne Festival to make orchestral music The team’s tour is meaningful in terms of sustainability. But the form of travel will change. The orchestra will switch from planes to trains as much as possible.”
