New Music for an Audience

New Music for an audience

Music brings people together. How does it do that? What does it feel like? And why don't we talk about it much more often? For what feels like forever, music history has revolved exclusively around masterpieces and ‘individual strokes of genius’, and this includes what has been known as ‘new music’ since 1919. Festival Wien Modern, with its tens of thousands of yearly visitors, is the perfect setting to shift the perspective a little. This begins with the opening concert (30.10.) and Terretektorh (1965–1966) which distributes 88 musicians of the Vienna RSO around the auditorium according to a plan by architect and composer Iannis Xenakis. The following day, in réactions II by Dieter Schnebel (1960–1961), Antoine Tamestit, Pierre-Laurent Aimard and Elena Schwarz enter into a soloistic dialogue with the audience as the ‘orchestra’ (31.10.). At the gala concert in Vienna City Hall (6.11.), the legendary Fluxus score Proposition by Alison Knowles (1962) will have the orchestra preparing a salad for the audience.

The astonishing new music theatre production Arnold Elevators by Manos Tsangaris (13.–21.11.) turns the individual listeners in the Secession, the Arnold Schönberg Center, the Musikverein and the Wiener Konzerthaus into the real site of the composition. And with John Cage's (1957–1958) Concert for piano and orchestra, the programme of the Claudio Abbado concert (29.11.) includes not just some world premieres, but also what caused probably the last scandalous concert in Vienna, in 1959 – not least because it also removes the divide between musicians and the audience.

Schönberg 150
What do the three productions we just mentioned have in common with these three: the world's largest project celebrating the 50th anniversary of the Arditti Quartet (01.–05.11.), the music theatre premiere Die Prinzessin for Young Audiences (07.11.), and the film premiere He's soo blue! Schönberg Pfeifen by Marino Formenti and Thomas Marschall (08.11.)? All of them, and many more, take a present-day look at Arnold Schönberg. Born in Vienna 150 years ago, the composer was a prime example of ‘individual strokes of genius’ and contributed significantly to the creation of the myth that new music is difficult, hard to explain, elitist, inaccessible and only interesting to a select group of specialised geeks. The legendary ‘Watschenkonzert’ at the Vienna Musikverein in 1913 and the ‘Verein für musikalische Privataufführungen’ [Society for Private Musical Performances], which was set up in Vienna in 1918 to ‘remove new music performances from the corrupting influence of the public’, are a welcome opportunity in Wien Modern's anniversary year to examine the relationship between new music and the public, which is shrouded in myths, clichés and rumours, and to reinvestigate it today.