projects

GREEN GUITAR

LOUD ROOMS

BLACKBOX NATUR

COUNTERPOINT

Green guitar

The Green Guitar is an exciting new music project bringing together female forces in Australian composition to create new works for guitar inspired by the theme of ‘green’ in response to the climate crisis. This project aims to broaden the guitar repertoire and contribute to bridging the gender gap in a male-dominated field. The new ‘green’ works for guitar form a collective call to action on climate change. To connect with a larger domestic and international audience, the new works will be studio recorded, culminating in a Green Guitar album, and also have engaging music videos. Two new commissions Royal Jelly by Holly Harrison and // Imbalance by Helen Svoboda were premiered in September 2022 in Hamburg. Australian premieres to be announced for 2023.

loud rooms

A musical dialogue in the Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe Hamburg.

In an experimental sound project, students from the Hochschule für Musik und Theater (HfMT) and the Hochschule für bildende Künste (HFBK) explore the museum and its collections. The young musicians move through the exhibition spaces like museum guests. In doing so, they react to the rooms and objects with their artistic means of expression. They comment on the collections, capture atmospheres and moods and recreate them in the fleeting medium of sound. Along the way, they listen and respond to each other's playing, creating dialogues between the different spaces of the museum and activating the entire building. The museum visitors are invited to listen to the musical dialogues and have a multi-sensory experience of the collections with entirely new eyes and ears.

Performances: 2pm & 4pm Sunday 17th July 2022.
Documentary video coming soon.

Blackbox Natur

The concert format of the future

Ein Tanz zwischen Romantisierung, Idealisierung und Künstlichkeit.
Ein Traum über die Folgen der Untätigkeit.
Eine Verwandlung.

Love experiments? For the Hamburg International Music Festival, students from the fields of music and communication design have developed the concert of the future. In line with the 2022 festival theme ‘Nature’, they focus on the sounds of their environment and, through various media, allow their audience to dive into a whole new dimension of concert experience. The Kaistudio becomes an exciting black box, music becomes communication, and culture becomes a space for social issues.

Premiered May 1st 2022, Elbphilharmonie, Hamburg, Germany.

VIEW PROGRAM

counterpoint

Collaboration project between the Hochschule für Musik und Theater Hamburg (HfMT), Hochschule für bildende Künste Hamburg (HFBK) & the Hamburger Gitarrenforum.
Performances: 21st & 26th February 2022, HFBK & HfMT Hamburg

VIEW POSTERS & PROGRAM

Improvisation project: "Passacaglia” for strings + electronics

Concept + Live Electronics: Junya Fujita + Alexander Iliashenko / HFBK
Theorbo + Archlute: Felix Ritter + Emma-Shay Gallenti-Guilfoyle / HfMT

This collaborative four-channel improvisation piece uses a theorbo, an archlute and live looping electronics. The piece begins with the recording of a passacaglia group on period instruments, which serves as the basis for a sequence of variations. Felix & Emma-Shay improvise a passacaglia in Baroque style. Simultaneously Junya & Alexander being improvising with the recorded material, looping and gradually distorting the passacaglia ground. As the four-way improvisation progresses, the passacaglia loses its conventional structure and the instruments their sound characteristics, pushing the Felix & Emma-Shay from the traditional Baroque improvisation mode into free modern improvisation.

Interdisciplinary project: "PlayingShapes"

Concept and realisation: Olga Mos + Kyle Egret / HFBK
Barock Guitar + Modern Guitar: Felix Ritter + Emma-Shay Gallenti-Guilfoyle / HfMT

Music and visual arts are fundamental genres of art and culture. Their different expressions show themselves in different ways. In our joint project we refer to the "counterpoint" taken from music. In the spirit of the idea of equality and artistic polyphony, we concentrate on similar ways of working and thinking. From this uniformity, a visual multi-track develops, which is based in its structure on the musical principle of "MIDI notation". The visuality of "MIDI notation" follows a simple pattern, but is able to represent the complexity of all sounds. We take up this visual system and expand it with additional aesthetic methods, while at the same time following a stringent concept. Musicians from the HfMT and the Hamburger Gitarrenforum freely interpreted and performed it.