Event

Guillaume de Machaut’s mystical motets from the 14th century, the world premiere of a new vocal sextet by Anna Korsun, and an experimental composition for solo piano by Sebastian Claren are featured in the program, which examines the dynamic concepts of gender and desire through the lens of Michel Foucault’s philosophy and explores how music has always been linked to physicality and desire. Ukrainian composer Anna Korsun previously composed a piece of bodily sounds with Vocerumori in 2012: six-part smacking, kissing, and other sounds of hard-to-define intimacy are amplified in multiple channels around the audience. In her new commissioned composition for the KlangForum Heidelberg, she expands on this approach to non-conceptual communication, thereby arriving at a musical body language. In Sebastian Claren’s Sex for solo piano, the instrument is used as a metaphor. Piano playing is staged as an extremely refined technique of touch – ironically, with an instrument that, more than almost any other, owes its origins to industrialization. John Eckhardt and Katrin Bethge place Machaut’s motets in a decidedly contemporary context through an electroacoustic performance with light projections, using the interpretations by SCHOLA HEIDELBERG as their sonic source material.