Event

Inclusive Prinzhorn Choir

To mark the 25th anniversary of the Prinzhorn Collection, the commemorative ceremony will be accompanied by an extraordinary musical program that focuses on issues of participation, perception, and artistic freedom. The program will feature works by Cornelius Cardew, John Cage, and Robert Schumann.

Performers include the inclusive Prinzhorn Choir, composed of former patients of Heidelberg’s psychiatric clinics, SCHOLA HEIDELBERG, J. Marc Reichow on piano, and conductor Ekkehard Windrich.

The decision to feature a choir of former patients in the ceremony is not only a powerful statement of social inclusion but also addresses a central question that Cornelius Cardew articulated radically early on: Who makes music – and for whom? Cardew, a trained pianist and cellist and former assistant to Karlheinz Stockhausen, increasingly turned to experimental and non-deterministic music in the 1960s. With “The Great Learning” in 1969, he developed an open conceptual framework based on collective participation and understanding musical learning as a communal process. The performance of the purely vocal Paragraph 7 takes this principle further: the participants move through the space, the audience can join in, and the architecture of the Prinzhorn Collection becomes the setting for a shifting sound procession of voices, perspectives, and resonances.

John Cage, too, embodies a philosophy of musical openness and the equality of sounds. In *ear for EAR (Antiphonies)*, he draws on the tradition of antiphonal singing and transforms it into an open network of individual breathing and sound processes: the responding voices follow only their own breath, while the lead singer serves as the sole visible figure. This creates an echo chamber that transforms the Prinzhorn Collection into a multi-layered acoustic labyrinth.

Finally, Robert Schumann provides the historical and emotional conclusion to the program. As one of the most famous composers with a history of mental illness, he exemplifies the fragile boundary between creative intensity and psychological vulnerability. In retrospect, his final works appear as a poignant testament to this fragility. The turbulent history of the work’s creation and reception underscores the tension between artistic legacy and biographical crisis, while simultaneously building a bridge to the Prinzhorn Collection’s work on the culture of memory.

This is a closed event.