Event

Whether they guided spiritual experiences, or sparked the idea of infinity and the inaccessible, the stars have always been a constant source of inspiration for the human imagination and therefore, symbolized supernatural or divine powers.

With Arnold Schönberg, who strived to sense “the air from other planets” (Stefan George) by using the ears (sic!), the music of the 20th century started out with synaesthetic sorcery and a poetic-imaginative notion of new worlds and a new cosmos. But soon enough, such artistic concepts and speculations would be essentially informed by the theory of relativity, quantum mechanics, wave theory, statistics and big data.

Directed by Walter Nußbaum, “Sternbild: Mensch VI” marks the end of a 6-parts series of events about musical cosmology and it would be insufficient to simply call it a concert. Besides closely intertwining vocal and instrumental music, the two ensembles of the KlangForum Heidelberg – SCHOLA HEIDELBERG and the ensemble aisthesis – integrate the musicality of room acoustics as well as visuals. This is why the series “Sternbild: Mensch” stands for connecting intangible, or poetically speaking, unearthly ideas.

For this sixth part of the concert series, Elina Lukijanova (Delta Kompositionspreis) and the Swiss composer Stefan Wirth were commissioned to compose pieces relating to the cosmos.