Collaboration project between the Hochschule für Musik und Theater Hamburg, Hochschule für bildende Künste Hamburg & the Hamburger Gitarrenforum.

Interdisciplinary )roject: "PlayingShapes"

Concept and realisation: Olga Mos + Kyle Egret / HFBK

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 will freely interpret and perform it.

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.

Composition Project: (Re)-interpretation of "Woodpecker No. 2" (Merzbow 1996)

Composition: Matthis Frickhöffer / HFBK

Performance: Kleynjans-Ensemble / guitars + percussion HfMT / cond.: Clemens Völker

Based on Bernstein's Harvard Lectures (1973) on the smallest possible units of music and the parallels to Chomsky's linguistics, this project approaches the attempt to realise noise as a score and a piece of music.

Noise as a counterpoint to music eludes concepts such as melody, rhythm, voice, composition and structure. Nevertheless, digital means can be used to record and sort pitches, lengths and changes. From this collection of data, a piece is composed that represents an interpretation of the source material. However, the aim is not to imitate, but to search for structure in the supposedly structureless.