ODE TO VULNERABILITY

"Any kind of collective, creative and social action is improvisation by its very nature. It is innate to us humans; we can observe it in early childhood play. However, experience shows that this ability is shaped, hindered or even broken in later life and we first have to recapture it without falling back into infantile behavior.
Applied to art, it is fundamentally about experiencing freedom, trying things out (which do not always succeed) and an all-connecting, empathetic togetherness as the creative motor of our actions.
That's the basic idea behind SPIIC (Studio for Polystylistic Improvisation and Interdisciplinary Crossover)," project manager Vlatko Kuĉan explains to me on the phone.

In the "SPIIC meets" series, saxophonist Evan Parker will be a guest at the HfMT in the coming days. Together with his Electro-Acoustic Ensemble, the improvisational veteran can be experienced from November 5 to 7 in workshops, lectures, concerts and talks in the JazzHall. A small improvisational side effect: due to the coronavirus pandemic, Evan Parker is unable to travel in person but will be joining us live from London.

SPIIC is funded by the "Innovative University", a joint initiative of the Federal Ministry of Education and Research and the Joint Science Conference.

An evening about crying? Isn't that terribly sad? No, and quite the opposite. With "RADICAL CRYMENTO" we want to make crying strong, give tears their space. To encourage you and all of us to cry, in the spirit of the Radical Softness movement. But we also want to explore crying, its political and social significance and the process as such. Out of hiding, into our midst.

In order to involve as heterogeneous a group as possible in the artistic process, an anonymous survey was conducted and personal stories were collected. The production team led by director Elli Neubert commented: "We were totally overwhelmed by how many people took part in our online questionnaire. The answers were very personal and intimate. Many allowed us to use their answers for the performance. We were delighted, of course, and it also confirmed that the topic of crying is very important to many people. We handled the stories very carefully, because we didn't want to 'use them to make people cry'. That's why we concentrated primarily on the process of crying in the text production."

The music for "Versuch über das Weinen" comes from the baroque composer and singer Barbara Strozzi. The premiere is on November 5.

Leon Zmelty (composition student of Prof. Gordon Kampe) is the lucky winner of the composition competition, which was organized on 27 September in cooperation with the Landesmusikrat Hamburg e.V. and the Landesjugendorchester Hamburg and was endowed with prize money of € 1,000 by the University Foundation.

Leon writes about his new work in the program booklet: "The poem 'nachts leuchten die schiffe' by Nico Bleutge (*1972) is the inspiration and basis for my composition of the same name. What fascinates me about this poem is that it does not follow a 'logical', stringent narrative, but creates a very strong atmosphere simply by stringing together images. Natural phenomena are combined with fantastic and humorous passages, creating a mood between melancholy, longing, curiosity and inner peace.

This mood is reflected in the music. As in the poem, concrete images become audible before they merge and begin to 'shine'.
The first movement begins with the 'movement of the water' before a second motif, the 'light', appears, dips into the water and combines to form something new - an 'in-between thing of gas and liquid'. [...]"

In addition to Zmelty, the composers Gerald Finzi (1901-1956) and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart are on the program of the enthusiastic young musicians of the Landesjugendorchester Hamburg in the concert on 15 November in the Forum.