Musik 21 Festival 2017

The programme of this year’s Musik 21 festival was all “about the word”. In concerts, readings, installations and experimental formats, the festival aimed to highlight the various types of encounter between music and text.
The regional spotlight of the 2017 festival has focused on the Scandinavian countries. Audiences heard works by Scandinavian composers, performed by the Norwegian ensemble ASAMISIMASA. A work by the Danish writer Inger Christensen has been presented at the Sprengel Museum. A recording of her long poem “Alphabet” has formed the basis of a language sound chamber, in which 30 loudspeakers playing Christensen’s text have created a spoken fugue.
A large-scale participative project titled “Listen: Voices!” has presented the numerous languages spoken by residents of Hanover. Young composers from the Hanover University of Music have been working together with migrants and foreign-language speakers living in the city to develop a live composition. The festival had also awarded twenty commissions for new fanfares. Fanfares are the acoustic equivalents of calls or warnings. The new compositions have been performed as such at diverse and unexpected locations throughout the festival period.

Artistic director: Matthias Kaul
Artists: Das Neue Ensemble, Ensemble ASAMISIMASA (NO), Ensemble L’ART POUR L’ART, Ensemble Megaphon, Ensemble Schwerpunkt, Inger Christensen (DK), Mara Genschel, Nomos-Quartett, Pit Noack, Yoko Tawada (JP) and others

Additional Venues:

Künstlerhaus, Kommunales Kino, Literaturhaus, Stiftung Niedersachsen