For the opening concert of the 25th anniversary edition of the festival Randspiele in Zepernick the duo Klarinette-Akkordeon plus together with the Sonar Quartett commissioned 16 composers to write a short piece of 3 to 4 minutes for clarinet, accordion and string quartet. The only specifications were the beginning and ending pitches for each piece - some kind of a cadavre-exquis method - directing the project to a big group composition.
Some days before the performance I developed a visual design concept for this concert bridging architecture and sound at the church with dynamic projections.
Duo Akkordeon-Klarinette plus:
Matthias Badczong, clarinets
Christine Paté, accordion
Sonar Quartett:
Susanne Zapf, violin
Wojciech Garbowski, violin
Nikolaus Schlierf, viola
Cosima Gerhardt, cello
Composers:
Helmut Zapf, Stefan Streich, Matthias Bauer, Leah Muir, Gabriel Iranyi, Sebastian Stier, Charlotte Seither, Helmut Oehring, Martin Daske, Fabien Lévy, Matthias Hinke, Eres Holz, Lothar Voigtländer, Petros Ovsepyan, Susanne Stelzenbach, Georg Katzer
Video projections:
Andre Bartetzki
impressions from the concert:
(camera: Andre Bartetzki, sound recording: tonus arcus)
video stills:
For each of the 16 miniature compositions I've developed a special visual scene which is in a way related to the musical attitude. The scenes are based either on video recordings inside and outside of the church building or on one or two image generating algorithms. Simple and strict geometric elements, such as lines and checkered patterns, are contrasted with quasi-organic wavy movements and amoeba-like shapes. Within the progress of the concert these artificial visual elements were combined and transformed with the video recordings in various ways.
As visual processing software I used Resolume Avenue and FFGL-Plugins (some of them self-developed). The realtime control was done with SuperCollider, a MIDI controller and OSC.