New Sounds from the Middle Kingdom

In the »Week of New Music« by the Theater and Orchester Heidelberg, the KlangForum Heidelberg e.V. is hosting two evenings under the motto »New Sounds from the Middle Kingdom« on Thursday 23 and Friday 24, February 2017. The events will inspire visitors both with words, in this case lectures by sinologist Prof. Dr. Barbara Mittler, and sounds of Asian composers (China and Korea). Pieces by this year’s winner of the Heidelberger Künstlerinnenpreis, Ms Ying Wang, will also be performed on these evenings. Ms. Wang studied in Shanghai, has lived in Cologne for the last ten years and studied with Johannes Schöllhorn and Rebecca Saunders there, among other people. Her father Xilin Wang is considered the most famous, non-conformist master of Chinese composers of the 20th century. In her music, Ying Wang uses Asian (pipa and guqin) and European instruments combined with Western vocal aesthetics and vocal techniques.

The other two composers from the Far East, Eun-Ji Anna Lee and Nan Zhang, have also studied in Europe (with Wolfgang Rihm and Beat Furrer, among others) and are renowned experts in their field. Their pieces, commissioned by the KlangForum, will be accompanied by those European composers who have set Chinese texts to music, such as Arnold Schönberg, and by pieces from Chou Wen-Chung – known as the assistant of Edgard Varèse and pioneer of musical mediation between China and the USA.

With this selection, the KlangForum has tried to encourage understanding for foreign cultures and their characteristics in times of globalisation and to use differences and similarities of Western and Far Eastern reasoning as a productive stimulation of artistic creativity.

SCHOLA HEIDELBERG | ensemble aisthesis | Conductor: Walter Nußbaum
Presentation: Prof. Dr. Barbara Mittler