Sternbild: Mensch IV

In February 2020 the KlangForum Heidelberg continues its interdisciplinary series »Sternbild: Mensch«. Works by Schöllhorn, Mahnkopf and Lang will be first performed.

Until today the stars have been a source of inspiration for the human imagination, for spiritual experience, the idea of the infinite and unreachable and therefore images of a superhuman or divine. Through Arnold Schönberg's feeling of the »air from other planets« (Stefan George) with his ears (!), the 20^th century began in music as a synaesthetic evocation and poetic-imaginative foreboding of new worlds and a new cosmos, but soon relativity theory, quantum mechanics, wave theory, statistics and big data began to have a decisive influence on artistic conceptions and speculations.

»Sternbild: Mensch IV to VI« is the continuation of a six-part series of events on the subject of musical cosmology, which would be described only incompletely by »concert«. Under the direction of Walter Nußbaum, the two ensembles of the KlangForum Heidelberg, the SCHOLA HEIDELBERG and the ensemble aisthesis, demonstrate the close connection between vocal and instrumental sound production, as well as the integration of spatial sound and visual representation. A connection of incomprehensible, poetically spoken: »supernatural« connections – that is what the project »Sternbild: Mensch« stands for.

For the continuation of the concert series »Sternbild: Mensch« the KlangForum Heidelberg awards composition commissions to renowned composers of international standing; only the special framework of this series allows them to artistically translate astronomical-cosmic questions and phenomena beyond the limitations of traditional concert podiums.

For the fourth part of the »Sternbild: Mensch« concert series, Johannes Schöllhorn (professor of composition in Freiburg), Claus-Steffen Mahnkopf (now professor at the Leipzig University of Music) and Austrian composer Klaus Lang have composed works specially commissioned for the concert series, all of which are related to the cosmos. Thus Lang argues that music is time made audible, which is a metaphorical approach to the cosmos and to time, the past, metaphorically expressed in the stars, a disappearing time, a past that is exciting in terms of acoustics. In his composition Schöllhorn treats the, only apparent, contrast between »light« and »dark«, which on closer examination turns out to be a flowing. Three small text excerpts from the beginning of Sor Juanas »primero sueño« serve as a basis for this. In Mahnkopf's composition the astrophysical moment dominates: scientific texts are reformulated, background noise, black holes, ekpyrosis represent only a small part of the topics dealt with.

• Klaus Lang: ubi est mundus., for flute and four voices (S, A, T, B), 2019
• Claus-Steffen Mahnkopf: Astronomica
• Johannes Schöllhorn: aire, for 6 solo voices, piano and percussion, 2019
• Hans Darmstadt: »...es sind noch Lieder zu singen jenseits der Menschen«, Poems by Paul Celan for mezzo soprano, tenor and bass baritone, 1982
• Karlheinz Stockhausen: Pisces, from the zodiac; version for mezzo-soprano or alto or lower tenor
• Orlando di Lasso: In me transierunt