Music on the 49th: Now where - a Journey to Concord

3 Evenings with a Prologue and Epilogue

First evening

Thursday 4 November 8 p.m.

Prologue :: A collage with narrator, presenter, instruments, and loudspeaker. Texts from Cooper, Thoreau, Ives
Music from Schubert, Cowell, Ives, Cage
Recital Charles Ives Piano Sonata No. 2
»Concord, Mass., 1840–1860«
Christian Brückner narrator
Manfred Reichert presenter
Christoph Grund piano
Pellegrini-Quartett Members of Ensemble 13
Daniel Weissberg sound design
Dieter Krauthausen sound direction
concept Manfred Reichert and Friedrich Hommel

Second evening

Friday 5 November 8 p.m.

Encounters, transatlantic
Edgar Varèse ionisation for 13 percussionists
John Cage »Seven« / »Freeman Etudes,« Book 1
Antonio Pellegrini violin - Ensemble 13
Varion percussion ensemble, Franz Lang
Manfred Reichert presentation

Third evening

Saturday 6 November 8 p.m.
Recital Henry Cowell »United Quartet«
Charles Ives String quartet No. 2
Prologue as Epilogue program and performers, see first evening

Concord: idyllic small town in Massachusetts, cradle of the American revolution and one of the seedbeds of a specific American artistic radical democracy. The author James Fenimore Cooper and also the poet-philosopher Henry David Thoreau as well as other intellectuals worked here. And from this site emanated, and still emanates, the admonition to every thinking person, to choose between comfort and truthfulness, in line with the composer Charles Ives whose name the music world, even 50 years after his death, only hesitantly includes among the great figures in the history of new music.
For several years, the event series »Music on the 49th« (overall concept Manfred Reichert) has contributed to the discussion of the hegemony claim of the western and, primarily American world in the establishment and spread of a political-civil world culture. »Jetzt wohin – Eine Reise nach Concord« aims to raise critical questions, but also create a lessening of the transatlantic gap.

Sponsored by the Culture department of the city of Karlsruhe, the Ministry for Science, Research and Art, Baden-Württemberg, and the Federal endowment for the arts