Heimathen [Home Places]

As a great plural, »Heimathen« [Home Places] describes objectives, dreams, ideas, homes and vanishing points in the future, continually renamed and in change, real objects of innovation. Three composers, Baden-born Jan Kopp, Uruguayan Alvaro Carlevaro and Frankfurt resident Hannes Seidl, grapple with their own and other Heimathen in the project of the same name – with the Heimathen picked due to expulsion or newly selected, perhaps even found within art itself. Their new compositions are being premiered for voices and instruments by »ensemble aisthesis« in collaboration with the vocal ensemble »SCHOLA HEILDELBERG« on Juli 17 in Heidelberg and at the following day presented for the first time in Karlsruhe – pieces with the influence of a wide range of cultural character, but with surprising conceptual connections.
 
On the other hand are scores by Ossip Mandelstam, whose poetic pieces are the basis for a wide range of compositions for chamber music ensembles. "Home is always something retrospective. A feeling of loss", says director Edgar Reitz. Back in 1924, long before exile, Arnold Schönberg »alienated« »Annie of Tharaw« – an epitome of the German folk song – in his »Suite op.29« in productive tension between would-be intimacy and distance. His student Hanns Eisler continued this dialectic procedure in Californian exile (together with Brecht): Their »Hollywood Song Book« revises and sets to music poems of German classicism in order to »liberate them from the process of historical sinking, update them, create a different resonance for them« (Albrecht Betz).
 
»... and birds flew in this direction and the other, as if to different Home Places« (Adalbert Stifter)