17 March 2021

Memories in Music
Festival of contemporary music

Concerts, installations, audio walks, symposium
digital & outdoor & indoor

6 – 9 May and 6 – 7 August 2021
Akademie der Künste, Berlin, Hanseatenweg

In the Memories in Music festival, the Akademie der Künste is presenting forms of commemorative culture in contemporary music. Music and sound store and release memories of experiences, realities, history and culture. They migrate with people and intertwine with other musics. How composers process and re-locate, weight and politicise these strands of memory is the theme of this festival.

The focus is on a dialogue- and research-based exploration of fault lines, migration movements, colonial memory and indigenous sound cultures. The programme brings together current works (as world premieres) with pieces from the 1970s/1980s. Kirsten Reese and Erkki Veltheim, for example, echo colonial history in their musical research on the expeditions of the Brandenburg naturalist Ludwig Leichhardt in northern Australia. Annesley Black is concerned with the Vuntut Gwitchin in northern Canada and a fiddle culture that has developed there. The festival introduces the two central figures of Brazilian sound art at the interface of European and indigenous aesthetics, Guilherme Vaz and Walter Smetak. Walter Zimmermann’s life’s work will be presented as memory work. In seven compositions, the Voice Affairs concert thematises the voice and the cultural space of Lebanon as a dialogue of Arabic and European music. Carola Bauckholt recalls the song of endangered birds, and Petros Ovsepyan the language lost through migration.

The festival starts with the two-day digital symposium Curating Diversity in Europe (6 – 7 May). Audio-visual installations, live performances by musicians and concert interventions from the roof of the Akademie der Künste are being staged in the many niches of a trail in the outdoor space at Hanseatenweg (6 - 9 May). Audio walks will bring radio compositions and plays to the public ear (6 May – 7 August). The ensemble mosaik and the Neue Vocalsolisten will be inviting thepublicto concerts (6 – 7 August). The programme also extends to live streams and other digital formats. A comprehensive programme book with working materials will be published in parallel.

Memories in Music is a project of the Music Section of the Akademie der Künste, curated by Julia Gerlach, Secretary of the Music Section, in collaboration with Akademie members Samir Odeh-Tamimi and Walter Zimmermann. The festival is the prelude to the Akademie’s programme focus “Arbeit am Gedächtnis – Transforming Archives” with events and an exhibition from May to November 2021.

Further information (from 1.4.): www.adk.de/gedaechtnis

With Matti Aikio/Katarina Barruk/Maja S. K. Ratkje, Panos Aprahamian, Carola Bauckholt, Dániel Péter Biró, Annesley Black, Tony Buck, Tony Elieh, Ensemble Adapter, ensemble mosaik, Carlos Gutierrez/ECOEIN, Leopold Hurt, Thomas Kessler, Manolis Manousakis, Aya Metwalli, Neue Vocalsolisten Stuttgart, Silvia Ocougne, Samir Odeh-Tamimi, Petros Ovsepyan, Kirsten Reese, Youmna Saba, Marco Scarassatti, Annette Schmucki, Walter Smetak, Livio Tragtenberg, Guilherme Vaz, Erkki Veltheim, Sabine Vogel, Ute Wassermann, Daniel Wilfred, Raed Yassin, Cynthia Zaven, Walter Zimmermann and others.

Project partners of Memories in Music: Berlin artists’ programme of the DAAD, Deutschlandfunk Kultur, Goethe-Institut (Beirut, La Paz), Irtijal Festival, Beirut, Musik der Jahrhunderte, Neue Vocalsolisten, Onassis Cultural Center/Stegi, Athens, and Ultima Oslo Contemporary Music Festival

Media partners: VAN, Digital in Berlin, taz

Funded by the Capital Cultural Fund and the Pro Helvetia Swiss cultural foundation

The symposium Curating Diversity in Europe is a project of Sounds Now in cooperation with the Akademie der Künste, inm / field notes and Ultima Festival, Oslo. Co-funded by the Creative Europe Programme of the European Union.

Press contact on behalf of the Akademie der Künste:
AMIONT Musik & Kultur, Dominique Schweizer
M +49 (0)176 96572527, ds@amiont.de