musikprotokoll 2019

Next Door—The Neighborhood of Europe
3.10.—6.10.

Using the terms distance and proximity to introduce musikprotokoll, a festival that has always promoted the new and yet unheard, might reasonably give the impression that the program addresses the near and the far in an aesthetic sense. While that is true to a certain extent in this year’s festival, we also mean geographically. Over the past fifty-two years, the range of artists whose works have been heard during musikprotokoll has always represented an internationally diverse group. This is even more pronounced in 2019, when geographic distance and proximity form the narrative arch of the program.

Borrowing from the large-scale project conceived and presented by Ö1 Kunstradio, Nebenan—Erkundungen in Europas Nachbarschaft (Next Door—Explorations in the Neighborhood of Europe), we ask regarding distance and proximity: How far is it to Belarus? How far is it to Lebanon, Georgia, and Armenia, to Cyprus and Israel, to Tunisia and Morocco? How far are these countries from Europe, or—more precisely—how far away are we from them, their history, mentality, and most of all, their music? The focus of musikprotokoll 2019 is on selected, individual positions from these different countries—works that cut across existing genres. New commissions for the Vienna Radio Symphony Orchestra (RSO) were awarded to a composer from Belarus, a composer from Israel, and a composer with Moroccan-British parents. Studio Dan plays a stringently ordered series of ten premiering works by Austrians as well as composers from Lebanon, Belarus, and Armenia. Three works by the legendary Georgian composer Mikheil Shugliashvili, who died in 1996, form another focus within the programming.

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