ESSAYS
At Darmstadt’s Summer Courses, New Music Transitions in Real Time
by Assaf Shelleg The Darmstadt summer courses, one of the storied and contentious hubs of contemporary music since 1946, is transitioning in high decibels while rebranding itself silently. Amid Germany’s sweltering summer heat, young composers and musicians rush from classes to workshops, from concerts of very recent works to lectures on machine subjectivity, the non-binary […]
read more
Critique in Darmstadt. Roundtable discussion with Steven Kazuo Takasugi, Elaine Fitz Gibbon, Martin Iddon, Patrick Becker and Jim Igor Kallenberg
The following is a transcript of the the roundtable discussion in response to the brochure “Specters of Kranichstein: What was the Darmstadt School“ by Jim Igor Kallenberg. It was held on July 22, 2025, 2pm during the Darmstadt Summer Course at Lichtenbergschule, in Takasugi’s teaching room 313, and transcribed by Lucian Spohr and Christian Gregori; […]
read more
I Can’t Breathe: A Virtual Dialogue
by George Lewis In 2016 I first heard I Can’t Breathe, Georg Friedrich Haas’s haunting work for solo trumpet, performed by Marco Blaauw at the Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival. Haas’s work, written just after the birth of the Black Lives Matter organization, and well before the concept of Black Lives Matter came to international prominence, […]
read more
Allusions to Music, Sexuality and Skin Color. In Conversation with Georg Friedrich Haas
by Jim Igor Kallenberg This text was originally published in Musik-Konzepte 199: Georg Friedrich Haas (2023), edited by Ulrich Tadday and translated by the author with the friendly permission of the publisher edition text+kritik. JIK: Sex is not music, and music is not sex. Music and sexuality are not identical. They relate to each other. […]
read more
„Visite Critique“ at Darmstadt Summer Course 2025
(26. Juli bis 2. August 2025) The “Visite Critique” accompanies the second festival week of the Darmstadt Summer Course 2025 with open and free discussion sessions in which we articulate and exchange our experiences of the concerts and critically discuss aesthetic tendencies in contemporary music and its history. Together we will listen to and discuss […]
read more
THE PARACHRONIES OF TZLIL MEUDCAN 2023
Parachrony, the multiplicity of current times that has been shaping contemporary art, literature, and music for the last three decades (roughly), could very well undergo pluralization if we wish to properly situate the recent sixteenth edition of Tzlil Meudcan. A contemporary chamber music festival held in Tel Aviv on the first week of July, Tzlil Meudcan hosts such parachronies, and they, in turn, can flesh out the simultaneous temporalities that have been informing it for more than a decade and a half.
read more
THREE PARADOXES OF CONTEMPORARY MUSIC
The notion of a musical installation contains three paradoxical desires: the paradox of creating situations, the paradox of static sounds and the paradox of a musical performance art. These ideas are intelligible non-sense, and yet they can become legitimate intentions of an artistic procuction.
read more
PHILOSOPHY OF MUSIC FROM AESTHETIC REASON
Philosophy of music can only succeed by reflecting upon the state of new music and binding itself to the aesthetic judgment. Philosophy thinks musical production, musical reproduction and musical reflection within the horizon of the autonomy of sound; within the horizon of music’s being different from all heteronomies; within the horizon of its freedom.
read more
MARY MELTING MEDIATION BAUERMEISTER
Mary Bauermeister represented what is missing in the ever-turning carousel: We need to establish contexts that are independent of both, culture-industry and the state, in which music can be played, performed, developed, discussed and criticized. We mourn Mary Bauermeister, grandmother of Fluxus, melting pot of the arts.
read more
THE LEGACY OF POLITICAL MUSIC
The composer and pianist Frederic Rzewski died on June 26th, 2021. In this conversation, Rzewski, towards the end of his life, was able to conceive of himself as a symptom and to reflect on the legacy of political music around the revolt of 1968, its potentials, limitations, and ultimately, its failure. As a representative of a generation of political musicians, he gave an account of its legacy.
read more
WHEN FATE CROWS AND NOBODY CAN HEAR IT
This article discusses the work of Viennese artist Georg Nussbaumer (1964) in the constellation of contemporary questions of media and material and historical consciousness in music. Transforming the coordinates of traditional musical work, the essay suggests Nussbaumers work as mixed martial arts instead of multi media art.
read more
