Klangforum Heidelberg
In collaboration with the Taiwan Lecture Series/Studies Program at Heidelberg University, we like to invite you to attend the upcoming concert:
Date: Saturday, June 25, 2022, 8 pm
Venue: BETRIEBSWERK, Heidelberg
This concert is part of a series of concerts celebrating the 30th anniversary of the KlangForum/Ensemble Aisthesis, entitled “Die Würde, wessen—Human Dignity: Whose Dignity?" It poses the question of the diversity of world orders and man’s position in them. The concert on Saturday features music from Taiwan aborigines and for Chinese instruments such as Guqin and Sheng and two newly composed works by two young Shanghai composers, Shen Ye and Howard Chen. Both pieces, SHEN's 人们，你们可听见? Leute, könnt ihr das hören? and Haosi Howard CHEN’s different anthems make use of the ancient idea of using song to stand in for human dignity in times of repression…
Background to this concert:
The name of the instrumental ensemble once founded by Walter Nußbaum is aisthesis—perception, and this has been both a program and a challenge for the participants of all KlangForum projects for more than 30 years. If there is something to celebrate about this, this year of all years, then perception—listening will be linked even more than usual with the demand (also to the audience) that we do so ethically, but that in doing so, we do not simply and easily separate the world into good and bad. For perception, immediate perception, first hand perception is not immediately TRUTH. When we take a first glance (at a premiere, for example) at the exotic characters or the ciphers of a new score, it quickly becomes apparent how our Latin-English lingua franca and five-staff notation has many different sounds and meanings in different parts of the globalized world. The Decoding China Project shows us what surprising scopes of interpretation can be found behind seemingly familiar terms such as "Human Rights," “Democracy” or “Freedom of Speech”. Our concert promises decoding work on several levels: In her lecture "Do you hear the People sing?" sinologist Barbara Mittler will show important connections between Confucian thinking, new world orders and the powers attributed to music to the present day. As real world politics seemingly questions elementary moral certainties and as historically coined terms like human dignity, liberation, law ... are devalued, perverted or sold off in propaganda slogans, questions like those by SHEN Ye touch our ears with special urgency. His work, created during the past two years in Shanghai, most recently in the lockdown-which recalls the despairing voices of those locked in with no food or help, as well as the officially forgotten events at Tian'anmen Square in 1989-bears the traces of the events already in his title question: Leute, könnt Ihr das hören? He ends his work, with a question not about hearing, but about remembering: aisthesis is not exhausted in perception itself, but happens in the space between the ears - one’s own as well as those of others. There, everything is connected, not too far in the distance— "Perhaps you will remember!”