« Tuning in and Tuning out » New Paths to Classical Music: Special Guest !
In this show we invite special guest Nickel to contribute to the show. He shares a collection of music as well as a radio edit of the Salon he hosted in Berlin.
The Dutch artist Nickel van Duijvenboden has been working in Berlin for several months, as part of a residency programme called Air Berlin Alexanderplatz. The result of Nickel’s working period was a "Salon" with monologues, music, and singing. For "Tuning In/Tuning Out" he created a radio edit of this Salon, featuring the infamous 1926 correspondence between Eisler and Schönberg, several pieces by those composers, as well as some related contemporary experimental music. The artist and writer Mirjam Kuitenbrouwer reads two extensive letters she sent to Nickel in Berlin. The piece concludes with two pieces of Eisler's "Ernste Gesänge" (1962) sung by the artist (one played with the double bass player Koen Nutters, and one sung a capella at the uppermost dome of the Teufelsberg radar station).
For the first hour of "Tuning In/Tuning Out", Nickel compiled a playlist of tracks that have recently informed his practice. It loosely consists of two strands: LP's he's listened to in Berlin, and pieces combining voice and percussion. This includes one track of his own piece "Echolocation Solo" (2016), that was shown in a gallery context in Amsterdam. It was an eight-channel audio installation in which readings of private messages were puctuated by the artist's own drumming.
Nickel van Duijvenboden (1981) is a writer and visual artist based in Amsterdam. After focusing several years on publishing, he centered his practice around autobiographical traces and private correspondences. His work has since broadened to include spatial installations, sound recordings, graphics, performative readings and, most recently, film.
This show not only thinks about who, how and why we can or should listen to classical music today but also who speaks about it and performs it and how this can be challenged and understood. What perspectives or histories are forgotten from the canon? It looks at the broader context of a composer's work and looks around at what was happening at the time it was written, what has happened since and how we could listen and interpret it today. Where did this music emerge from, what was it doing musically and why could that be interesting ? It eschews traditional ways of talking and educating about classical music and looks for a subversive way round the side door and into the concert hall.