« Sunrise Surprise » From the Colaboradio Archives: Tuning in and Tuning out

A listening salon in a Neukölln lounge room in Berlin. Five friends listen to Camille Saint-Saens First Violin Sonata Opus 75 and invite you to listen with them. Discussions range from how we experience classical music today, ideas of musicality and the salon as an historical place of culture. How do we listen together ? How does this influence or change the listening experience ? This salon was inspired in part by research from the UK by Lucy Dearn and Sarah Price about the communal and social aspects of attending live classical concerts. I took up their concept of a listening community which creates a listening experience through shared discussion and reflection as the starting point for this salon

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.