KLANGSPUREN FESTIVAL OF CONTEMPORARY MUSIC
Focus Korea
13. – 29. September 2012

The tried and true and the innovative merge and intertwine every year at the KLANGSPUREN Schwaz Festival of Contemporary Music, and yet it is more than merely a repetition of the same programming concept. Contemporary music from Korea is the focus of the 19th edition of the KLANGSPUREN Festival. The past years have shown that national schools of contemporary composition hardly exist anymore; instead strong individual figures light the way and open the doors to regional scenes. Korea is no exception.

Unsuk Chin, composer in residence of the International Ensemble Modern Academy at KLANGSPUREN 2012, assumes a particularly prominent position: she is not only a prize-winning composer who is recognized and played worldwide but also a patron of Korea’s youngest composers, who are catching our ear more and more across the globe from Shanghai to Paris to Frankfurt. Further facets of the current contemporary music scene in Korea will come to the fore thanks to close cooperation with the TIMF Ensemble from Tongyeong, South Korea, and the Isang Yun Ensemble from Pyongyang, North Korea.

The opening concert inaugurating the Neue Stadtsaal in KLANGSPUREN’s hometown Schwaz on 9/13 includes a composition by Georg Friedrich Haas which was commissioned specifically for the occasion and ponders the spatialization of music, as well as Johannes Maria Staud’s most recent orchestral composition, and a sheng concerto by Unsuk Chin, who occasionally also shifts musicians out of the normal stage-audience axis. High above Innsbruck, composer Gunter Schneider will address the space and theme of the new Museum am Bergisel Das Tirol Panorama in an installation-concert on 9/15 performed by the Tiroler Kammerorchester InnStrumenti.

On 9/16 KLANGSPUREN will continue its time-tested musical pilgrimage series. Last year’s attempt to cross the Brenner Pass was interrupted by storms and rain. This time the hike will go from Gossensass in South Tyrol to St. Jodok in North Tyrol, woven together musically – like a search for musical traces – with Songlines by the Munich-based composer Nikolaus Brass, Solo Caprices by Salvatore Sciarrino, and other selected pieces that allow musical spirituality to shine in the Baroque architectural context in a very unique way. On 9/21 Klangforum Wien will perform world premieres of compositions by Michael Pelzel and Klaus Lang as well as a revised version of Unsuk Chin’s Gougalon. New this season is the attempt to perform the complete set of John Cage’s Etudes Australes on 9/22 and 9/23 with the pianist Sabine Liebner high up in the Alps, close to the stars, so to speak.

KLANGSPUREN 2012 will wind up the season on 9/29, not on a stage, however, but in the living rooms of Schwaz: developed by its partner festival Transart, the project is entitled “rent a musician”, and it sends chamber music formations of the members of Phace Contemporary Music into the living rooms of private hosts to play 20-minute-long mini contemporary music concerts and open a fresh new dialogue between hosts, musicians, and audiences.