Music for Theatre

"Dance with the Computer"
19 days

Thierry de Mey, Composer and Film-Maker, Brussels
Studied film directing and composition. Has long been a wanderer between the disciplines. He realises his own music projects, is founder member of various bands (e.g. of MAXIMALIST!), directs and composes the scores for internationally distinguished dance films and has composed the music for various choreographies by Anne-Teresa de Keersmaeker, Wim Vandekeybus and others. His compositions have been performed by internationally renowned ensembles like the Arditti Quartet and the Ensemble Ictus. He develops computer programmes for music.

"Stage and film music is often considered a synonym for "poor" music, which is granted its right of existence only to serve the visual. The inspiration, the process of overtaking, the inventions, which may lie in the encounters with other artistic disciplines, are often forgotten. But these provide fantastic chances of development for the algorithms of intuition."

Together with the Belgian choreographers de Keersmaker, Vandekeybus and Michèle-Anne de Mey, Thierry de Mey began a dialogue of inspiration between dance, music and film nearly twenty years ago. By way of research, experimentation and formalising, they defined the conditions under which a truly "interactive" encounter can take place, taking into account the specific inalienable character of the respective discipline. The course will develop compositions in the climate of this inspiring "interactivity".The computer can be a very quick and useful tool and its possibilities will be investigated. The work will take place in various situations and with differing materials: nearly unknown silent movies from the Twenties featuring Martha Graham, Mary Wigman and others, background noise from cities, virtual choreographies.

"Mozart will always do ..."
10 days

Hans Peter Kuhn, Sound Artist and Composer, Berlin
He works internationally on site-specific sound installations. Since 1978, he has created music and sound installations for more than 30 theatre, film and exhibition projects of Robert Wilson's. He has worked with the directors Claus Peymann, Luc Bondy and Peter Zadek, as well as composing the scores for numerous dance pieces and films. He has given world-wide performances of his projects, which deal with sounds and the phenomenon of hearing.

"I see my work as a permanent flow. The pieces emerge from static, remain visible and audible for a while, and then they return to static. Ultimately, however, they are always existent, only below the threshold of perception, as it were. Therefore, they form a continuity of which we only perceive a small excerpt. As a rule, I work with every-day noises, not with synthetic sounds. The listener is always confronted with familiar material as a starting-point. The sounds are blended with the memories of situations in which one has heard them before. The composition, however, then creates new, unfamiliar contexts. The blending of different memories produces a parallelism of various time-strands from the past and the current experience."

The theoretical part of the course will deal with the significance of sound and music in theatre and in art. Following this, the students will work on a sound installation, making use of digital sound processing systems. The base-material for this composition will consist of sound-recordings from the daily lives of the students.