Ecological imagination
Artists (much like scientists, by the way) find themselves often represented in the popular imagination as a bit unworldly. The composer in the attic, locked in extreme artistic concentration and thus leaving behind all awareness of the outside world is a cliché that seems hard to get rid of.
Although there may be a slight touch of truth to it (it does require a particular kind of focus in order to create music), it is mostly unfair. Composers and musicians are no less concerned about the state of the world than you or me. Their music then, can and may also become a means for better understanding the world around us, to imagine it and through that imagination invite the audience to reflect.
Transit opens and closes this edition with two projects introducing an artistic commentary on today’s ecological challenges. The dwindling biodiversity is taken up by Trio Accanto in the shape of ten extinct or endangered species musically portrayed by ten composers. Though biologically (almost) disappeared, there still remains the collective – here: musical – imagination in which the black tree kangaroo or the monarch butterfly may live on in virtual shape.
Likewise, the final production, Eva Reiter and HYOID’s Wastories mixes staged, visual and musical elements, this time around the topic of waste and recycling. Waste, the byproduct of consumer society, constitutes not only a real ecological problem, but also serves as the perfect model for the arts: recycling, reusing, tranformation are powerful metaphors for musical practice. A practice in which the past is not discarded, but continually and creatively reworked into new possibilities.
Waste, the byproduct of consumer society, constitutes not only a real ecological problem, but also serves as the perfect model for the arts: recycling, reusing, tranformation are powerful metaphors for musical practice.