SIGN O’ THE TIMES
The idea that music is supposed to tell us something about the spirit of the age in which it was written is of course a cliché. After all, music is universal, meant to endure for eternity, isn’t it? Although there’s something to be said about that last bit, even ‘immortal’ music (Bach, say?) is inextricably bound to its time and place, not just in terms of style and technique but also the worldview that emanates from it. It’s intriguing to think about how we might look back in a few decades (or centuries?) at the perspective of 2026 as shown in the Transit programming.
We’re opening this year’s edition with Stefan Prins’ recently composed Cyborg Flesh. Prins brings the string quartet as cultural icon (represented by the equally iconic veterans of new music, the Arditti Quartet) face to face with a noisy layer of electronic alienation. The cyborg in the title is a refer-ence to the post-human aspect, the alienation engendered by the technological and the artificial, a theme that has been running through his music for a long time. And now that we as humankind are confronted with a new level of ‘different’, with artificial intelligence on the one hand and combat-capable drones on the other, this theme seems more urgent than ever.
In times when our humanity, our humaneness, is stuck between the super-human of technology and the inhuman of the increasing erosion of moral authority, music can help to question and restore the connection with our own humanity. Accordingly, the music of today, at least the music at Transit, doesn’t need any explicit political or social content to possess a sense of the zeitgeist.
The ethereal sentimentality of Thomas Meadowcroft’s Love Songs without Subjects, the collective experience in which audience, composers and musicians form one organic whole in COLLAB, the sensitive reflection on musical and personal relationships in Kris Defoort’s Dedicatio, and so many other works invite us to listen attentively and, in doing so, to also internalise them in a way that allows us to experience a connection with our humanity. At the same time, this is also the ideal moment to pause once again on reflect, along with Simon Steen-Andersen, on the dadaism of Kurt Schwitters, a feast of absurdity, which was inextricably bound to the gloomy spirit of the interbellum. We can ask ourselves, not in Prins’ but in Prince’s words, whether this will turn out to be a sign o’ the times.
the music of today, at least the music at Transit, doesn’t need any explicit political or social content to possess a sense of the zeitgeist.