Monthati Masebe
MERARO

Innovation and Tradition. Meeting as equals instead of a eurocentric viewpoint. South African indigenous sounds blend with electronic music in Monthati Masebe’s works. As a gender rights activist, Masebe uses her works to address patriarchal norms in her home and to question colonial hierarchies. In Meraro, she demands that the Western instruments adapt to the soundscape of indigenous bowstrings. Her music is described as uprooting, eerie and transcendental. With her orchestration of traditional African instruments and research into inclusive notations, Masebe opens up new perspectives of a decolonial music practice.

Marina Lukashevich
LULLABY

Since the 2020 political crisis in Belarus, Marina Lukashevich’s works have been deeply entangled with documentary art. With Lullaby, she has designed a documentary sound installation for light and fourteen audio speakers. The body and the voice as a site of war are at the centre of the work.

Sha Sha Chen
401 BLOWS (UA)

The world premiere of 401 BLOWS lets composer, multi-media artist and performer ShaSha Chen address violence against girls and women that aims to smother disobedience vis-a-vis authorities. 401 blows structure the composition; objects of punishment and castigation, intimidation and traumatisation serve for sound resonance. The focus is the relationship between perpetrator and victim. To what extent does violence become an indelible part of their identity? How does violence connect and separate people? Is it even possible to overcome the experience of violence?

Feliz Anne Reyes Macahis
TÍNIG

TíNIG (Voice) is a confrontation with human dignity and alienation. Setting out from Philippine epic song in the context of contemporary music, Feliz Anne Reyes Macahis has created a revision of her work for wind instruments, drums, accordion and strings.

Du Yun
WHERE WE LOST OUR SHADOWS

Where We Lost Our Shadows is a piece for orchestra, video and soloists that addresses human migration as a question of permanent movement and exodus that recurs over the course of history and passes on collective as well as individual traumas from generation to generation.

Dilay Doğanay
ÖLULLABY(E)

The disastrous consequences of the most recent earthquake in Turkey touched a deep nerve even with those who were not directly affected by the disaster. The Ìzmir-born composer processes this fateful event in Ölullaby(e) for drums, piano, accordion, violin, cello, double bass and tape. The title refers to a final lullaby in the face of the catastrophe as it is closing in.

Aida Shirazi
CRYSTALLINE TREES

Crystalline Trees is inspired by the poem Winter by Iranian poet Mehdi Akhavān-Sāless. In his poem, Akhavān uses winter as a metaphor to describe the dark and suppressive political climate in 1950s Iran. Crystalline Trees for flute, bass clarinet, drums, piano, violin, viola and cello responds to the final verses of Akhavān’s poem and reflects on the relationship between interior and exterior darkness.

Bushra El-Turk
MURMURATIONS

The beauty of synchronicity and a high degree of inexorability are the basic theme ofMurmurations. Gestures of Japanese rituals with their penetrative static harmonies and dynamics inspire the composition. The entire piece revolves around grace notes on the note of C, the melody of which is the core melody of a violin transcription of an Arab Taqsim (an Arab form of modal improvisation).

Mirela Ivicevic
CASE BLACK

Mirela Ivicevic describes her music as Sonic Fiction; she sounds out the subversive potential of sound by placing tonal and media (side) products of daily life in a new context. Case Black for ensemble and electronics addresses the consequences of the Balkan wars. ‘To me, music is not fleeing from but interacting with the world. If need be, a battle. Even when I use sound to create a “new” world, its purpose is to address the real world in one way or another.’

Brigitta Muntendorf
NEKROPOLIS

NEKROPOLIS addresses the question of origins and the end of physical existence. The piece is a chapter from the trans-digital musical theatre MELENCOLIA – a show against the complacency of the universe that was premiered at the Bregenzer Festspiele in 2022. In NEKROPOLIS, the live ensemble plays with the virtual Ney-anbān soloist Saeid Shanbehzadeh who is not physically present. A double bass solo for electric bass, musical saw and ensemble forms the beginning and end. The musical vision of a transcultural encounter is set out: the traditional Western pitch spaces, the pitch space of traditional Persian musical system Dastgāh and electronics combine to let a musical hybrid emerge.