What does an object sound like? What do we associate with it? What happens when we start playing with it and on it? Five musicians ask themselves this question and work on one object, each provided by the Swiss Design Market.

Perhaps as a result of the pandemic, artists have become more concerned with their own homes and everyday objects at home. "We were probably not the only ones who cleaned out and changed the state of their homes." In this way we got to ask the question: "What do we actually need? Why do we buy certain things? And as musicians, we quickly asked ourselves the question: What does our home and what is in it sound like? What music do we associate with the things that surround us? Can we express the emotions that these objects trigger translate into music?"

We approached the Swiss Design Market with these questions, selected diverse objects and explored them through different musical methods. "Every object influences us and sends a message. We want to make these subjective messages musically audible."

 

Programm:
 

Fall

Composer: Altin Volaj

Musician: Fabio da Silva, Saxophone

 

In Fall, a solo saxophone explores a creative spectrum of sonic possibilities. According to the composer, the contact between the object and the instrument generates sound-producing processes, musical gestures, ideas, and structures within the composition. In this work, the composer has not only utilized the object as a tool, but the material also stimulates the creative imagination and inspires ideas. Volaj's piece engages audiences in a spectacular array of colors and sounds created by extended techniques and virtuosic gestures. By manipulating lines, shapes, and geometric forms, the composer creates illusions, ambiguity, and a sense of movement and flicks like a three-dimensional effect. Another essential element that the composer has explored in the piece is the relationship between light and shadow through the alternation of pure tones (light) and their multiphonics (shadows). 

 

 

underneath the pieces…

Composer: Arda Yurdusev

Musician: Melissa da Silva, Flute

 

”underneath the pieces...” is an interactive concert piece where the music takes shape as one starts to remove the puzzle pieces. It can be argued as the piece composes itself as you decompose the puzzle. What would be hiding behind the pitch black artwork? What would be revealed in the end, what could be laying underneath it all?

 

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Study

Composer: Tianyu Zou

Musician: Pascal Widmer, Percussion (+Playback&Video)

 

Study, is a topic which the composer has been hesitating for years, was conceived as Study for practice in various aspect. Study used a network of resources from the local context, region, and further afield to provide space of critical thinking and making. As the composer suggests, “It harnesses ritualistic and music networks that could be accessed by everyday objects which trigger an experience of association, is presented to the audience in a relatively relaxed manner.” 

 

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Anthem to the Moon God(dess)!

Composer: Hekmat Homsi

Musician: Dan Marginean, Piano

 

It was simply a small town in the eastern suburbs of the Mediterranean. inhabited by people who loved to travel, whose curiosity led them to try to understand the universe, astronomy, and Study the earth and humans. They soon organized their alphabet, and then they directly used it, as other companions, in the musical ritual. Music was nothing but deities and a divine tool, given to humans for worship and communication with the deity. This is why the first musical notation in history originated in Ugarit: an anthem to the moon goddess; Nikkal.

 

In this piece I used a motif repeated in the original Ugarit hymn, and I built the piece on this basis, with my attempt to load the presentation with a historical dimension that I believe it was necessary in this context; which happened after the transformation of the female deities into men in what is historically known as the male reversal.

 

Anthem to the moon god[dess] ! : is a piece for piano, a statue of a female deity, and a fake moustache and beard.

 

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PEEPS!

Composer: Ali Latif Shushtari

Musician: Daniil Rumiantsev, Alto flute

 

In this piece, I have tried to challenge the traditional Performer-Audience relationship in which a great deal of reality is concealed by formal stages, concert rituals, formal costumes, make-ups, and even sitting positions. PEEPS is a keyhole through which one can take a peek at what’s hidden.