They are everywhere. They stand behind columns, on canopies and in the many open windows of the sun-drenched main street. You hit thunder plates and focus on the sounds of water coming from the innumerable loudspeakers. They play holding notes on trombones or virtuosos on trumpets. Each apparently autistic for himself. A moved crowd strolls past these street musicians, amazed with questioning glances, curiously followed the enigmatic events in Donaueschingen’s main street, which leads from the Danube source to Rathausplatz. A little boy is conducting, lost in a dream, two dogs are deeply relaxed and sink into a trance.
What otherwise happens only hidden and shielded from everyday reality in the many gyms and halls of the city, pushes out into the open on this wonderful autumn afternoon, Holderlin’s request “Come on into the open, friend!” Obeying. How many musicians can there be now from the neighboring countries that the Danube touches from its source in Donaueschingen on its long way to the Black Sea? Many are folk musicians in their uniforms, most of them play the trumpet, sousaphone, tuba, horn, flugelhorn, and trombone. Then there’s a combo of drummers in fantasy divines. So they remember the 100th birthday of the “Donaueschingen Music Days“Because in 1921 not only the local music freaks founded this unique and longest-serving avant-garde music festival in the world, but also the local Princely House, which has been brewing beer since the 16th century and whose company building dominates the cityscape.
When your ears need an e-bike
The music days are not only a crowd puller at this open-air spectacle “Donau / Rauschen”, conceived by Daniel Ott and Enrico Stolzenburg for and with the city, they are also a crowd puller in the always full halls, where premiere follows premiere, where newcomers to the scene and established composers and top ensembles crowd. The audience is also young and interested and insatiable and benevolent and attentive because of the many music students who have traveled to the city of 21,000 inhabitants in the Black Forest. What a relief to listen to music with such people! Even if the course is insane, when it is overcrowded, there is hardly any time to change halls or to have a mundane quick snack. Probably the listener who has an e-bike. But her head will soon be buzzing too, she feels lost in an infinite symphony with an infinite number of movements, which is garnished by inspiring conversations.
They can all compose. Much works smoothly, musically. Sometimes the pieces are too long because the possibilities of the material have long been exhausted: shorten! Some things seem all too sure to have been mastered because the female composers (there are many of them, in contrast to conducting, which is almost entirely in male hands) and their male colleagues do not existentially forcing the struggle with tradition, material, instruments, and listener inertia.
But that’s what Rebecca Saunders does in her 20-minute saxophone-piano-drums piece “That Time”. Saunders is a sound researcher, she defies the familiar instruments again and again from amazing new sounds, she begins with archaic touch, intensifies the music furiously, sinks back into the dark, softly, fading away. This music knows all states of mind, it is formally consistent, risks everything – and therefore grabs you. The Trio Accanto consists of three virtuoso sound artisans, who nevertheless make music visibly and audibly at their limits in this piece and thus increase the effect to the limit. What a great moment.
Milica Djordjević rages just as excessively in her orchestral piece “Čvor”, which holds on to the eruptive volcanic element for a good quarter of an hour and excludes everything that is contrasting and moderate. While Misato Mochizuki besieges the limits of sound art in “Intrusions” just as uncompromisingly, but lets shadows and counterweights flow into her orchestral tumult. Like most of the pieces played in Donaueschingen, Saunders, Djordjević and Mochizuki continue that tradition of polyphony and the musical idea that plays with tradition and musicianship, as it was formulated in medieval Paris and has been the trademark of Central European art music ever since. This art music, which likes to devote itself to the complicated, contradictory and ambivalent to polyvalent, continues to exert a great attraction on musicians around the world who, coming from completely different traditions of thought, feeling and music-making, change, transform or challenge this art music.
Gripped in the listener’s brain
Australian native Liza Lim took this challenging survey to extremes in “World as Lover, World as Self”. Even the old-fashioned genre of the piano concerto provokes, it is the romantic form par excellence. The fact that she is referring to Sergei Rachmaninoff’s pithy concerts exacerbates the situation. The soloist Tamara Stefanovich easily copes with these challenges, she has to sing in the second movement and the following movements crumble. Liza Lim pokes cheekily in the European tradition, she is not afraid of the frowned upon. This provokes contradiction, makes you think, stamps the piece as an outsider, but which will keep the listener busy for a long time.
Where many of her colleagues serve expectations with virtuosity and therefore easily disappear from memory, Liza Lim clings to the listener’s brain with her insubordination. Honest and impartial in dealing with tradition: some of Liza Lim’s colleagues lack these qualities. Nothing is provocative in Donaueschingen, at least there are no boos in the concerts attended by the critic. Due to the pandemic, the audience may be happy that after the last failed music days, music can finally be played again in full halls. Even if with the annoying mask on your face.
In the meantime, the “Donau / Rauschen” musicians and their audience have set in motion on Donaueschinger Hauptstrasse. Everything flows to the town hall square. In the middle of the square, the drummer combo is making lace, the bands line up on the arterial roads. Many of these musicians may be playing avant-garde music for the first time in their lives, but they do it just as naturally as their colleagues in the world-famous ensembles and orchestras. There is no solo conductor waving himself to the center, coordination is provided by time clocks.
This is how democratic music can work. The interplay of electronics, surround sound, feeds, live music, sound composition and percussion orgasms can be experienced in many Donaueschingen pieces. But seldom does it come together so organically and enthusiastically with an idea as in “Donau / Rauschen”. The piece is an invitation to the new director Lydia Rilling, who will take up the position next year, to say goodbye to the atavistic concert forms, from the faithfulness to conductors, the concert breaks, the strict spatial separation between the musicians in front and the audience sitting in front. All of this is part of the global classic business, to which Donaueschingen has always responded with a wrench against the sting of everyday life. After all, according to Alfred Einstein’s words, which are almost a hundred years old, this public festival is “a small oasis in the desert of today’s music business”.