On the stage of an empty concert hall, the Austrian-born composer Peter Ablinger sits in a chair and begins to tell the time. “At the third stroke, it will be twenty o’clock precisely,” he says, adhering to the hallowed formula of the BBC’s Speaking Clock. He accompanies himself with a simple C-minor sequence on a keyboard. After continuing in this vein for twenty minutes, Ablinger cedes the floor to the young German actress Salome Manyak, who speaks over an atmospherically bleeping soundtrack by the Finnish experimental musician Olli Aarni. The ritual goes on for nearly twenty-seven hours, with an ever-changing team of artists, curators, composers, singers, and d.j.s announcing the time in German, English, Italian, French, Spanish, Turkish, Arabic, Farsi, Oromo, Mandarin, and twelve other languages. A rotating assortment of prerecorded tracks, usually electronic, provide accompaniment. Most of the reciters maintain a crisp, cool demeanor, even when their Web sites lead one to expect something more uproarious. The Swedish dancer and costume designer Björn Ivan Ekemark, for example, gives no sign that he also performs under the name Ivanka Tramp and leads a “sticky and visceral cake-sitting performance group,” called analkollaps.
We are, needless to say, in Berlin, witnessing the finale of MaerzMusik, an annual bacchanal of sonic extremes that falls under the aegis of the Berliner Festspiele. This year’s edition was streamed online, meaning that you could absorb it from the banal comfort of an American home. In keeping with European practice, there was an imposing but vague central theme: Zeitfragen, or “time issues.” The programming emphasized experiences that sprawl beyond conventional time frames and engulf the consciousness. The most potent example was Éliane Radigue’s “Trilogie de la Mort” (1988-93), a three-hour soundscape of darkly hypnotic electronic drones. It had the feeling of an indecipherable monument outside time.
Yet MaerzMusik offered more than an escape from aesthetic norms. In a high-profile, well-funded festival such as this, time becomes a political question: Who gets to speak, and for how long? In the European cultural sphere, the long-unquestioned dominance of the white-male perspective is receiving nearly as much scrutiny as it is in America. MaerzMusik, which is led by the arts curator Berno Odo Polzer, has taken a sharp turn away from the usual suspects. The African-American composer and scholar George E. Lewis was invited to organize a concert devoted to Black composers. Several events paid tribute to the eclectic Egyptian-American composer Halim El-Dabh, who died in 2017, at the age of ninety-six. Two Berlin-based experimental groups, phønix16 and noiserkroiser, presented a multimedia evening in collaboration with the Orquesta Experimental de Instrumentos Nativos, a Bolivian ensemble that seeks new contexts for traditional Andean instruments.
The ever-formidable Lewis, who is based at Columbia but is currently a fellow at the Berlin Institute for Advanced Study (the Wissenschaftskolleg), has led the way in confronting the German new-music world with the question of race. A few years ago, he assembled statistics showing that the venerable Darmstadt Summer Courses for New Music had featured only two Black composers in seven decades—amounting to 0.04 per cent of all the compositions selected. In response, Lewis has argued not only for greater numerical diversity but also for a different vision of musical culture itself—one of a “creolized” world in which histories and identities circulate freely. The word “creole” is often used to denote racial mixing, but for Lewis, and for post-colonial theorists who have embraced the term, it denotes a broader confluence of languages and values.
The young Swiss composer-drummer Jessie Cox, who is studying with Lewis at Columbia, exemplifies what such a hyphenated future might look and sound like. Cox grew up in the majority-German-speaking town of Biel, but his family has roots in Trinidad and Tobago. At an early age, he took up djembe and Latin drumming; later, he turned to a serious study of modern composition. At MaerzMusik, he appeared during the tribute to El-Dabh, playing drums alongside the guitarist Nicola Hein and the sheng player Wu Wei in a partly improvised piece titled “Sound Is Where Drums Meet.” He was also featured on an Ensemble Modern program called “Afro-Modernism in Contemporary Music,” which included works by Hannah Kendall, Alvin Singleton, Daniel Kidane, Andile Khumalo, and Tania León.
The idea of a creolized music was most obvious in “Sound Is Where Drums Meet,” with its implicit fusion of deep-rooted world traditions. (The sheng, a Chinese free-reed instrument, is at least three thousand years old.) The piece was hardly an ethnomusicological exercise, though; the performers adopted an experimental lingua franca, ranging from delicate washes of timbre to furious spells of collective pandemonium, which reminded me at moments of duos between Max Roach and Cecil Taylor. No less commanding was “Existence lies In-Between,” Cox’s contribution to the Ensemble Modern project. This is a fully notated score that nonetheless offers some freedom to the performers. The bass clarinet, for example, is sometimes asked to engage in “wild, free-jazz-like playing” in the manner of Marshall Allen, the longtime saxophonist of the Sun Ra Arkestra. Cox’s style might be described as dynamic pointillism, with breathy instrumental noises giving way to mournfully wailing glissandi, and then to a climactic stampede of frantic figuration.
The two pieces still seemed to dwell in separate worlds: one in the experimental zone, the other in the concert hall. Online, Cox has undertaken projects that collapse such distinctions by creating their own virtual acoustic spaces. Just after his visit to Berlin, he presented, in league with issue Project Room, a ninety-minute work titled “The Sound of Listening,” which invites spectators to visit an array of “rooms” where various musical activities are unfolding. The mood here is spacious, ruminative: an opening solo, for the bassist Kathryn Schulmeister, comes across as a restless, questing meditation. Far more fraught is “Breathing,” a kind of video aria that Cox made for the Long Beach Opera’s “Songbook” series, in November. The Black bass-baritone Derrell Acon vocalizes as he wanders through city and forest landscapes, his voice fractured by pain and rage. At the end, he exhales while birdsong fills the soundtrack—an idyllic turn that appears to astonish him as much as it does the viewer.
Amid a general trend toward ad-libitum frenzy at MaerzMusik—the event with the Orquesta Experimental de Instrumentos Nativos swelled to an impressively apocalyptic roar—the première of Jürg Frey’s Fourth String Quartet provided an oasis of focussed stillness. Frey, who is from Aarau, Switzerland, about forty-five miles from Cox’s home town of Biel, writes chamber music that seems to pick up where Shostakovich’s left off, in a realm where Romantic harmony has decayed into beautiful, half-buried ruins. The Fourth Quartet is especially notable for its coda, in which a soft, low C-sharp is plucked out more than a hundred times on the cello, like a muffled clock, while the violins and viola grasp at ghostly chords.
The festival’s epic speaking-clock finale had its own bleary pleasures. Titled “timepiece,” it built on Ablinger’s 2012 work “tim Song.” Lewis appeared as a reciter in the first hour; a few hours later, the Bozzini Quartet accompanied the speakers with Michael Oesterle’s “Consolations,” which is not unlike Frey’s quartet in mood. Long past midnight, the Irish composer-performer Jennifer Walshe took over the broadcast and wreaked havoc, as is her wont. She switched to Dublin Mean Time, which has not been in active use since 1916, and diverged from the script with such announcements as “At the third chime, it will be arse o’clock.” Above all, it was mesmerizing to hear the time told in so many languages—a multiplicity that testified to Berlin’s cosmopolitan nature. According to the German philosopher Johann Gottfried Herder, diverse world cultures should take pride in their distinctive features while seeking the higher truth of a shared humanity. For a day or so, this utopia seemed to come into being, as the people of many nations came to agree about at least one thing: the time. ♦
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