A journey to the origin of occidental music with the baroque harpist Luise Enzian.
First of all: What is the WUNDERKAMMER? A new series of events that brings together artists, philosophers, scientists and an inquisitive audience in a common “resonance room”. Here we experience music as a central encounter with ourselves and the world and combine it with philosophical and scientific considerations and experiments. After all, doesn’t it make sense (and pleasure) to approach things differently than through discussion, fact-checking and dispute? In the WUNDERKAMMER we let ourselves be inspired by the spirit of the historical Chambers of Wonder around 1600: with the collection of the most diverse finds from art, nature and science, the idea was connected at that time that everything in our world was connected with each other and in a special way, perceived through being amazed, admired and touched.
The foundation stone for our four-part journey/series is laid by baroque harpist Luise Enzian. In THE AIR BETWEEN THE STRINGS she leads us with her instrument to the origins of Western music and culture and its “rebirth” in the Renaissance. Compositions by forgotten and famous masters from the Renaissance and Baroque periods, such as Johann Jakob Froberger, Athanasius Kircher, Johann Hieronymus Kapsberger and Johann Sebastian Bach, take us into a resonating space of that time when the boundaries between science, intuition and speculation were still fluid. Such as the musical and scientific work of the universal scholar Athanasius Kircher, who corresponded internationally “networked” with leading intellectuals of his time – including Galileo Galilei’s father – and at the same time maintained a chamber of curiosities in which he exhibited “globes of heaven and earth”, the “tail of a mermaid” and an organ that “played a concert of all kinds of birdsong and carried a spherical sphere in the middle of the air.
The studies of music, physics, Pythagoras, vibration and cosmos at that time tell in an impressive way of a world in which music played a truly central role. In the spirit of miracles and chambers of wonder as research laboratories, sound artist Lena Wenta gives us insights into the “primal matter of music”, in vibrations and frequencies, to be seen in a physical-aesthetic experiment. But more will not be revealed here: after all, our WONDERCHAMBER is meant to be a space of common discoveries.
With: Luise Enzian (music and moderation), Lena Wenta (sound images) and Bernhard Glocksin (moderation). Equipment: Sabrina Rossetto
Over the course of the coming season, four programs invite you to different locations in Berlin, to the Kiez-Kapelle in the Prinzessinengarten on Hermannstraße in Neukölln, to the Zeiss Großplanetarium and elsewhere. The first of the above-mentioned evenings will be followed on October 23 and 24 by an immersive journey of sound and smell: MIT HUMBOLDT NACH MEXICO, led by the composer Diana Syrse and the neuroscientist Anna D’Errico (Goethe University and Max Planck Institute Frankfurt). In February, the musical duo “Wild Strings” and the astrophysicist and philosopher Sibylle Anderl will go to the Zeiss-Großplanetarium, where they will pose exciting questions about the universe with music by Charles Ives and others. And for March, an evening with Skrijabin, video artist Vincent Stefan and pianist Markus Syperek is in preparation.
Concept, equipment: Bernhard Glocksin, Sabrina Rossetto
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Photo: (c) Wenzel Stählin