Memory of Hearing: Orality and Body Memory

Both composers of the evening, Australian composer Liza Lim, currently a fellow at the Wissenschaftskolleg in Berlin, and Isabel Mundry, who lives in Munich and Zurich and is a member of the Akademie der Künste, set their new compositions in complex historical spaces shaped by cultural experience, changing and intensifying the perspective. This is done on the basis of current interrogations: the physicality of being a woman and the echo spaces of oralality, the interplay of listening, remembering and performing. For Isabel Mundry, “Figura is a composition about how the one shows itself in the other, how it is an inkling or trace or renewed form. (...) Sound figures are not only an expression, but also an imprint of something. They are gestures of taking in and passing on.” Liza Lim’s Sex Magic, a sprawling ritual for double bass flute, electronics and kinetic percussion for New York flutist Claire Chase is “a work about an alternative cultural logic of female power linked to the cycles of the womb” – the womb as a site of divine wisdom, referencing the Pythia at Delphi and Kali, the Hindu goddess of rage. Alternating constellations between the trumpeters in Mundry’s piece and live electronic and installation components in Lim's piece spatialise and intensify the listening experience.
In a conversation together, they trace each other’s footsteps.

The “Memory of Hearing” series by the Music Section, suspended due to the Covid pandemic, in which a member of the Akademie der Künste and an international guest meet musically and discursively in the thematic field of “cultural memory and hearing”, will be continued in 2022 with two events in April and May.

Programme

Liza Lim: Sex Magic (2020, 45 Min.) for double bass flute, electronics & kinetic percussion

Isabel Mundry: Figura (2022, 25 Min.) for two trumpets
Commissioned by Musik der Jahrhunderte, premiered at Festival ECLAT hybrid 2022

Double bass flute: Claire Chase
Live electronics: Senem Pirler
Trumpets: Marco Blaauw, Markus Schwind