Many thresholds crossed

A pedestrian zone in the center of Munich. Two passers-by are bending attentively over a garbage can. Is there something to watch, hear or smell? Others walk past carelessly, others join them, while the first ones move away without exchanging words.

The video documentation as an integral part of the piece Staring at the Bin ("Anmülleimer anstarren", composition and concept Meriel Price) is symptomatic of a concept of music theater that Munich Biennale (May 28 to June 9, 2016) under the new directorship of composer duo Daniel Ott and Manos Tsangaris. The focus is on integrating the city and everyday life as well as opening up to interaction, strange occurrences and altered sound perception. According to the two artistic directors, "threshold crossers" are to be attracted and the Biennale opened up with performative sound interventions in the urban space, the consolidation of the festival and a doubling of the number of world premieres to 15 in 13 days. By including individual new venues away from the major venues, the team of artistic directors deliberately deviated from the programs of their predecessors Hans-Werner Henze and Peter Ruzicka.

Ott and Tsangaris seem to complement each other perfectly, as Daniel Ott, a Swiss national anchored in his adopted home of Berlin, brings with him many years of experience as director of the Rümlingen Festival for New Music, which specializes in musical dialogue with the environment (see interview in the Swiss Music Newspaper 6/2016, p. 6 ff.). Since his first music theater miniatures in the 1970s, Tsangaris, who teaches in Dresden, has devoted himself to radical statements on world references, new parameters of theatrical actions, the search for sounds and encounters with the audience.

The radical break with Munich tradition is nevertheless surprising and testifies to a genuine passion for the cause. The choice of the biennial title OmU - Original with subtitlesThe "film", which in the cinema is the decisive indicator for an unadulterated screening, is deliberately based on cinematic processes. He evokes numerous possibilities of how an original can be related to its transposition or realization, but also fragmentation, alienation or documentation. At the same time, he alludes to the "OmÜ" variant - original with surtitles - of common practice in opera.

Symposium with Swiss accents
What does the term "original" mean and what do new formats and strategies look like in today's music theater? Is the term "music theater" still appropriate at all and what relationship could this music theater have to other fields of contemporary art?

With a view to productions of the Biennale, but also on the basis of fundamental and further-reaching considerations, a dense symposium conceived by Jörn Peter Hiekel (Dresden/Zurich) and David Roesner (Munich) under the title OmU - Echo spaces and search movements in today's music theater to the discourse. The fact that Switzerland is evidently a fertile breeding ground for the musical-theatrical treatment of templates of all kinds was particularly evident at this event.

The two artistic directors playfully introduced the themes of originality, authorship and hierarchies, before subtitling and encouraging each other with "keep talking" and "keep playing" on instruments in a flowing transition between word and sound - Ott on the piano prepared with blind rivets and Tsangaris on the forest devil and flummi ball.
Roman Brotbeck (Bern/Basel) showed a way of dealing with the original by setting Robert Walser's texts to music. Only in the last twenty years has Walser often been set to music, especially in théâtre musical, which Brotbeck justified with an interest in biographical topoi. He exemplified the relationship between the style of Walser's texts and the methods of théâtre musical with works by Mischa Käser, Georges Aperghis, Helmut Oehring, Johannes Harneit, Ruedi Häusermann and Heinz Holliger.

David Roesner (Munich) presented Christoph Marthaler's The Unanswered Question (Basel 1997) as a key work for dealing with models. It uses Charles Ivesʼ epochal piece of the same name (1908), which addresses fundamental questions of music. Ruedi Häusermann's music theater A multitude of quiet whistles (Zurich 2011), which led to a staged concert in the box after a musicalized walk through the workshops of Zurich's Schiffbau, was read by Leo Dick (Bern) as a "composed memory work" (see Dick's article of the same name in: Transitions: New music theater - vocal art - staged musicStuttgarter Musikwissenschaftliche Schriften 4, edited by Andreas Meyer and Christina Richter-Ibáñez, Mainz 2016).
 

Photo: Munich Biennale, Franz Kimmel

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