Amplifier walls
Electro-acoustic inaugural concert by Prof. Maximilian Marcoll in Weimar's KET Hall
Electroacoustic accesses are the focus of Prof. Maximilian Marcoll's inaugural concert on Friday, June 30 at 8:00 p.m. in Weimar's KET Hall. Like the light of a flickering fluorescent tube flashing and unpredictable, the sound in Marcoll's new composition of the Renaissance mass "Missa Papae Marcelli" comes and goes.
The mass will be sung by a vocal ensemble from the Weimar University of Music under the direction of Prof. Kerstin Behnke. As the second piece of the evening, the professor for electroacoustic composition and sound art has put his project "A C H K" for two electric guitars and electronics on the program; the guitarists here are Thilo Ruck and Timm Roller. At the mixing desk, Maximilian Marcoll personally intervenes live in the musical events - and thus becomes part of the performance as a sound director.
Tickets for the concert in the series "Virtuoses Weimar" of the University of Music FRANZ LISZT Weimar are available at 12 euros, concessions 8 euros, at the Tourist Information Weimar and at the box office.
The venue, the Weimar KET Hall, is located north-east of the Weimar railway station and is part of the Kromsdorfer Straße commercial and industrial estate. The hall is located at Straße des 17. Juni 7, 99427 Weimar. The KET Hall can be reached by bus from Goetheplatz with line 7 (direction Kromsdorf) in 20 minutes without changing.
The underlying work of the "Amproprification VI", the mass "Missa Papae Marcelli" by Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina from the 16th century, will be performed as intended in the original, but amplified by microphones and loudspeakers. Only the amplification level is the subject of the composition.
The original is fragmented by this procedure, individual passages become inaudible, Maximilian Marcoll does not let the volume control stand still. In a recent article, the "Schweizer Musikzeitung" called this "chopping out of love and respect". The music thus becomes "something new, something unexpected," the composer explains.
While the first half of the concert takes place in the usual manner as a frontally oriented concert, in the second part of the concert the artists and the audience change the space. "A C H K," a performance conceived by Marcoll for two electric guitars and electronics, adopts a new spatial concept. Artist and audience are together between guitars and two walls of amplifiers, in Marcoll's words "in the body of the instrument."
As he explains, with electric guitars, effects units, modulation, amplification and speakers are all part of the instrument. "The electric guitar extends from the string to the speaker cone and itself forms a signal chain, an instrument complex, into which I connect in real time for this performance," Marcoll says.
Maximilian Marcoll, born in 1981, studied percussion as well as instrumental and electronic composition. As a professor of electroacoustic composition and sound art, he works simultaneously at the University of Music FRANZ LISZT Weimar and at the Bauhaus University Weimar. He directs the studio for electroacoustic music (SeaM) at the university. His work focuses on media-reflexive aspects of music as well as the social and political potential of music and sound.
Already in 1999 he founded and directed the Ensemble Neue Musik Lübeck, followed three years later by the foundation of the electronic duo "dis.playce". In 2006 he became a member of the artist group "Stock11", and from 2008 to 2018 Maximilian Marcoll took over the technical direction of the festival "Klangwerkstatt Berlin".
In the mid-2010s he stayed as "Composer in Residence" at the "Centro Mexicano para la Música y las Artes Sonoras" in Morelia (Mexico), at the "Institute for Computer Music and Sound Technology" in Zurich (Switzerland), at the Künstlerhaus "Lukas" in Ahrenshoop (Germany) - and in 2020 at the Institute for Electronic Music and Acoustics in Graz (Austria).
[14 June 2023]