stichtingmousai

Donaueschinger Musiktage 2022 saw the premiere of a number of works commissioned by the foundation. The first concert saw the premiere of works by Evis Sammoutis and Iris ter Schiphorst, which are part of the ‘Voices’ project, a series of commissions asking composers to address the subject of Neurological Disorder, Parkinson’s Disease and mental health issues through the human voice. The second performance was the premiere of Cheap Opera #3 by Bernhard Lang a music theatre is based on the writings, drawings and concepts of an architect and writer, afflicted with Parkinson’s disease.

In a rhizomatic wandering through these texts the music tries to explore the effects and side-effects of Parkinson’s disease on the mind of a creative person. The libretto is trying at a new way of documentary textuality, substituting the fictional narration by the narration of the real. The festival in Donaueschingen is one of the largest platforms for contemporary music in Europe and these performances were also broadcast worldwide by SWR.

Roland Dahinden’s Theatre of the Mind received it’s premiere as the opening performance of the Ostrava Days Festival of Contemporary Music in August 2021. This was the first of two Stichting Mousai supported projects that have been performed in August and September  2021 making for a very active end of the summer! The piece by Roland was created as a dialogue between voices and sections of the mind. In using artwork from a parkinson’s patient as an element of the musical score the idea of how visual image can influence musical notation was explored.  Roland created this work for bass clarinet and electronics. The sound of the instrument enters into a dialogue with itself, each voice becoming a shadow of the other with echoes of memory and distance becoming ever more present. The premiere in Ostrava was assisted by Mikuláš Mrva on live electronics. This was followed by further outings in The Netherlands and a studio recording in Den Haag. The piece is being recorded for a future CD release in 2023 on the Moving Furniture label.

Roland is a composer and trombone player. He has worked with various well-known music artists like Miles Davis, John Cage, Anthony Braxton and Alvin Lucier.
Gareth is a bass clarinettist involved in a wide range of music including contemporary classical, jazz, rock and experimental.

Mousai is helping support a new reading of the work Aus Den Sieben Tagen by Karlheinz Stockhausen. The piece, written in 1968, was created by Stockhausen as a way of coming to terms and help deal with internal and external crisis. Although this work does not focus exclusively on any disease it explores shared issues of mental health, brining them into the light and also looking for ways to address them. It is a work that, in the same way as the other Mousai project Theatre of the Mind looks at how musical notation can be revisited and become a different way of creating instruction with an ever changing outcome. The production was premiered in the Ostrava Days festival and was followed by a performance at the Rewire Festival in Den Haag.  In 2022 Aus Den Sieben Tagen had a four hour performance at DOX in Prague followed by two shorter performances in The Netherlands. May 2023 sees a further performance of Aus Den Sieben Tagen at Synthese in Utrecht. 

Stockhausen: Aus den sieben Tagen (Prague 2022)