<p>Orm Finnendahl [1963] • <em>Fälschung</em> for string quartet, ghetto blaster, tape and live electronics [2003]</p>
<p>John Zorn [b. 1953] • <em>The Dead Man</em>. 13 specimen for string quartet [1990]</p>
<p>John Cage [1912–1992] <em>•TwelvePieces </em>for String Quartet [1983]</p>
<p>George Crumb [1929–2022] • <em>Black Angels: 13 Images form the Dark Land</em> for electric string quartet [in tempore belli, 1970]</p>
<p><br />Walking the ridge between collage and montage, which have been used in the visual arts since the early 20th century, this musical program simultaneously sets accents against war with the music of Crumb and Zorn.</p>
<p>In a sense, the technique is already implied in the word com-position (= composition). In the techniques of montage and collage, however, the constituent elements behave disparately and snub without transitions, juxtaposed „glued“ (French coller = to stick) or mounted together. Multi-layered musical and thoroughly symbolically charged factures grow out of what is actually a simple specification.</p>
<p>Finnendahl's <em>forgery</em> with live electronics uses two „objets trouvés“, namely a sample of Bulgarian Balkan music and a recording of a Chopin nocturne by Artur Rubinstein. These samples sound over marauding ghetto blasters, among other things, and are condensed and deconstructed.</p>
<p>John Zorn's <em>The Dead Man</em> takes its cues from the comic strip, right down to playing instructions like „scrape“, „crunch“ and „insane bowing“. The 13 „specimen“ (specimens) not only contrast with each other in a mounted way, but partly consist themselves of collages of partly brutal partly musing materials in a frenzied alternation.</p>
<p>From John Cage's <em>30 Pieces for String Quartet</em>, 12 pieces are heard, with the four musicians spread around the room, placing the audience in the crosshairs of the emerging sonic montage of microtonal, tonal, and highly virtuosic aggregate material occurring along the seconds timeline.</p>
<p>Crumb reflects on the horrors of the Vietnam War [“in tempore belli“] with <em>Black Angels,</em> a cult piece of contemporary music. In several programmatically connoted sections charged with numerical symbolism, he criticizes and comments on what is happening, at the same time summoning forces of the mystically otherworldly to help endure what is being commented on. In the „Pavana Lacrimae“ he quotes Schubert's <em>Death and the Maiden</em>, but at the same time calls this bridging into question by prescribing bizarre additional instruments (glasses, thimbles) and a „surrealistic“ overall sound.<br /> <br /> The title LUFT | WURZELN of the new Germany-wide series of events curated by the Kairos Quartet goes back to the composer Sandeep Bhagwati. Born in India, raised in Germany and today commuting between Canada, Switzerland and Germany, he uses the term Luftwurzeln to describe his understanding of home. As an independent and cosmopolitan as well as internationally active ensemble, the Kairos Quartet identifies with this description and makes the term the motto for its series until June 2023.</p>
<p>Funded by Neustart Kultur of the Federal Commissioner for Culture and the Media, Ensemble Funding.</p>