Improvised Music I/88
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One component of the European Cultural Year in Berlin "E 88" is the series Workshop Berlin, under whose aegis FMP will present, in two stages, its project "Improvised Music". The first block of "Improvised Music", is closely connected to that wandering institution, the European Cultural Capital. Each year the Common Market countries select one member city to serve as a showplace for European art and culture, and for 1988 West Berlin has been chosen to bear this honour. One stated goal of the European Cultural Capital's founders is "to display both our shared cultural values as well as the multiplicity of our differences", and in keeping with this, last year the Dutchman Maarten Altena started a European Improvisation Project in the 1987 Cultural Capital, Amsterdam. Using his own Octet as a nucleus, Maarten put together a thirteen-piece European Improvisers Orchestra, for which he composed one piece, and for which he commissioned trombonist Radu Malfatti to write another. From year to year this project will wander from one host city to another, growing in the process and adding new pieces to its repertoire; the personnel will also constantly change. Within the next three years (that's to say after Paris and Glasgow have served as host cities), a considerable body of new work will have been composed and performed. Jost Gebers remarks: "Naturally one difficulty in all this is that the pieces are being composed for specific improvising musicians, so we can't expect that someone coming in off the street will be able to perform them just because he can read the notes; the notes don't tell the whole story." This year's repertoire will include, in addition to the pieces just mentioned, three new commissioned works: one by the pianist Carlo Inderhees, located in Köln; another by the Dutch violinist Maartje ten Hoorn; and a third by the English composer Steve Martland. Maarten Altena's European Improvisers Orchestra will rehearse and polish all of these pieces for an entire week in April; during the first four days, the musicians will work among themselves, preparing for two concerts, presented on the evenings of April 23 and 24 in the Ballhaus Rixdorf at the Kottbusser Damm. Translation: Daniel Werts from: Booklet “improvised music” by Free Music Production (FMP), 1988 |
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