KREUZTANBUL
Intercultural Happenings between Kreuzberg and Istanbul in Sound, Image and Word
October 10 – 14, 2007
Let´s look at it this way: We would never have this wonderful flourish of cymbals in our wind ensembles if our great-great-grandparents weren´t fascinated with the sounds of the music of the Ottomans. We certainly wouldn´t have “The Abduction from the Seraglio” and would also have to search far and wide for alla turca.
But let´s frame the question in another way: Who has given what to whom, intentionally or not? What do we desire and what do we fear? And how do artists and musicians react to these gifts – wanted or unwanted - now and in times past? Regarding “times past”, a short historical perspective before looking to the present and the future: how much more complex would the process of desire and rejection be, if – as had been for centuries – an Ottoman Empire and a Habsburg Empire, the “East” and the “West”, stood facing each other along a common border, instead of – as in the 19th Century – Giuseppe Donizetti and countless other Western composers working in Constantinople. And is Turkish music already no longer what it used to be? And – since we are already in the present – if all of these processes take place within a city such as Berlin, such as Kreuzberg, or in Istanbul, as social happenings at first, are they artistic as a result or also by necessity? No sound is innocent and these process are certainly complex; artists react to them here as well as there. Sometimes the situation is also reversed and the artists set the agenda (an agenda that is dealt with only later by the majority of those concerned); indeed, it is the artists stipulate what politics and cultural politics must then work on.
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 Programmheft (PDF)
Plakat (PDF) |
