Four Composition Commissions: Hannes Seidl, Martin Schüttler, Huihui Cheng, Alexander Schubert

ECLAT Festival neue Musik Stuttgart, Germany

Themes like mobility, multiculturalism, urbanization, individualization, digitalization or gender issues dominate the art world. Festival ECLAT does not present any themes in response to this. Instead, it aims to pick up on artistic visions or longings and invite artists to realize these with the utmost freedom and with the special possibilities offered by Stuttgart’s Theaterhaus during the festival. Often random connections arise between the projects ‒ relating to aesthetics, facture or even also our relationship with society.

As part of the festival four composers have been commissioned to write works that are being supported by the EvS Music Foundation: Hannes Seidl, Martin Schüttler, Huihui Cheng and Alexander Schubert. Despite all their differences what links the four artists is their intense work with digital media and the inclusion of visual and scenic aspects in their works. Quite separately from each other all four composers design projects that pick up on the topics of “community” in different ways. This allows the audience to be liberated from their passive and distanced role in the normal concert setting, granting them each a function corresponding to the artistic happenings. Special performance situations must therefore be created for the works: circular positioning to allow the audience an intimate, almost voyeuristic proximity or to make them the protagonists of an immersive experience. Arising from this is the CIRCLES project that the Neue Vocalsolisten will be premiering at ECLAT in February 2019 at Theaterhaus Stuttgart. CIRCLES describes the positioning of ensemble and audience as well as the social “circles” that are touched upon in the concepts. Spectators are allocated various roles here: onlookers with Seidl, idea generators with Schüttler, interactors with Cheng, and they are set into a trance by Schubert.

February 6 to 8, 2019
Theaterhaus Stuttgart, Germany

Further information:
eclat.org