Klangwerkstatt Festival 2023

NOT FOUND – ERROR – THE NUMBER YOU HAVE DIALED IS NOT IN SERVICE

A search was started, a message was sent out into the world, but the result is a blank white page with a sad smiley face in the middle and the text ERROR 404 – PAGE NOT FOUND. And yet, one has landed somewhere. Someone conceived and implemented the design of this page; somewhere one ends up when making a phone call if the number is not in service.

This strange, indefinable place, where our search gets stuck, is explored and illuminated in a full-length work; our failed attempts at communication, already swallowed up by this 404-like place, are set in motion together. Ultimately, the question remains: How can communication succeed despite failure?

Four scenes, each independent of the others, depict how people attempt to communicate with one another, achieving mixed success in their endeavors. The same situation is musically reinterpreted four times, with the intention of uncovering the profoundly human element in failed communication attempts and messages that go unheard.

The concert evening is a blend of the classic concert format with participatory, installation-based elements, in which the audience also plays an active, performative role. The piece was specifically conceived for the church architecture of Studio 1, whose characteristic reverberation tends to absorb and obscure our messages.

NOT FOUND: not to be found, but to hover between exact opposites; a gray area in which the audience can merge with the collective in a shared soundscape. Through a juxtaposition of energy and exhaustion, silence and contemplation, improvisation, interaction, and interpretation, the music attempts to communicate. Since communication fails, it prompts closer examination and explores the contingencies of the collective mind.