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Article

Elisa Erkelenz
dramaturg

Development Process

Contain is about real international cooperation. From the conception to the joint development of new music in the form of "collaborative composing" developed by Simon James Phillips to joint storytelling. The work process Phillips develops strongly focuses on the musicians involved, their cultural backgrounds and their special qualities in productive exchange. In this way, a new kind of new music is created, which in its performance also enables the musicians to identify with "their" material in a special way and also includes references, quotations and historical links.

The Hong Kong based composer Samson Young is in the process of developing several works for Contain, that will be shown in video form for the performances in Germany, and as installations for the performances in Hong Kong. Other musical material includes old and contemporary music from Hamburg and Hong Kong as well as improvisations, field recordings and soundscapes.

In its stream of acoustic narration the project also involves thoughts and sounds of the current changes in the Hong Kong music scene due to the political situation. In an interview Samson Young spoke not only about the feeling of getting lost, but also about a new felt “urgency to come together“. And performance artist Steve Hui told The Wire: “My ultimate belief is that music can change the world. But I’ve found that the world changing music is more often the case.”

2019

In May 2019, musicians from Ensemble Resonanz traveled to Hong Kong for the first workshops of the project "Contain" together with Hong Kong New Music Ensemble. Director Folkert Uhde and dramaturg Elisa Erkelenz interviewed musicians of the Hong Kong New Music Ensemble about identities, freedom - and musical correspondences.

2021

From August to September 2021, eleven musicians from the Hong Kong New Music Ensemble met online with composer Simon James Phillips.

Simon James Phillips is a musician whose creative approach activates alternative processes broadening the relational connections between musics, participants, heritages, and practises. He utilises transdisciplinary methodologies of collaboration and adaptation to question dominant approaches to artistic creation. Phillips produces immersive work that explores the perception of time and place through sound and spatialisation by building expansive sonic atmospheres and taking particular care to tailor his compositions to each context. He often incorporates methods of collaborative composition that invite creative contributions from musicians who shift the composer/performer relationship towards an initiator/creative-participant dynamic.

Together, Phillips and members of the HKNME worked on five specific “modules” and variations of those modules:

Module 1

Passing a sort of pedal note from one player to the next in a circle. After the tone has been established, they began to experiment with ’shadow’ tones - supportive tones that act like overtones or harmonics that are softer than the main, original tone.

Module 2

Isolated percussive sounds that can move between random ensemble playing to organised and structured playing (using timbre, rhythm, tempo etc)

Module 3

A kind of cultural modulation, beginning with a distinct musical language or style that gradually becomes appropriated and mimicked to create a confused wash of sound that at some point begins to morph into another musical language.

Module 4

Random, isolated percussive events that are interrupted by chordal material.

Module 5

A “module” developed independently by the musicians themselves.

Biography

Elisa Erkelenz

Elisa Erkelenz is a freelance curator, dramaturg and author in the field of classical, contemporary and trans-traditional music. After years at the Ensemble Resonanz as a dramaturg and deputy manager, she launched the artistic research Outernational in 2019, which is dedicated to transtraditional, contemporary music, and its discourses in concerts and listening sessions in Berlin and Europe as well as in its own magazine (VAN Outernational). With violinist David-Maria Gramse she curates and moderates the podcast »Des Pudels Kern«. As a freelance dramaturg and curator, she works for various houses and festivals, from the Elbphilharmonie to the Donaueschinger Musiktage and Deutschlandfunk. She writes for the VAN magazine, among others, and teaches dramaturgy at the HAW in Hamburg.

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