Credit: Blablabor
The collective blablabor with Annette Schmucki and Reto Friedmann holds the Endowed Visiting Professorship Composition 2023/24. Welcome!
blablabor offers workshops and individual talks in November 2023, April 2024 and June 2024. Highlights will be a first installation with students on November 28, 2023 at the KunstKulturKirche and a portrait concert on April 27, 2024 at the HfMDK. Interested students and teachers as well as guest auditors can contact the Institute for Contemporary Music IzM.
1st workshop session: Sound of Language
21.11. to 29.11.2023 (with shortcuts-concert at the KunstKulturKirche)
The core area of Blablabor lies in the exploration of the borderline between language and music. How can the melody and rhythm of language be made usable for composition? Blablabor works with its own method to extract the sonority of language and make it usable for instruments and vocals.
Blablabor will present this method and the students will research further methods to tap into the sonority of language for themselves. Using simple technology such as our own cell phones, we produce short audio pieces using these methods. These will be performed or presented as a sound installation at an event in the KunstKulturKirche on November 28.
2nd workshop session: Media reflection
22.4. to 28.4.2024 (with portrait concert of blablabor on 27.4. in the small hall of the HfMDK)
In blablabor's media art, reflection on media conditions plays an important role. In the performances, for example, Blablabor plays with the inadequacies of FM transmitters and portable radios, or takes the medium of radio or the genre of radio play as the subject of radio plays. Blablabor presents various approaches to the medium of radio, which serve as a stimulus for students to conduct their own experiments reflecting on the media. In cooperation with Radio X.
3rd workshop session: Collective Authorship
18.6. to 21.6.2024
Collective authorship plays an important role in the compositional process at Blablabor. The people involved in speaking, playing and singing actively bring in their own background. Also in network projects the own contribution dissolves in the collective event. The students develop their own strategies for collective authorship.
Since 2019, the HfMDK has established a unique endowed guest professorship with the help of the HfMDK Foundation, which was established in 2016: Renowned composers come to Frankfurt for one year at a time to work with students from all departments. Workshops with instrumentalists and students of composition and the performing arts are on the program, as are lectures and public performances, roundtable discussions and symposia.
The Foundation for the Frankfurt University of Music and Performing Arts contributes to the good development of the university and the excellent reputation of the HfMDK with its first project "Endowed Visiting Professorship Composition", which is comparable to the Foundation Guest Professorship for Poetics at the Goethe University, and enriches the educational offer. The existing good framework conditions of the university in the areas of teaching, interpretation, networking and cooperation are meaningfully expanded with this endowed guest professorship and strengthen the contemporary profile and international charisma of the HfMDK.
in 2019 Brian Ferneyhough was the first to hold the visiting professorship, in 2020/21 the Italian composer Lucia Ronchetti was in Frankfurt for three large project islands, and in 2022/23 composer and tinkerer Koka Nikoladze worked with HfMDK students and teachers. 2023/24 the Swiss collective blablabor with Annette Schmucki and Reto Friedmann will be guests at the HfMDK
An initiative of the Institute for Contemporary Music IzM of the Frankfurt University of Music and Performing Arts, sponsored by the Foundation for the Frankfurt University of Music and Performing Arts (HfMDK Foundation)