The new normal – Schallfeld Ensemble

William Dougherty The new normal

Milica Djordjevic Rdja

Claudio Panariello To Learn the Obscene Art of Suffering Pain

Ensemble Kompositionsauftrag des Schallfeld Ensembles im Rahmen des StAiR (Styrian artist in residence) Programmes 2022 des Landes Steiermark

Misato Mochizuki Chimera

At the end of 2021, when we conceived our 2022 season, we wanted to focus on an optimistic (but still critical) reflection about the consequences of two years of pandemic in our lives and in the way we experience music together.

Since February 2022, the war and many other changes in the world gave a new and unexpected turn to the topics we choose for our concerts (Debris, Nahe).

In our mind, “The New Normal” stays probably  more close to its original meaning of a reunion to urgent socio-political and existential topics that we might have forgotten or recontextualized during the pandemic as in the last months.

The piece “the new normal” by William Daugherty reminds us about social inequality (on a world scale as in his own country, the USA), choosing a direct impact to the audience – however filtered through a calibrated work of collage from ethnomusicological material, ancient music quotations and other samples.

Moving from apparently objective scientific phenomena (oxidation and hybridation), the works by Milica Djordjevic and Misato Mochizuki bring us respectively to our “rusty”,  jammed aptitude in the expression of  feelings as to alienating and extraneous processes of transformation.

Claudio Panariello’s work (Styrian artist in residency 2022) mediates between the innest existential reflection about the experience of pain and its possible narrativity in our society, which seem to mirror in the “impossible” antiphonal dialogue between a (human) instrumental ensemble and its analogic Doppelgänger – a feedback system driven by piezos microphones and loudspeakers.

Free entry, ticket reservation under office@schallfeldensemble.com.