It is impossible to discuss cultural questions nowadays without taking into account the global political situation. I am absolutely certain that the events of the recent past irrefutably show the extent to which ideologies (and by that I mean economic, religious, cultural and political ideologies) have ousted the categories of origin and personal background. There is obviously nothing completely new about this development. However, this constellation has taken on a new aspect: many people all around the world no longer accept the dominance of western culture and are expressing their resistance in hitherto unheard-of ways. For this reason alone, it has now become more necessary than ever to initiate communication processes and promote a broader understanding of the way cultures outside Europe perceive things.
Gene Coleman
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| | The development of new musical languages between cultures—this is the artistic vision from which the transonic concert series emerged in its present form. It not only intends to question anew concepts such as tradition and modernity, or categories such as contemporary and ritual, folklore and avant-garde, but also to provide a space in which techniques and modes of working can be examined and transformed. At the House of World Cultures, a production and research centre has been created where such debate and activities can take place. A kind of musical workshop has been established which, in the years to come, will increasingly open its doors to universities and all those promoting and staging events Berlin and elsewhere.
It is not only the festival which is in its infancy. It is exemplary of a dialogue that is evolving gradually but with growing intensity between musicians and composers from the musical cultures of India, China, the Arab world, Africa and Southeast Asia, Central and South America. Europe and the Western music traditions constitute only one partner among many. The hierarchy between western modernities and the music of “foreign cultures” has been replaced by mutual curiosity.
Hans-Georg Knopp, Johannes Odenthal
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| | Contemporary music and globalisation
The transonic Internet Forum:
Contemporary music strives to transcend borders and attain global presence. But isn’t it also a little blind in its extra-European eye and Eurocentric into the bargain?
In co-operation with the German section of the International Society for Contemporary Music, the House of World Cultures is launching a moderated Internet Forum on 4th December to discuss the relationship between contemporary and extra-European music. Musicians, composers, musicologists, journalists and music fans are invited to submit their views for discussion. The debate will open with statements from Dieter Mack, Professor of Composition at the conservatory in Lübeck, the German-Indian composer Sandeep Bhagwati, and the American composer and clarinettist Guillermo Gregorio.
Forum
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