It is all starting to feel very real now, as more and more musicians get involved in the workshop process of Tempelhof Broadcast. Here you can hear musicians from the Flintstones Big Band, the Humboldt University chorus and orchestra, and the professional new music group Work in Progress as we experimented with musical material last Saturday at the Schloss Britz Castle!
Really enjoying my continued collaboration with The Knights - the New York orchestra that commissioned the Tempelhof Etude. They are taking Version 2.0 of the piece on tour in the US this month, and I got to hear them play it in the beautiful Troy Savings Bank Music Hall in upstate NY on Thursday night. In a totally random New York moment, I actually ran into members of the orchestra this morning in the airport (where I am now) on my way to Chicago for a totally unrelated gig - they are continuing their tour in Detroit, playing it tonight, in fact!
Meanwhile, in transit, I am preparing the little musical materials for the upcoming day-long Workshop with amateur and student groups in Berlin on April 21 - these are tidbits of melody and gesture that musicians will combine, according to instructions. It was magical to hear these materials on stage with the 40 members of The Knights on Thursday! The Etude has been incredibly helpful for me, in preparation for a bigger and bigger scope.
More soon as we ramp up!
Leonard Bernstein arriving at Tempelhof in December 1989, to conduct musicians from both Berlins in Beethoven’s 9th - thanks to Charles Waters, who sent this along for me to share!
Yes, it’s true - that is, of course, the Flintstones Big Band, which is the resident BB at the Neukölln Musikschule here in Berlin, who were my very first ‘lab’ group for the Tempelhof Broadcast workshops. Daniel Busch, trombonist and director of the group, is also the director of the Paul Hindemith Musikschule, one of the project’s most inspiring and inspired partners. Here are some pix of the goings-on, which consisted of bringing a couple of members from Solistensemble Kaleidoskop to help me try out some musical sketches (taken from the Tempelhof Etude but made more flexible for the wide variety of groups I will be meeting) - ideas that will, with the help of groups like this, grow into the stuff of the final musical work itself. It was exhilarating to jump into this collaboration - my first actual musical interaction here in this huge musical endeavor.
these are the Flintstones! and here I am teaching some material in formation…
…with the help of Flintstones and Neukölln Musikschule director Daniel Busch:
….and Daniella Strassfogel from Solistenensemble Kaleidoskop:
…as I gave some guidance…
…but eventually mostly just listened!
…and then we spread all over the room to try these ideas out spatially:
It was a landmark day for the project, with many thanks to these great collaborators, and also to Jule Kauert & Manuela Kugler-Knape, my Berlin-based Production Directors, who are tackling the mounting logistical challenges of the project, as more and more people become involved, with aplomb and great good cheer. Thanks all!
The invitation has gone out (you can see it here on the website), and we are now looking forward to learning more about the various amateur and student groups in Berlin who will come together just over a year from now to make some joyful noise on the tarmac. Spread the word!
Meanwhile, if you are in Berlin and want to hear some of my other music in transient public space, go check out violinist Sarah Plum’s recital in the Hauptbahnhof this coming Thursday, August 25, at 6pm. More info here: http://www.ohrenstrand.de/2011/live-programm/250811/
Back home now in NYC, but with many new friends back in Berlin I feel that a part of me is away from home. Here is a beautiful photo diary from my new friend Noema Pérez, a Spanish-German translator who lives just 3 blocks from the park, and has lived there for seven years. She watched the process of Tempelhof changing from airport to park - how Berliners claimed this massive space as their own over the past year and a half. Thank you Noema! (We are going to swap apartments next summer, so I’ll be staying at her place - lucky me!)
I visited areas of Tempelhof now closed to the public on my last day in Berlin. The roof of this gargantuan building was originally conceived to be easily convertible to a grandstand for 80,000 people (allegedly for the never-to-be-realized National Socialist victory celebration at the end of WWII). This grandiose edifice became the backdrop, later in the 20th century, for some very famous arrivals during the Cold War era. On the plane I enjoyed a beautiful article in the German edition of Architectural Digest from Oktober 2004 (when the airport was still in limited use), written by my new friend and colleague, journalist and historian Bodo Mrozek. Among the gorgeous photos of early 20th-century flight experiments and postwar airlift operations are stories of these Cold War famous arrivals: the Rolling Stones, Martin Luther King Jr., Maria Callas, Ella Fitzgerald, Leonard Bernstein and the NY Phil. A deeply complex history is so palpable at this site.
Finally getting the chance to sit and talk face to face with real people whose role as partners in the project is going to make it truly meaningful for the community here. Whether I’m talking to the Urban Planning visionaries at Tempelhofer Freiheit (the city planning partners of Grün-Berlin), or the director of the Neukölln “Paul Hindemith” MusikSchule (the conservatory that is nearest to the Park), I am feeling great camaraderie here. I suppose this makes sense, since the whole concept for this project was inspired first and foremost by two things: Tempelhof Field itself, and its role in the life of the city; and the presence and vitality of amateur and student musicmaking here in Berlin. These two new partners are the embodiment of these two inspirations.
Daniel Busch, director of the Musikschule, gave me a colorful overview of all of the goings-on there. From trumpet and trombone ensembles, wind bands and big bands (including a faculty big band called The Flintstones!). One favorite of mine is the upcoming Country-Western music festival: check it out! (with band names like Laura Bean & her Corn Breads, how can you go wrong??)
Other meetings this week included another sort of work session with Moritz. He and I walked around the Park together on a misty, half-rainy morning - and I described to him some of the ways I hope to deploy the groups of musicians as they move away from the center of the runway.
Meanwhile, to help me with the spatial logistics involved in composing the piece, Grün Berlin has supplied me with all kinds of very useful maps, mechanical plans and satellite photos. Now I can start imagining the piece from above, a lot more concretely!
I’m also enjoying seeing some of my musician colleagues here - people I’ve met (often in New York or even somewhere completely else - like Paris, Salzburg or San Diego…) in various professional contexts over the years. Nicolai Thärichen and I, for example, had a great long hang the other night, listening to each other’s music and talking about everything from US and German politics to brass tunings. I’m grateful to Niki because he put me in touch with Daniel Busch over at the Neukölln Musikschule. Thanks Niki! Currently enjoying tunes from his new CD with his “Tentett.”
A couple of other co-inhabitants I witnessed on the Tempelhof Field: a Kestrel (no I am not suddenly a bird expert; yes there are birdwatching aids in the form of posters at the Park):
and a cloud of Segways - now rentable at the Field. These things always remind me of “Arrested Development”…
As I deepen my collaborations with my Berlin-based colleagues, I find that I am getting a unique view on the differences between our two cultures, much more than I would if I were here as a tourist. Of course there are the various inroads that become more and more available to me as my German gets better - like seeing the German news media’s coverage of the default crisis in the US Congress (and an added bonus: many news stories here come with a very clear explanation of how the US government actually works, which is handy since I think I phoned in my junior high school Social Studies class…)
Soll und Haben - debit and credit - also has nuances of the related verbs Sollen (should) and Haben (have). That cappuccino, by the way, was superb…
But it was a whole new window into the nuances of these differences this weekend: an intense few days of grantwriting, mostly with my trusty production manager Jule Kauert, but also with patient help from folks at both the Soliestenensemble Kaleidoskop office and the manager of Ensemble Mosaik, the two professional new music ensembles who will be playing in the piece next year. Jule is 28 years old, and was born in East Berlin - so she was 6 or 7 when the Wall came down. Her work is mostly as freelance event manager for corporate events, but she is passionate about the arts (and has a really lovely voice too!). We pulled long days of hard work, over kaffee and, eventually, beautiful Riesling with multiple delicious cheeses.
One comical thing we talked about is that, although my German is getting besser und besser, the difference between formal and informal German is much wider than in the States. It’s not just the pronouns and the declensions, it’s the whole vocabulary and sentence structure (a bilingual friend of mine in the US comforted me when I was feeling particularly bewildered by saying that, after all, my intensive German lessons did not include “the Kaiser’s German”…). In addition, almost everyone here speaks English (which makes it hard to get them to speak German with me!), except - so it seems - the people with whom I need to use only the most formal German. But, as it turns out, even though we were preparing grant proposals for organizations that award projects that celebrate German-American cooperation, many of them are hosted by governmental offices in which the language barrier makes such cooperation nearly impossible, without Jule’s help! Now the danger is that I will speak to new Berlin friends and colleagues as if they were uniformed officials…
Preparing these proposals gave rise to some really interesting discussions, too, about how granting organizations here (mostly governmental) and in the States (mostly private) want to see different things in these proposals. I enjoyed a lively talk about this whole issue with Max von Aulock, whose Soniq Performing Arts organization manages many innovative groups here in Berlin, including Ensemble Mosaik - dance and theater as well as music. Different audience expectations, different common understandings about what constitutes a need or ‘hunger’ for arts in a society, different nuances in the definitions of terms as basic as ‘participation’ or ‘outcome.’ These values underlie all of the questions in these grant proposals, and we are all learning an enormous amount by preparing language for grantwriting in both countries! All of these discussions take place in the context of deep respect for each other’s involvement in artistic life, combined with a genuine curiosity about how all of us find ways to make art happen, in whatever political and/or cultural climate we find ourselves. The underlying feeling is that there is a strong commonality among all of us on the project - our motivations and hopes - but that we have vastly different experiences because we have been functioning within two very different systems, each of which can reinforce, challenge, reward and encourage (and, yes, sometimes frustrate) our efforts in different ways.
Max’s offices are in a splendid building near the Ostbahnhof, by the way, in former East Berlin. This building was the headquarters of the biggest East Berlin newspaper, Neues Deutschland. Still in circulation but on a much smaller scale, this was the main organ in communist East Berlin. The building used to house massive printing rooms (now used by the Berlin Opera for rehearsals and workshops). An very distinctive building:
If I hadn’t had another important meeting, I might have spent the entire rest of the day playing on the Paternoster, which Max says is one of the very few of these left in Germany. Two open elevator-like shafts with no doors, one going eternally up, one going eternally down. It reminded me of playing double-dutch jump-rope in the schoolyard:
Amid a flurry of meetings with partners, collaborators and friends of the project - Production Manager Jule Kauert, Solistenensemble Kaleidoskop, Ensemble Mosaik, and Grün-Berlin - I am finding time to get my head around the technical research I’ll be doing here. One handy thing that happened last time I visited the field was that some kind of event was taking place outside the terminal building…
…and there was a loud rock band being amplified out towards the field. This allowed me to hear the behavior of sound on a windy day from all points on the field. Of course, huge mega-watt amplification is an entirely different thing from spatialized acoustic musicians in the hundreds, but as a pure sound experiment it was very useful!
As it turns out, however, I may have a lucky head start for some of my experiments. A young composer here named Moritz Sembritzki (whose 15-horn big band has the excellent handle “Das Grosse Alte Problem”) had a similar response to mine when he walked onto the tarmac here for the first time. And when a friend of his sent him to my website a month or so ago, he got in touch with me out of the blue, offering help and the benefit of his own experimentation. When I told him I wanted to take some horns out there and measure audibility distances between them, above and below certain pitches, at different bell angles (with some margin for wind, and additional atmospheric noise), he said to me, “30 meters.” Turns out, he already took his horns out to the runways and did this very experiment! Here we are - Moritz and me - having just shared an enormous Apfelstrudel over the score of “Tempelhof Etude:”
So my future visits here will probably include some nerdy afternoons with Moritz and our various tools of the trade:
Even before the Wright brothers came to Tempelhof to hone their flight experiments, it turns out that the site was used for ballooning expos and the like. After several days of rain upon my arrival here, I finally got to spend a whole afternoon soaking up the energy of this crazy site, reminding myself why I felt such a strong urge to make a big musical project here in the first place. This was the first time I visited when the temperature was non-extreme (my first visit was a year ago on a scorching day during their heat wave, and my second visit, which was captured in the film we made, was brutally frigid). But it was windy! and all of the kite-skateboarders were out. I watched them for hours, musing about how nothing has changed: people still want to find ways to soar above it all somehow. Here is a picture of one of these modern-day brothers Wright, defying gravity in his own dude-like way:
My first steps onto the tarmac this trip (impossible to communicate the expansiveness of it, but I hope this little video - the first one I ever made on this new camera! - gives a taste of it)
