The Ensemble ascolta initially developed the concept for an innovative, full-evening concert project with the renowned Israeli composer Chaya Czernowin. The collaborative project would involve 7 composers and the 7-member ensemble. The composers are all former students of Czernowin from her time teaching at the University of California, San Diego. She felt that her studio at that time was a very special group of composers, each unique and particularly strong in their vision.
The process of the composition happened in three stages and can be considered dialogical in numerous ways, not unlike the process of making chamber music wherein the performers of an ensemble must act as one:
1. In the first stage, each composer - Rick Burkhardt, Chaya Czernowin, Peter Ivan Edwards, Michelle Lou, Chris Mercer, Ming Tsao and Rob Wannamaker - created an individual musical statement. This 7-8 minute work was in response to an initial material called "the sound" - a very short collaborative composition created by Czernowin and Burkhardt. The degree of engagement with "the sound" was up to each composer's discretion. The responses produced are very unique.
2. These statements, or "islands of individuality", came together formally through the process of ordering them and deciding what materials should be placed between them, if any. From this phase came the various interstitial materials, which are largely ollaborative projects created by pairs of composers. Essential to this process was the group's familiarity of the aesthetic approaches of each composer involved. This familiarity stems from their many years of working and studying together in San Diego.
3. In the third stage, the performers enter the picture. The completion of the music is partially left to them through their role as interpreters of the music. The realization of the work is a collaborative and creative act of transforming sounds into communicative material. The final form of the project, then, exists of a dialog between the group of composers and their materials on the one hand and the ensemble on the other hand. This final phase was achieved through a long rehearsal period wherein composers and performers were able to work closely together. The result challenges the traditional stage situation - it is not music theater in the traditional sense. It has more to do with a "teatro dell'ascoltare".
Roles were often broken through this dialog. There are differences of affiliation to certain aesthetics in the group, which couldn't always be legitimized by the contributions of others. Assumptions were unstable; openness to transformation was essential. In the Ensemble ascolta composer-interpreters engage in a multi-layered dialog with interpreter-composers from the composer group.
A further field of investigation and understanding is the instrumentarium: on the one hand the composer Chris Mercer creates a unique set of instruments for each of his works, and on the other hand there is an engagement with the possibilities offered up by the instruments normally performed by the members of the Ensemble ascolta.
The project enters a new world of radical dialogical structure. It is a contribution to the discourse on the nature of art, questioning artistic borders, roles, and methodologies. It is an attempt to bring the "collective composition" to a new level.
Performances:
19 october 2008 in Donaueschingen
15 november 2008 in Vienna (festival Wien Modern)
21 may 2009 in Stuttgart (concert series "ascolta plays...")
