Forum Neue Musik 2023 - In der deutschen Nachkriegszeit

Contemporary witnesses describe Germany after 1945 as a flight from reality, a lack of mourning, and even a general coldness of feeling. The undoubtedly traumatized population is now preoccupied with moving on: with reconstruction, reintegration of those returning home from war and camp imprisonment, with clarifying or covering up their own actions during National Socialism and the war. Many Germans see themselves as the main victims of the war.

Approaching a closed time

We approach this closed time, distant to us today, through its musical expressions. The Forum 2023 visits serious and light music, which was created before, during and after the Nazi dictatorship in Germany and whose authors were rather conformists, inward emigrants, also fellow travelers.

What do their musical works say, what do they conceal? And what of the unfinished business speaks from them when we listen to and re-politicize them today?

For the 15th time, the Forum is sponsored by the Kunststiftung NRW. It is produced as a radio festival and broadcast in eight programs: in the Deutschlandfunk program as well as online. In our chamber music hall, we welcome you to two live evenings!

We offer two concerts in the Radioforum, which you can attend in Cologne. Students from the music academies in Hanover and Mannheim, for example, will reflect the decade from 1923 in an explosive song program. Frankfurt's Oliver Augst and Marcel Daemgen deconstruct film hits and songs from the 1930s to the 1950s.

And: Olaf Reitz and the Essen-based E-MEX Ensemble combine seemingly unrealistic piano works and songs with reports from a highly contradictory social reality. Commissioned by Deutschlandfunk, the Israeli-German composer Eres Holz writes large ensemble music that addresses repressed war experiences.

Free admission. Registration: here.

Radio Forum

The artistic projects will be flanked by music journalistic formats. Composers on Hitler's "Gottbegnadeten List", female characters in post-war operas, the beginnings of compositional reflection on annihilation and trauma, and music-political experiments in the early days of the GDR will be up for debate. One program is devoted to the collaboration between Karlheinz Stockhausen and Recha Freier.

Frank Kämpfer

Invitation: Two evenings live in the Chamber Music Hall

Concert Thursday, 26.10.2023 / 19:30 / Deutschlandfunk Kammermusiksaal (Cologne)
In the desperate search for normality .
Musical-literary evening with Olaf Reitz, Amira Elmadfa, Martin von der Heydt, Eres Holz and the E-MEX Ensemble
Direction: Christoph Maria Wagner

To register for the concert visit: here.

Which emotional states circulate - in view of the ruins, the camps, in view of Hitler's end and the presence of the occupying armies? Susanne Kerckhoff's "Berlin Letters" bring this impressively to the point. Combined with texts by Hannah Arendt, Inge Müller and Hans Magnus Enzensberger, German post-war perceptions are articulated as dismayingly unacknowledged, even topical. Even seemingly harmless compositions by Hermann Reutter, Boris Blacher and Ernst Hermann Meyer suddenly become eloquent in such a context. The evening, featuring actor Olaf Reitz, mezzo-soprano Amira Elmadfa and the E-MEX Ensemble, leads into the world premiere of an ensemble work by Israeli-German composer Eres Holz that addresses repressed experiences of war.

Broadcast on: 11/27/2023, 9:05 p.m., Music Panorama.

Concert Saturday, 28.10.2023, 19:30 / Deutschlandfunk Kammermusiksaal (Cologne)
Davon_geht_die_Welt_nicht_unter
Songs Schlager of the conformists - newly interpreted
With: Oliver Augst (vocals), Marcel Daemogen (electronics), Sophie Agnel (inside piano), Jörg Fischer (drums)

To register for the concert: here.

Oliver Augst and Marcel Daemgen have been working on their project "Archiv Deutschland" for 25 years. Song material from different eras and political-aesthetic spheres is artistically deconstructed and examined for buried core messages. In this case, well-known songs and hits from the 1930s to 1950s are reinterpreted and supplemented with reality that they conceal: a program between new music, pop and improvisation: disturbing, dark, sometimes danceable.

Broadcast on: 11/26/2023, 10:05 p.m., concert doc.