»Torn« | Musik 21 Festival

Cityscapes encounter radio silence; birdsong is doubled, then doubled again; and quiet, handwritten letters hold feverish ideas about the universe. In this concert, the violin serves as a means of meditation on nature, silence, and the release of tension—a liberation of sound and thought. “Torn” finds personal solitude in various forms of repetition, in musical stillness that becomes silence or noise—depending on whether the audience listens inwardly or loses focus.

The Program: A Collective Meditation

The violin is presented at times unadorned and alone, at other times amplified or in interplay with electronic audio material, featuring a selection of works by composers Bahar Royaee, Carola Bauckholt, Farzia Fallah, Stuart Wheeler, Peter Ablinger, and Jack Sheen. These pieces are at times like dissected poems translated into sound—some vocal, some visual, some catching in the throat, some parroted by our animal cousins. In this collective meditation, we begin to ask whether a piece of music is even intended for public consumption. In “Torn,” the violin is tuned and retuned; the violinist acts as a sage, storyteller, messenger, and mediator, while the audience dances gently between humming light and abstract melodies.

“What kind of times are these?” – The Musik 21 Festival 2026

Silence or a scream? Act, react—but how? Or look away? Caught between power and powerlessness, between cries and silence, the Musik 21 Festival 2026 unfolds its program and takes up Bertolt Brecht’s question: “What kind of times are these?”—a question that remains as relevant today as ever.

“What kind of times are these?” wrote Bertolt Brecht in 1934 in his poem “To Those Yet to Come,” denouncing the fact that a conversation about trees was almost a crime because it implied silence about so many atrocities. In this way, he responded artistically to the silence surrounding the atrocities of his time, which are likely similar to our own: fascism, militarism, the threat of war and annihilation, and, not least, a hegemonic callousness.