Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau (1888–1931) / Jannik Giger (*1985): “Nosferatu – A Symphony of Horror” (1922/2017)
Co-production with “Stadtkino Basel”
As a composer and filmmaker, Jannik Giger is used to exploring and overcoming the boundaries between genres. Projects by and with him always bear his unmistakable signature. His affinity with film allows him to set Murnau’s classic “Nosferatu” to music in a sensitive and coherent way, without ever becoming bold or illustrative.
For his new setting of the silent film classic “Nosferatu – A Symphony of Horror” (1922), which was premiered at the Bern Music Festival in 2017, Jannik Giger drew on set pieces from soundtracks to films by David Lynch and Alfred Hitchcock as well as fragments from the Romantic sound world of Franz Schubert. These reminiscences haunt the score, on the one hand as played samples and on the other as compositional recreations for fourteen instrumentalists, thus linking the historicity of the film with the present of its performance. In the transformation of these traces of the sounding past and their juxtaposition with live musicians, Giger blurs the dividing lines between real and virtual sound production. He dissolves the conventional film-musical orchestral sound by overwriting it with a sound collage of alienated orchestral sounds. This has an intoxicating sonic sensuality and fits cleverly into Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau’s poetic imagery, underlining the dramaturgy of the film and yet remaining an independent unit of meaning. Furthermore, Giger’s composition repeatedly identifies its level of quotation as such and thus becomes a reflection on the nature and effect of film music. (Moritz Achermann)
Concert with works by students of the composition classes of the Music Academy Basel. In this edition from the classes of Erik Oña, Caspar Johannes Walter and Michel Roth.
Concert with works by students of the composition classes of the Music Academy Basel from the class of Caspar Johannes Walter and the class for music theory of Gerhard Luchterhandt and Michel Roth (Amador Buda Fuentes Manzor).
EPhB had a central role in the mediation project “Waterways” as part of the biennial festival “ZeitRäume Basel” 2017. The initial idea came from the architect Raul Mera, who had long been interested in the hidden water veins that run underneath Basel’s city center. He was especially interested in hidden canals, such as the one that carries the waters of Birsig river from the zoo to Basels “Mittlere Brücke”. Raul’s concern was to make these water veins tangible, palpable and audible for the population. The project was based on a now 35-year-old project by Herzog & de Meuron, which was never implemented: fountains and open channels on the market square. The renowned German composer Carola Bauckholt and her composition class at the Anton Bruckner Private University Linz were enlisted for the musical elaboration. She realized this idea together with the EPhB and with students of Basel high school classes.
The project travelled as a co-production to Wien Modern and took place around and in (!) the lake at Prater.
The first concert of the EPhB series in 2017 took place in co-production with the Museum Tinguely Basel in the context of the exhibition “Music Machines / Machine Music”. Since the 1940s, the American composer Conlon Nancarrow has written almost exclusively compositions for pianola or player piano, as the instrument is called in America. This instrument was invented at the turn of the century and has inspired composers such as Igor Stravinsky, Paul Hindemith, George Antheil and others to write works for it. Nancarrow has written over 50 “studies” that are not feasible for human hands and fingers. East German composer Wolfgang Heisig met Nancarrow in Paris in the 1990s and has since specialized in reconstructing Nancarrow’s rolls – as a composer, he writes solo works as well as ensemble works with phonola (a machine that is placed in front of a “normal” piano and moves the keys instead of a live pianist). With his strong affinity for unusual sound production, Basel composer Alex Buess contributes a new work for phonola, ensemble and live electronics.