Concert | New Music on Old Instruments
In times of digital reproduction, the artistic research of London-based composer Aleks Kolkowski takes us back to the early days of musical sound recording and the mechanical instruments developed for this purpose.
His group Recording Angels alludes with its name to the angel that sat on a record as an early label signet and scratched the sound writing into the disc with a quill pen. In the music performance ‘Mechanical Landscape with Bird’, live sound recordings of a canary bird are scratched into the wax cylinder of an Edison phonograph and played back by another phonograph.
Such bird recordings were extremely popular in the early years of the recording industry - birds trained with bird organs sang opera arias and popular melodies and were accompanied by small chamber ensembles. For the ‘Mechanical Landscape with Bird’, the Berlin-based sound artist Martin Riches constructed a bird organ, picking up on a tradition dating back to the early 18th century.
The small hand organ plays short melodies to which the canary bird improvises on stage. He is accompanied by a string quartet on straw instruments, i.e. string instruments with sound funnels that were developed around the turn of the century for mechanical sound recordings. The stage arrangement, characterised by lush flowerbeds, emphasises the gesture of distinguished entertainment of the 1920s. Nature, art and the artificiality of music are combined in the most pleasing way.
Recording Angels
Mechanical Landscape with Bird
for canary, bird organ, phonograph and rotating string quartet with funnel instruments (2004) WP / commissioned work
Aleksander Kolkowski – composition, direction
Martin Riches – bird organ construction
Helmut Moßmann – bird trainer
Kairos Quartett – funnel instruments
Aleksander Kolkowski, Martin Riches – phonographs
Zolle – techniclal management
Jörg Bittner – lighting
Aleksander Kolkowski, Martin Riches, Anja Fuchs – stage
In collaboration with sophiensæle