Benedict Mason, Ensemble Modern

The relation between music and the place of its performance is one of the central issues in new music. Parallel to the discussion about the breaking-up of ideologically determined ways of reception and traditional views on concert settings, the questions of space and place have increasingly influenced the compositional process. Under the heading “Music and Space”, MaerzMusik 2005 will present some extraordinary compositional approaches that treat ‘space’ as a central, a compositional element.

One of the highlights of the festival and reflecting the above concept will be the Berlin première of Benedict Mason’s felt/ebb/thus/brink/here/array/telling by Ensemble Modern on 12 March. When the piece was first performed at Donaueschinger Musiktage 2004, it became the undisputed highlight of the festival. Mason’s work consists of 12 sound studies played by 48 musicians in ever changing spacial arrangements on instruments especially designed by the composer. It forms part of a series of compositions entitled “Music for European Concert Halls”. In all of these compositions, the concert halls function as a kind of resonance box where the acoustic and architectonic particularities of the ‘space’ are articulated and rendered audible by human beings producing sound.