new space

Master classes on the performance practice of historical and contemporary music

10 – 15 September 2012

In addition to its characteristic property as temporal art, music is also a spatial art. And this in two respects: firstly, the multi-dimensional textures of a compostion open up musical spaces for the listener. Musical structures thus create spatial sounds. Secondly, since the middle ages music has often been composed for particular spaces, and is thus literally "space-bound". Whereby sounds in space resulting from instrumental polyphony or echo effects between individual instruments are undoubtedly the most remarkable properties of this music. New sound spaces can be created from both these aspects - individually or taken together - and they are to be found in both historical and contemporary msuic. As when, in Petro Locatelli's Baroque Sonata Op. 2 No. 12, two ensembles play the same music but slightly offset and the strange feeling of having an acoustic squint steals over the listener. Or when Gérard Grisey in his work Vortex Temporum, created between 1994 and 1996, unfolds the musical material with the perseverance of a master-builder as "the story of an arpeggio in time and space" (Gérard Zinsstag).

The Ensemble Academy 2012 will focus on these new experiential spaces in historical and contemporary music. It is fitting that the newly built Ensemble House will also be opened this year, providing the rehearsal home for the Freiburg Baroque Orchestra and the ensemble recherche: new spaces for two inqusitive ensembles!