Since its inception, Klangwerkstatt Berlin has presented concerts, performances and multimedia formats over several days each year. High-caliber and lively performances of relevant musical trends take place across genres and generations. The festival initiates and accompanies the development of new artistic forms and offers space for the discussion of musical aesthetic positions.
A special feature of the festival is the way in which professional ensembles and composers work together with children's and youth ensembles, which has developed over many years and is now a matter of course at this festival. On equal terms and at the highest level, both the ideational and practical mediation of new music for children and young people and the unconstrained, independent performance of important works and promising experiments have been the norm at the Klangwerkstatt since 1990.
The testing of new scenic forms of presentation and the combination of electronic and traditional acoustic instruments are also important themes of the festival.
The festival was founded in 1990 by the composer Peter Ablinger together with students and colleagues under the name Klangwerkstatt - Neue Musik in Kreuzberg at the Musikschule Kreuzberg and was subsequently directed by the composers Orm Finnendahl, Michael Beil and Stefan Streich. Today it is the oldest continuously existing festival for new music in Berlin.
Organized by the Berlin-Kreuzberg music school, the Klangwerkstatt initially saw itself as a platform for its own diverse activities in the field of new music around 1990. Soon the Freundeskreis der Musikschule Kreuzberg e.V. was founded, which is still responsible for organizing the festival today. This was followed by collaborations with many artists and institutions outside the music school and gradually a network developed that was soon active far beyond the city limits.
As history would have it, the beginning of the Klangwerkstatt coincided with the opening of the German-German border in 1989. From the very beginning, there were close contacts between East and West, and works by composers from the eastern part of the city that were rarely performed in West Berlin were performed as early as the beginning of the 1990s. As a result, the festival has always focused on the juxtaposition and gradual fusion of East and West.
By 2018, around 1,500 pieces had been performed at Klangwerkstatt Berlin, of which around 600, or 40%, were world premieres.
Much has changed in recent years, but the most important pillars of the festival have remained constant and will continue to find a protected place in the Klangwerkstatt in the future: the high quality of the many new compositions created for the festival and their realization, the focus of the program on young Berlin and New Berlin artists and, as the foundation of all this, the informal yet concentrated atmosphere that offers an open space for ambitious, cross-media and cross-genre projects.
Numerous composition commissions were awarded and Klangwerkstatt Berlin offered many now renowned composers their first opportunity to present their works to an interested public. Then as now, the festival places great value on the balance in the presentation and sensitively curated juxtaposition of works by young composers, including those still studying and those established in the music business. And the work on the pieces and performances has always been accompanied by great personal commitment of everyone involved.
Here are just a few names in no particular order: Enno Poppe, Peter Ablinger, Kirsten Reese, Johannes Kreidler, Neo Hülcker, Elena Mendoza, Georg Katzer, Carola Bauckholt, Charlotte Seither, Mathias Spahlinger, Iris ter Schiphorst, Joanna Wozny, Friedrich Goldmann, Walter Zimmermann, Alvin Lucier, Erhard Grosskopf, Georg Nussbaumer, Klaus Lang, Chris Newman, Manuel Hidalgo, Mark Andre, Sven-Ingo Koch, Helmut Zapf, Jakob Ullmann, Sarah Nemtsov, Matthias Bauer, Michael Hirsch, Helmut Oehring, Rainer Rubbert, Hannes Seidl, Stephan Winkler, Annette Schlünz, Michael Maierhof, Oliver Schneller, Stefan Streich, Ana Maria Rodriguez, Orm Finnendahl, Mayako Kubo, Fabien Lévy, Ludger Brümmer, Hermann Keller, Juliane Klein, Christina Kubisch, Tiziano Manca, Wolfgang Heiniger, Michael Wertmüller, Jürg Frey, Sidney Corbett, Makiko Nishikaze, Annesley Black, Maximilian Marcoll, Matthias Kaul, Leopold Hurt, Alexander Schubert, Jagoda Szmytka, Phill Niblock, Nicolaus A. Huber, Petros Ovsepyan and many others.
The list could be extended, if not at will, then beyond this framework.
The founding of the Ensemble Zwischentöne by Peter Ablinger is inseparable from the creation of the festival itself. The Klangwerkstatt Berlin offered this group of music students and amateur musicians a platform to present the results of their composition and improvisation experiments to the public. Soon the Kreuzberg music school also formed the ensemble JungeMusik (directed by Helmut Zapf), the youth orchestra Experimente (directed by Gerhard Scherer) and the youth ensembles Progress and multiphon (directed by Sylvia Hinz).
In addition to the diverse activities of these groups, new young ensembles have emerged over the years that were founded as students at Berlin's music academies. A prominent example of this is the now highly renowned ensemble mosaik.
Many ensembles and soloists, both local and foreign, have been guests at the Klangwerkstatt Berlin over the years, such as ensemble mosaik, Sonar Quartett, Ensemble Nikel, MaM - Manufaktur neue Musik, Ensemble Zaafran, Suono Mobile, Daniel Gloger, Marcus Weiss, Quatuor Diotima, Natalia Pschenitschnikova, Minguet Quartett, Andrea Neumann, Susanne Zapf, Rei Nakamura, Fernanda Farah, modern art sextett, Kammerensemble Neue Musik Berlin, Ensemble S201, Ensemble Reflexion K, Decoder Ensemble, Ensemble 2x2, Solistenensemble Kaleidoskop, aleph Gitarrenquartett, Ensemble LUX: NM, Ensemble Adapter, Stock 11, Les Femmes Savantes and many more.
