“But if there is a sense of reality, and no one will doubt that it has a right to exist, then there must also be something that can be called a sense of possibility,” wrote Robert Musil in his novel The Man Without Qualities, published in 1930. This open-minded, provocative, and hopeful way of looking at the future also fascinated Luigi Nono, who took this sentence as a kind of credo for his own work. The 100th anniversary of Nono's birth provided an opportunity to look back on him and his music at the Klangwerkstatt Berlin 2024 from November 8 to 17 and, in his spirit, to encourage a broader perspective on contemporary music. To open our ears to the subtle, fragile, and new in our awareness of the present, in order to make us sensitive to the hopeful and possible in the future. The video documentation presents the complete program online.
→ to the video documentation 2024
“The smallest social unit is not a person, but two people”. Brecht's remark describes society not as a collection of atomic individuals, but as molecular energy. It is about exchange and dialectics, about communication and empathy. This applies to music just as much as it does to theater. Klangwerkstatt Berlin 2023 took place from November 10 to 19 at Kunstquartier Bethanien and Fahrbereitschaft with 23 events under the title Kollektiv und Gemeinsinn (Collective and Public Spirit). The video documentation presents the complete program online.
→ to the video documentation 2023
2022 Klangwerkstatt Berlin took place from November 4 to 13 at Kunstquartier Bethanien in Kreuzberg. The motto of the 21 events was Schönheit (Beauty). Beauty can sensitize us and – literally – take hold of us. It allows us to discover the unknown in the familiar. It is therefore an act of self-empowerment and freedom. The video documentation presents the complete program online.
→ to the video documentation 2022
Klangwerkstatt Berlin 2021 took place at Kunstquartier Bethanien in Kreuzberg from November 5 to 14. The festival focused on an aspect that seems like an echo of the lockdown period: the loudspeaker. It played the leading role several times in very different contexts as an instrument in its own right. The program included 25 concerts and performances. The video documentation presents the complete program online.
→ to the video documentation 2021
Due to the coronavirus, everything was different at Klangwerkstatt Berlin in November 2020. The festival was supposed to celebrate its 30th anniversary. Instead, the audience had to stay at home and the concert hall turned into a recording studio, resulting in videos of 18 concerts with 70 individual works, presented by more than 200 musicians ranging from professionals to primary school children, as well as numerous interviews with participating artists. All of this was published as an online festival in February 2021.
→ to the Online Festival 2020
