clang.bilder

clang.bilder  –  concept/direction Robert J. Crow

The clang.bilder series of New Music Projects NÖ seeks to create an interplay between contemporary music, related artistic disciplines and the culture of the artists’ immediate surroundings. In collaboration with organisations at a local, national and international level, clang.bilder has realised a broad spectrum of projects which explore the intertwining of the personal creative moment with the ever expanding concentric circles of its cultural resonance.

Psyche on the Styx
The Water Tower, Favoriten Vienna, 04.06.2024
Via internet video stream from her bathroom, Psyche takes on all roles from the baroque opera of that name (1670) by the English composer Mathew Locke, and tells her story of a journey down the river Styx to Hell. Her Baroque orchestra is made up of sampled original instruments, with newly composed recitatives and a basso continuo of electronically manipulated water sounds that morph into the voices of the spirits of the underworld.
Music: Matthew Locke, Robert J. Crow, Norbert Math
Voice, performance: Loré Lixenberg; electronics: Norbert Math

“By crystal streams and never fading flowers…”: fehlgedeutete Liebesbotschaften
Klosterneuburg Tag des offenen Ateliers 2023
“Misinterpreted love letters”: the re- and misinterpretation of love poetry from Sumerian clay tablets, the Bible and American hip-hop through mistranslation, religious appropriation and personal ‘klang-association’.

Von der Geometrie der Gefühle
Villa Wertheimstein, Vienna 2023
“The geometry of feelings”:On occasion of the 100th anniversary of twelve-tone music, the project explores the polarity between abstraction and expression in art and music. Etchings of musical instruments act as musical scores while oil paintings form the catalyst for poetry that acts and reacts on the thoughts and feelings that the pictures provoke.  Alongside compositions of Luigi Dallapicola, Arnold Schönberg and Karlheinz Stockhausen, contemporary composers present musical essays in search of the strictness of dodecaphony while following their own contradictory expressive goals.

The Masque of Amor and Psyche
Festsaal der Raiffeisenkasse Klosterneuburg 2022
Arias from Psyche (1645) by Mathew Locke form the framework of a contemporary ‘masque’ which explores tensions between Eros and Ratio – with newly composed settings of Aristotle, the medieval Persian poet Rumi, cabaret songs from England of the thirties, texts from American hiphop, poems by local poets and paintings and drawings by artists from the area.

The Cure of Melancholy, Ausblicke aus einem verfinsterten Raum
Kunstraum Nestroyhof Vienna 2021 
“Views from a darkened room”:  A string quartet focuses the various optic, textual and acoustic aspects of a multi-media project combining sound installation, video, painting, drawing and objets trouvées. Text fragments from Robert Burton’s The Cure of Melancholy (1621) form a commentary both on the music, and – as projections – on the objects of the exhibition.

Bestiary
Villa Wertheimstein, Vienna 2019
A bestiarum in words, sound and pictures, with music by Kees Arnzten, François Couperin, Robert J. Crow, Norbert Math and Igor Stravinsky, painting by Verena Crow, photography by Petra Egg, prints by Kees Arntzen and textile art by Jo-anne Kobald.

„…auf welsche art die zeit gar neu erfunden“
Altes Rathaus Vienna 2018
“…in the Southern manner, re-inventing time”:Italian composers who worked in Austria from 1582 – 1840 are juxtaposed with compositions and photographs by ‘Wahl Wiener’ (‘Viennese by choice’) of the 20th and 21st centuries.  

Walking in Cemeteries 
Villa Wertheimstein, Vienna, 2017
 An evening for bells, piano, harp, speaker, soprano and electronics: with music after inscriptions on church bells and gravestones, texts by Hahnrei Wolf Käfer from “Herbstgedichte” (‘Autumn poems’), oil painting, guache and water colours..

„die Gedanken fielen in einen leeren Luftkorb“
Off-theater Vienna 2015
“The thoughts fell into an empty basket of air”: In ‘mad songs’ of the Baroque and new works by living composers, exceptional states of mind become the material of moving musical encounters. In 17th century London the suffering and fantasising of the inmates of Bethlem Hospital became the stuff of stage ballads. In Lower Austria of the 21st century the mentally ill have their own say, in the overflowing creativity of the poetry and art of Gugging.

Pastorale: Utopien und Elegien
Schneider-Siemssen Studio Vienna 2014
In his heightened ecstatic language, a patient of Gugging mental hospital tells of a night walk through the woods, leading the visitor through pictures of cherry gum, berry juices and oil paint. The journey is interrupted by musical stations that illumine the utopias of the pastorale and elegy with works by Morton Feldman, Arvo Pärt, Toshio Hosokawa a.o.

Hot sunne, coole fire: airs and fancies for a summer night
Schneider-Siemssen Studio, Vienna, 2014.
A recital of extended song for the summer solstice: aria, Lied, air, experimental and traditional improvised singing meet the art of instrumental fantasising from 18th and 21st centuries.

bog burials: I become a bird
Alte Schmiede Vienna, Kulturhof St. Andrä Wördern 2013
A reflection on the processes of transience and change, for harp, voice, electronics, bird song and insect noises, and visual artists working in analogue and digital media – after sources from the Egyptian Book of the Dead, the Irish ‘wake’ and fragments of improvised laments from the European periphery.

die Krähe und der Krautkopf
Kellertheater Wilheringerhof, Klosterneuburg 2013
The Crow and the Cabbage (1981) connects with traditions of English pantomime, limericks, stage magic and comedy routines, attempting to redefine these through its own contemporary musical vocabulary. Thirty years later this ‘burlesque melodrama for a spring solstice at full moon’ grows into a multi-layered collage: a remix with compositions from the project Raptor Reloaded by alien productions, live electronics and visuals that enter into a dialogue with the cartoon-like projections of the 1981 original.

bilderklänge – clang.bilder: zeitgenössische Musik zwischen Volkskunst und Avantgarde
Essl Museum Klosterneuburg 2012
With live music, electronics and video, young musicians and professional artists present an evening with and about the films of the clang.bilder youth workshops 2012 (MUKATO: dir. T. Renoldner), that explores points of connection between folk-art and the avantgard

sang six sad springs: ein niederösterreichisches Mysterienspiel in sechs Gesprächen
Schloss Wolkersdorf 2010
Conversations between the psychiatrist Leo Navratil and his patients in Gugging mental hospital become ‘recitatives’ in a recomposed version of an 800-year-old resurrection drama from Klosterneuburg, telling parallel stories from opposite sides of the border between faith and madness.


Gesänge der Auferstehung aus Sumer, Israel und dem Wienerwald
Filmcasino Wien, Schloss Wolkersdorf 2009, King’s Place Festival London 2010
Songs of resurrection from Sumer, Israel and the Vienna woods:The biblical Song of Songs in re-compositions of medieval plainchant and its putative source text – ritual songs from Sumer of the third millennium BC – meet in a performance for voices, electronics, Zheng and animated film from the broad field of Viennese ‘Aktionismus’.

Are you afraid of silence?
Schloss Wolkersdorf 2009
Animations by young film-makers between 14 and 16 years old, made in the clang.bilder workshops 2009 (direction: Thomas Renoldner)  are presented in a performance which  reflects upon the disturbing subject matter of their works in visuals, music and texts from the Tibetan Book of the Dead.

reimspiele:rhyming games
Babenbergerhalle Klosterneuburg 2008
 A singer, an actor, eight instrumentalists and fifteen young players/singers meet in a music theatre piece about an autistic person who has only retained his relationship to the outside world through fragmentary pictures of his childhood. Through children’s rhymes, teasing songs, proverbs, and children’s games they tell a true fairy story about a path to self-discovery.

Osterspielfragmente (Easter Play fragments)
Stift Klosterneuburg 2009
In scenes from musical easter dramas from the 12th, 14th and 17th centuries interspersed with music by living composers, the story of the Passion is told from the viewpoint of Mary Magdalene.  With texts from the Old Testament and Babylonian sources, Markus Kupferblum leads the audience along a path from hopelessness and mourning to a spring awakening.

clang.bilder: Neue Musik und Trickfilme von Kindern und Jugendlichen
Kino Klosterneuburg 2008  
Animations by 80 children from schools in Lower Austria and Vienna (workshop MUKATO, direction Thomas Renoldner) together with historic silent animations and contemporary experimental animations are framed by live visuals, electronic music improvisations and compositions for Chinese zheng, pipa, flutes and cello.

clang.bilder: neue musik und experimentelle Animation
Film Galerie Krems, Fluss NÖ, Filmklub Drosendorf, Filmcasino Wien, Kino Klosterneuburg 2007
Historic and contemporary animations from Vienna and Lower Austria in a conversation between musicians, soundtrack and the moving picture.

ein Klosterneuburger Lautenbuch: fünf Arten, ein barockes Manuskript zu betrachten
Stift Klosterneuburg, Austrian Cultural Forum London, 2008
Five ways of looking at a Baroque manuscript”:  codex KN1255, the ‘Klosterneuburg lute book’, is viewed through the prism of historically informed performance practice, re-arrangement, re-composition, improvisation and new composition for voice, theorbo, piano and electric guitar.

ordo paschalis 
 Stift Klosterneuburg 2007/8, ORF recording 2007, Festival Passion, musica sacra Linz 2008, Durham University 2007, COMA Festival Doncaster 2008
In collaboration with musicologists from Cambridge, Salzburg and Klosterneuburg, the medieval Klosterneuburg Easter Play is transcribed, re-composed and performed at the place of its origin.