From 17 to 19 October 2024, with concerts and workshops at the temporary bauhaus-archiv and the Villa Elisabeth, Bauhaus Music dedicated itself to the theme of freedom. On bauhaus stories, we delve deeper into the historical and contemporary background of the project.
Music at the Bauhaus 1919 to 1933
Bauhaus and music – a combination only few have fully appreciated. And yet, the first guest event at the Bauhaus in Weimar in 1919 was dedicated to music, and many more musical performances followed. When the school opened its doors to the public for the first time in 1923, music played a significant role. Famous composers like Igor Stravinsky, Paul Hindemith and Ferrucio Busoni were invited to the five-day Bauhaus Week in Weimar in 1923 to witness the performance of their works which opened the exhibition.
„I felt released, freed“
Bauhaus Music 2024
Freedom is more relevant than ever before and is the central theme of the 2024 “Bauhaus Music” festival. With a spotlight on “exile”, the three-day festival highlighted artistic and political positions and forms of expression surrounding the concept of freedom, past and present. The moderated concerts included works by Arnold Schönberg, Kurt Schwitters, Johann Sebastian Bach, Béla Bartók, Alban Berg, Stefan Wolpe, Cathy Milliken and Ruth Crawford Seeger. Numerous artists and renowned soloists like Claudia Barainsky, Kolja Blacher, Gunnar Brandt-Sigurdsson and Jocelyn B. Smith, and the Deutsches Kammerorchester Berlin came together over three days to explore the musical life and work at the Bauhaus.
Thursday, 17 October
Musical freedom and new perspectives. The Bauhaus Music Festival 2024 kicked off with excerpts from Mark Blitzstein’s opera ‘Parabola and Circula’ and Cathy Milliken’s radio play ‘Driving with Fatima’ at our temporary Bauhaus Archive.
Friday, 18 October
Bach, Bartók, and Berg – the second evening continued with a varied program at St. Elisabeth Church, featuring the Deutsches Kammerorchester Berlin and Kolja Blacher.
Saturday, 19 October
The event concluded with a diverse program: Schwitters, Seeger, and Schönberg intersected with experimental soundscapes. The concerts were accompanied by a comprehensive outreach program. On the grounds of Villa Elisabeth, ‘Sounds for the Future’ presented ‘Early Reflections’, and there were opportunities to engage creatively and musically in the bauhaus_werkstatt and the workshop ‘The Art of Listening’.
Outreach formats
Various workshops were being offered to school-aged children in the lead-up to the festival. For example, composer Cathy Milliken had had the pupils tell their stories and made them audible using very simple means. In another project, artists Alexandre Decoupigny and Claire Fristot worked with 11th-graders from the Carl von Ossietzky comprehensive school to grasp the principles of the Bauhaus by means of musical composition. Here, too, the focus lied in exploring how music relates to the lives and reality of the young participants. The results of the various projects were presented at the festival.
Bauhaus Music: an interdisciplinary research project since 2021
The Bauhaus-Archiv / Museum für Gestaltung has been studying the relationship between the Bauhaus and music in an interdisciplinary research project entitled “bauhaus music” since 2021. The team of art historians and musicologists systematically reconstructed musical life at the historic Bauhaus sites of Weimar, Dessau and Berlin.
The festival kicks off with a sensational discovery: While researching musical life at the Bauhaus, scholars recently unearthed the 1929/30 avant-garde opera “Parabola and Circula” by the American composer Marc Blitzstein. It was supposed to debut at the Bauhaus theatre in Dessau, but the performance was ultimately cancelled. At the opening of the “Bauhaus Music” festival at the temporary bauhaus-archiv, audiences will get to hear excerpts of the opera for the very first time. Inspired by Blitzstein’s occupation with Constructivist Art, “Parabola and Circula” tells the story of a romance between a square and a dot, accompanied by many other geometric shapes. Marc Blitzstein, along with Kurt Weill, is one of the most influential composers of anticapitalistic and antifascist theatre of that age.