In his lecture Music in the Expanded Field, originally titled Wide Is the New Deep, Marko Ciciliani takes a look at how today’s composers typically include a wide range of activities in their practice. Expanding their field rather than jumping the fence.

An interdisciplinary experience that can play a role even when working within the medium of music alone.

I’ve been catching up on lectures from the Darmstädter Ferienkurse 2016. They’re fortunately all available in audio form via Voice Republic with a handy podcast feed so that I can get them into Overcast.

I started off with Klaus Lang’s Liebe und Notation. Klaus was a fellow student back in the day when I studied composition with Younghi Pagh-Pahn in Bremen. He enjoyed the long trips from the Austrian mountains to the flat spaces of the German north: Creating open spaces happens to be one of the main features of his music.

The second lecture I’ve gotten round to has been Theater – Macht – Kritik – a concise overview of the changing views on theatre since the Greeks. I found it useful as a framework – as a tool for placing the kind of mindset (the director’s inszenierung as central focus) that Pelle Gudmundsen-Holmgreen came up against when getting his opera staged, as discussed at Frankenstein’s Lab last year.