Music As Material and Metaphor | Berlin Art Link

"The focus on music in this year's programming at the Hamburger Bahnhof is indicative of a larger trend that has been going on for a number of years, but has really picked up momentum in the last 15 or so. Just as music festivals, such as Maerzmusik, have been looking to strategies from galleries and museums to break through the audience-performer divide, so have museums been programming music, not only as public events parallel to their exhibition format, but as a material that can be used by artists."

"In most cases, it seems music, even when produced for the occasion, comes in the form of a kind of ready-made, a sociocultural phenomenon laden with its own stereotypes, projections and institutional structures, which, when taken out of its usual habitat, could (hopefully) destabilize or expand the mechanisms of art."

"Following this narrative, as would be expected, the appropriated genre is often used in a fairly positive or uncritical way. Music is employed as a kind of remedy for the isolationism, the elitism and perhaps also the literalness of art. Within the gallery context, it can appear as an accompanying soundtrack, a de facto means of communal experience or in the way Kandinsky and Mondriaan once looked up to music-as a form whose, to cite Douglas Kahn from his essay 'The Sound of Music,' "abstracted character was thought to have already achieved what the other arts were attempting.""

"These things were understood to be: "self-containment, self-reflexivity and unmediated communication." Whether or not the poaching of other genres with their accompanying public presentation practices is successful mig"

Music programming at Hamburger Bahnhof reflects a broader shift that has accelerated over the past 15 years. Music festivals have adopted strategies from galleries and museums to reduce the audience-performer divide, while museums have increasingly used music both as public programming alongside exhibitions and as material for artists. Works such as Sâadane Afif’s “Preludes,” Petrit Halilaj’s “An Opera Out of Time,” Annika Kahrs’s “OFF SCORE,” and Lina Lapelytė’s “We Make Years Out of Hours” show a concentration of musically oriented programming. Music is often treated as ready-made sociocultural material carrying stereotypes and institutional structures, and relocating it from its usual setting can expand or destabilize art’s mechanisms. Music is frequently used positively as a remedy for isolationism and elitism, sometimes functioning as communal experience or as an unmediated communication ideal associated with earlier views of music’s abstract character.

Read at Berlin Art Link