How many songs do you know and which ones did you learn as a child? Songs have been invented for every occasion, for every emotional state, for every shift in life. Work songs, love arias, songs for mourning, for manifestations, lullabies, hymns and lamentations – they are sung to tell a story in a different way. Das Lied doesn’t exclusively appear as a complex art form, to which Schubert had elevated it, but might as well be regarded as musical gossip, as a fleeting, polyphonic form of communication –spreading stories, news, sharing … The relevant question is to which songs we listen to, which story should be circulated?

ONE-DAY FESTIVAL

Curated by Eva Reiter, this 4-stage Liquid Room in Bern will be a one-day festival as usual – a firework display of unique pieces of music, scattered songs with unforeseen echoes. It will also be our second experience with Svletana Maraš and Pony Says. Svetlana has developed a very particular style that could be described as “modular improvisation”, pre-composed material intertwines with real-time-composing which guides us into a world of immense sonic richness.

NEW ROLES
Pony Says – who possesses all the keys to Maraš's music – is perfectly emblematic of the musical language of our time, and typical of its generation: rather than merely executing the composer's ideas, the trio has developed a distinctive personal “sound”, consisting of all the best ingredients of written music, free improvisation and pop culture. Eva Reiter has followed this guiding principle of a new allocation of roles between performers, composers and improvisers, adding the most intimate of her own expertise and subjectivity, and her own experience with early music. All the diverse threads of this evening’s programme are woven into an invisible net, through which we look at the very original, simplest and most archaic manifestation of music, the Lied.

FOUR CENTURIES OF SONGS

We perform songs by John Dowland, admiringly seen as "the first singer-songwriter in Renaissance time" by Burkhard Stangl; an aria by Henry Purcell, satirized by Francesco Filidei; and we reach the pinnacle of the art of „Liedkultur“ with excerpts from Franz Schuberts Winterreise in two mutations – in Martin Schüttler‘s version for AI voice and piano, and Bernhard Lang's contemporary song cycle The Cold Trip. An interpretation of Schubert’s Der Leiermann by Eva Reiter takes the title of the song even one step further playing on a self-made lyre accompanying the narrative voice. All this revelry concludes with Jürg Frey’s rich musical cosmos – „spare to the point of vanishing, his works suspend fragile harmonies above stretches of percussive rustling and spells of silence“, as expressed by Alex Ross.

SOCIAL RESONANCES

How can we revive the pathos of pre-modern and romantic songs, make their sobs and shivers felt, distil them like a strong alcohol in a new aesthetic compatible with our present? It is basically Luigi Nono’s question that Eva Reiter brings up, but in a less ascetic way than the old Venetian, and without fearing the warm and cosy sounds of pop music refrains and minimalist daydreams. Communities in resonance and dissonance, collectively experienced joy and mourning songs – as an alternative form of “storytelling” – certainly have a transformative power. Stories and music bring us into contact with our nature, the best and the worst of it. They enable us to empathize with other people’s experiences and allow for alternative perspectives.