Text & Bilder: Verena Hahn
Ari Benjamin Meyers hat Konzertperformances für Laienmusiker:innen und Opelarbeiter:innen entwickelt, Filme gemacht, mit Choreographen und bildenden Künstlerinnen kollaboriert und in einer Rockband gespielt. Der ausgebildete Komponist und Dirigent, der mittlerweile in Berlin lebt, bekam dabei auch immer wieder die strukturellen Eigenheiten der Räume zu spüren, in denen er seine Arbeit zeigte. Diese Konfrontationen führten ihn jedoch nicht von Institutionen weg. Durch Meyers Arbeit zieht sich ein Interesse an den Strukturen der Institutionen, in denen Musik stattfindet. Anstatt nach reibungslosen Aufführungsbedingungen zu suchen, lässt er immer wieder verschiedene Systeme aufeinanderstoßen. Das, was für diese Strukturen typisch ist, wird in Meyers Arbeiten erhalten, und doch ergibt sich Raum für die Frage, warum wir so arbeiten, wie wir arbeiten, und was jenseits dessen möglich wäre.
In der Kunsthalle for Music kommen all diese Überlegungen zusammen. Seit 2017 zieht Meyers mit einem immer neu zusammengestellten Ensemble in Ausstellungshäuser und führt über mehrere Wochen ein Repertoire von Musikstücken auf, die in einem Songbook gesammelt sind. Doch die Besucher:innen erleben nie zweimal dasselbe Programm: die Reihenfolge und die Zusammenstellung der Lieder variieren von Tag zu Tag; die Besucher:innen selbst können sich frei im Raum bewegen. Die Kunsthalle for Music ist nicht nur eine Auseinandersetzung mit Institutionen, sondern auch mit dem Publikum.
Im vergangenen Spätfrühling gastierte die Kunsthalle for Music, diesmal bestehend aus den Musiker:innen und Künstler:innen Chiara Cecconello, Sandhya Daemgen (Ensembletrainerin), Maria del Mar Ribas, Benjamin Enders, Patrick Hänsler, Sung Mi Marina Kim, Christian Löffel, Christopher Loy, Dominik Schmitt, Roland Sonnabend, Enrico Taubmann und Meyers, im Museum Abteiberg in Mönchengladbach. Mit dem Museum und der mittelgroßen Stadt führt Meyers eine Beziehung, die mittlerweile 3 Jahre und 3 Akte umfasst: nach einem ersten Performanceabend im Sommer 2022 und der Kunsthalle for Music im letzten Frühjahr hat Meyers jetzt eine Komposition mit Fans von Borussia Mönchengladbach entwickelt. “Hymnus (Fankurve)” ist ab dem 19. Januar im Museum Abteiberg zu hören.
Am Morgen des 23. Juni hielt ich Ari Benjamin Meyers für ungefähr eine Stunde davon ab, ganz den letzten Tag der Kunsthalle for Music zu genießen. Im zum Backstage umfunktionierten Café des Museums trafen wir uns zum Interview. Ganz schalldicht war der Ort nicht: alle paar Minuten drang ein “Nooo-oooot” durch die Scheiben, Ausschnitte aus dem gesungenen Manifest der Kunsthalle for Music.
Verena Hahn
So, today is the last day of the Kunsthalle for Music at Museum Abteiberg!
Ari Benjamin Meyers
Yes. It’s exciting and also a bit sad. When you do projects like this, with a group of people performing and working together five, six, seven hours a day every day, they become very close. Usually I’m only around at the beginning to set up the show and at the end. So in a way I’m actually jealous of them because they spend their days in a museum, making music, performing. Of course I’m not jealous of how much work they have to do, but they are living in a very special way. Tomorrow morning, when they wake up, I think it will be very hard for them, a bit like back to a real life.
VH
You just had a discussion with the group in the other space, prior to the opening of this last round. What was this last talk about?
ABM
That’s part of the morning ritual, a thing they do every morning. They meet about 40 minutes before to go through the schedule because it’s different each day. Since everything is the last time today there were a couple of discussions like “I really want to do this piece”. But the usual meeting is to discuss the daily plan, the setlist as we call it, and just coming together, like “How was your night? Did you sleep well? How is everyone feeling?”
VH
You have been doing a lot of very different things already. You have been composing, you have been conducting, you have been collaborating with all kinds of artists… Did you ever have the feeling that it would be a good idea to decide for one thing?
ABM
I had that feeling for a very long time when I was a bit younger and starting out. I had a lot of people telling me that. I had agents, managers, press people saying “We don’t know what to do with you, because what are you actually?” And I myself at that time wasn’t even so able to articulate the answer.
But I also knew that I couldn’t do that because I couldn’t think of any particular one thing I would want to do forever. I wrote music for films, I even did music for a tv advertisement, I played in bands on tour. I guess I have a kind of curious restlessness. I get quickly frustrated and bored, not necessarily with the music making but more with the institutions around it. If I worked too much in let’s say theatres, at some point I’d really get frustrated with the way theatres work and the hierarchies of theatres. The music business also has rules and hierarchies, and the art world too. But for me the contemporary art world is a little bit more free and open. It has its rules, it has its hierarchies, it has its market. But if you would compare it to different possibilities of where you could make work and how you can work, for me personally it has offered the most flexibility and space to work in.
But it took a long time to become accepted. I just kept at it and then it wasn’t so much a conscious decision, but just the happy situation that at some point I was doing it long enough that finally it broke through a little bit in terms of “Oh, okay… That’s what he does, that’s his thing”. I used to do a club night for many years and the press would say I was a DJ – I’m not a DJ, I have never DJed (at least not publically). The press said I was an electronic musician – I’m not an electronic musician. Or a classical conductor – I’m not, I mean I’m trained as a conductor, but I’m not working as a classical conductor. I would see all these things written about me and of course it’s frustrating because you always go “No, I’m not that…”. And after doing enough things, it became its own thing. And now I can kind of do what interests me artistically, people kind of know what that is, I’m often invited to things because they want that, whatever that is.
Now in the world in which we live, which is obviously very consumerist, it’s much easier to fit into some genre. Music is divided into hundreds or even thousands of genres, so people can talk for example about dark wave, neo dark wave, chill wave, etc. It’s easy to put a label on genres. And I’m a little bit proud that you can’t so easily put a label on my work.
VH
It must have taken a while to find people who understand it, but I think there is a big group of people who are exactly interested in this.
ABM
I think so. Oddly enough, thinking of Covid – of course it was terrible. But there was something interesting I found as someone who is working a lot with audience and people, strangers coming together. Suddenly it was forbidden, in fact, illegal, to be an audience. Suddenly people realised, like, “Wow, we used to be an audience. We used to be able to interact.” Before so much was taken for granted.
Even now not all audiences have come back, but in general discourse around these issues is happening now more than before. Institutions, even very conservative, slow moving ones like orchestras were scared out of their mind, because they can only do one thing and suddenly they couldn’t do that one thing anymore. I had people calling me because suddenly they realized, “Oh, maybe we need to start thinking about other ways to be musicians, to be orchestras, to be choirs, to be opera houses.”
Als ich an einem Freitagvormittag zwei Wochen vorher zum ersten Mal zur Kunsthalle komme, ist nicht viel los in den großen, weißen Ausstellungsräumen. Aber die Gäste, die gekommen sind, bleiben lange. Eine andere Besucherin und ich stellen flüsternd fest, dass uns beiden das gleiche Stück am besten gefällt: eine E-Gitarrenversion von der Aria aus den Goldberg-Variationen von Bach, gespielt von Benjamin Jakob Enders. Seit der Eröffnung war sie jede Woche da, an diesem Freitag also zum 5. Mal. Mindestens 6 Mal sind es aber insgesamt geworden, denn am letzten Tag entdecke ich sie in der ungefähr 10-fachen Menge an Besucher:innen auf der anderen Seite des Raums. Wir senden uns einen geräuschlosen Gruß über die Performer:innen hinweg zu, die sich gerade auf dem Boden verteilt haben und “Serious Immobilities” von Ari Benjamin Meyers performen, wie zwei Verschworene, die etwas wissen, was die anderen noch nicht wissen.
Eine ähnliche Art von Gemeinschaft gibt es im Kino oder im Fußballstadion, wenn eine Reihe aus Fans unterschiedlichen Alters und Anreisemittel über den Witz aus der Reihe dahinter lacht. Das ist eine Art von Gemeinschaft, aus der nicht mehr entstehen muss als die geteilte Gegenwart und die Freude daran, dass auch andere an dem teilhaben, was man gerade erlebt. Weitere Gespräche, in denen man seinen Unterschieden auf die Schliche kommt, sind nicht nötig. Hintergründe können hier etwas mehr im Hintergrund bleiben, als anderswo. Viele Räume, in denen diese Art von Öffentlichkeit möglich wird, stehen übrigens gerade in vielen Kommunen und Ländern unter Druck. In Köln soll z. B. der Eintritt von Museen teurer und die Unterhaltungsbeihilfe für Sportstätten halbiert werden.
VH
Did it take a long time to find institutions that are interested in this open way of working?
ABM
At first it was hard, because I was also writing music that didn’t fit. “Solo”, a very early piece of mine, is for one singer and one audience member in a small room. It’s a simple idea. But it was very hard to find where that was going to happen. Because how will a concert house or an opera house sell tickets? Economics is a big part of this. The music industry is always an economy of volume. How many tickets did you sell for the concert, how many records did you sell? That’s problematic, especially for new music or experimental music.
There are very few platforms, possibilities, also financial, to make new music work that isn’t based on volume – not to mention the paradox that if you are making new work it may not always be the priority that people should necessarily like it. Already when I was studying composition I was sensing this weird schizophrenia where somehow you are trying to express yourself, you are trying to break free from all sorts of norms, but at the bottom of it it’s like “But I hope they like me.” Because otherwise how are you ever going to write for the Berlin Philharmonic if people don’t like it? But on the other hand being liked should be the last thing to think about.
The art world works differently. It has other metrics, but it’s not a metric of volume. There are days with Kunsthalle for Music where there’s maybe five people in the museum. That’s fine. That’s how museums and galleries are, sometimes they’re empty. But they’re still open and the works are still hanging on the wall. The ensemble is performing whether there are visitors or not, and that’s possible because of how they’re economically sustained. That’s a very freeing thing. Whereas if you give a concert to no audience it would be a disaster.
“Can we imagine a space for music that exists outside of any media and beyond the stage? A space for unrecordable music, music of undefined duration, existing even when no audience is present?”
Es ist aufregend, das Manifest der Kunsthalle for Music zu lesen. Was verpassen wir alles in konventionellen Konzertformaten? Es gibt zwar nichts, was es noch nicht gab: Konzerte, die im Morgengrauen stattfinden, Stücke, die über einen Zeitraum von hunderten von Jahren aufgeführt werden, Konzerte in allen denkbaren öffentlichen Räumen. Die Kunsthalle for Music steht jedoch für die Möglichkeit, sich über einzelne Werke oder über den finanziellen Spielraum von Festivals hinaus Institutionen für Musik vorzustellen, die nicht nach den Metrics of Volume funktionieren, wie Meyers sie nennt.
Der:die Saxophonist:in Salim(a) Javaid beschrieb kürzlich, warum eine reine Uraufführungspraxis den Werken nicht gerecht wird: weder die Musiker:innen noch die Zuhörer:innen können das Stück wirklich kennenlernen, und die zeitaufwendige Arbeit des Komponierens steht in keinem Verhältnis zu den wenigen Aufführungen, die das Werk am Ende häufig erfährt. Die Kunsthalle for Music könnte also vieles sein: ein festes Haus mit anderen Möglichkeiten, eine Idee, die sich durch Programme und Förderkonzepte zieht, eine Bereitschaft des Publikums, Erwartungen aufzugeben. “Es ist jedes Mal anders”, sagt die Frau zu mir, die am 7. Juni zum 5. Mal kommt.
VH
The Kunsthalle has always been a guest in other institutions. How do you like this guest situation? Is there something that you’re missing in the hosting institutions? Something that maybe only a real Kunsthalle for Music could offer?
ABM
No, I look at it like we’re in a kind of nomadic phase. Trying out different things. Each time we do it there is some different situation.
Of course the idea came up if there could be a permanent, physical Kunsthalle for Music. I think there definitely could be, but maybe not like right now. We’re still learning and it takes a while to understand. It’s super interesting to think what that place would be, what the acoustics would be, what kind of spaces it would have. One would have to talk to architects, acousticians. How does it work with visitors? I thought there should be something like you get a ticket and it’s good for a year. You could even imagine that it could have its own ensemble. Other groups could be in residence, people could sit in rehearsals and all rehearsals could be open to the public. There are many things one could imagine. So I think it’s certainly possible and maybe it will happen one day, but these nomadic, even parasitic takeovers have been really great to understand the limits and different ways of working.
Es scheint, als könnten alle irgendwie mitmachen in der Kunsthalle for Music. Das Publikum darf sich frei bewegen und mit einer oder einem der Performer:innen das “Duet” (2014) von Meyers singen. Und mit dem Sichtbarmachen der Institution werden auch ihre Arbeiter:innen sichtbarer, die am Ende mehr Zeit mit der Musik verbracht haben werden, als die Kurator:innen der Show.
Das heißt aber nicht, dass alle gleich sind. Auf der Website des Museums Abteiberg sind die Namen der Ensemblemusiker:innen erst nach einigem Scrollen am Ende der Seite zu finden, und vor dem Titel der Ausstellung steht in Großbuchstaben der Name von Ari Benjamin Meyers. Es ist am Ende eben doch eine Soloausstellung. In einem Artikel über den Wandel von Clubkultur beschreibt die Musikjournalistin Chal Ravens einen Blickrichtungswechsel: dieser war laut Ravens in den 90er Jahren ganz auf den DJ als einen mächtigen Kenner gerichtet, der über viel kulturelles Kapital verfügt und die Crowd kontrolliert, während wir uns heute der Tatsache bewusster sind, dass das Gelingen einer Clubnacht eine kollektive Leistung ist: vom Barpersonal über Awarenessteams bis zu den Gästen, die mit ihren tanzenden Körpern nicht weniger zur Stimmung beitragen als die DJs selbst.
Auch im Konzertbetrieb hält sich die Unterscheidung zwischen konzeptioneller und umsetzender Arbeit hartnäckig. Dabei werden essentielle kreative Entscheidungen im Austausch mit technischen Leiter:innen, Projektmanager:innen oder Ensemblemusiker:innen getroffen. Der experimentelle Chor Glossa aus Köln zum Beispiel führt in Konzertankündigungen die Gründerin Elisa Kühnl gar nicht mehr gesondert auf. Die konzeptionelle Arbeit wird hier nur als eine von vielen Leistungen begriffen, durch die das kollektive Projekt stattfindet. Ich frage mich, was die Kunsthalle for Music sein könnte, welche Positionen zu besetzen wären, was in ihrem Songbook stehen würde, welche Aufführungssituationen entstehen würden, wenn sie wirklich kollektiv wäre.
VH
In a younger generation of artists there has been a rising interest in collaborative processes and a critical look on hierarchies. Is this an interesting issue for you?
ABM
It is. But I don’t think it’s black and white. Hierarchies and structures are super interesting for me and I work with them. I also studied conducting. If you think about a conductor, it’s almost like the metaphor for hierarchy, you know, the old white guy conducting an orchestra or whatever… On the other hand, so much of conducting is tapping into trying to understand your musicians and channeling that. There’s a reason why I’ve done a lot of orchestra-based pieces. There are hierarchies, but at the same time these groups are also amazing social machines, and then it becomes interesting: how much hierarchy do you need that something functions but not that it becomes just about the one person leading?
I’m not interested in standing in front of people and yelling at them and ordering them around. What I can say with this show is that we rehearse a lot, and then I leave. I’m not here and they are making the show. They have a lot of freedom. There are certain boundaries and there is also a kind of meta score for the show, but when I come back at the end of the show everything has changed and that’s great.
So there’s something between authorship, and giving up control of that authorship. It’s good that these things are being challenged. But there’s a lot of room between old school hierarchical structures as we know them and everything being completely horizontal. Even the act of composing – you’re writing down your thing and giving it to the musicians, and say, okay, play it. But a lot is happening there. How much freedom do they have?
Music has always been about that. I can play a piece of Mozart or Beethoven and I could play it however I want, who is going to stop me? I could play it twice as fast or as slow. Most musicians don’t do that but we have the freedom to do that and still it is this piece by Beethoven. I think music has a lot to say about hierarchies actually.
VH
Maybe we can speak about the songbook. Doing a song book and choosing the songs is reminiscent of making your own canon. What does the songbook represent for you?
ABM
It represents maybe a possible canon, you’re right. It’s people I like, some of it is people I know personally, some not, some I reached out to… It’s not trying to be THE new canon. If anything, maybe it’s trying to be a corrective.
It’s very personal and I just ask people who I thought would be interesting to contribute something to the Kunsthalle, as if we were a museum, “Would you donate a work to our songbook?” that then becomes part of our repertoire. And every time we do it the repertoire grows and changes, so it’s a living thing. And yes, of course it’s trying to suggest a possible canonic shift and having for instance pieces that are conventionally notated side by side with other pieces that are not and not considering them completely unrelated. Like I said, maybe a corrective.
VH
In which way corrective?
ABM
Like not a straight line from Mozart and then Beethoven and then Wiener Schule, but maybe a more weird trajectory. It is at the moment quite focused on European and American composers. I myself don’t know enough. Of course I would love to bring in more composers from other cultures and broaden the scope of Kunsthalle for Music. But I would have to deepen my knowledge about it.
VH
Do quotas matter to you, for example gender?
ABM
For some things it definitely does and for other things less. When we are putting together ensembles I think it’s important that the ensembles be diverse. I try very hard, but it’s not always possible. I think in terms of actual people that you are working with it’s very important and I’m always pushing to have it be equal and diverse, and not to have seven guys and one woman. In other things, for instance the songbook itself, I honestly couldn’t tell you how many female composers there are. I’m sure there are more men. I’m sure you’ve gone through and counted it.
VH
Actually I did, it’s three to one.
ABM
Fair enough. We could argue that it’s a weakness.
I’m just saying for some things I find it very important and with other things, I’m just choosing stuff I like. But if it’s in fact three to one, there should definitely be more, and there are obviously many amazing female composers. It’s again about your own knowledge. I also have to learn and ask, what are you listening to?
There are moments where I really insist, it has to be balanced, otherwise it’s not possible. And there are other moments where it is less important to me. These are processes. I work a lot with orchestras for instance. Orchestras are primarily white and for a long time they were male and white. In the States, there are people who don’t even want to use the word orchestra, because it represents something so European, white, male, elitist. You might remember there was this paper coming out of Oxford discussing if musical notation itself is racist. Well, in Philadelphia we had an orchestra and it was optional whether you could read notes or not.
Maybe 50 years ago no one thought about it, no one cared enough and it’s super important that we think about it now, but that doesn’t mean that instantly everything is changing. It’s also not how the world is, and we have to deal with that and face that, you know. I’ve worked with symphony orchestras where I have for instance aggressively pushed on how many non-white members of the orchestra there are, and it gets very, very intense very quickly. So it’s a process there, too.
VH
The good thing is that it’s also a fluid songbook.
ABM
Very fluid.
Ari Benjamin Meyers dritte Arbeit im Museum Abteiberg in Mönchengladbach, “Hymnus (Fankurve)”, ist ab dem 19. Januar 2025 zu sehen und hören.
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