Contemporary music festival in Berlin features Middle Eastern musicians

MaerzMusik Festival of Contemporary Music will interweave several different themes and include composers and performances from Turkey, the Levant, the Maghreb and Egypt

The MaerzMusik Festival of Contemporary Music, held from 15-24 March, is one of the most important German festivals dedicated to contemporary music.
According to the organisers, this year, the 12th year of the festival, "pursues three dynamic, partially interwoven themes, presented under the headings Percussion, Minidrama – Monodrama – Melodrama and Break & Change: Turkey – Levant – Maghreb."
As well as a large number of German composers, musicians and orchestras who are participating in the festival, this year's edition also features artists from the Arab World, including Egypt.
Held every year in Berlin, MaerzMusik festival aims to showcase the contemporary classical music scene.
As well as a series of concerts, the festival incorporates a dynamic programme of meetings and roundtables where musicians and music lovers can exchange ideas and get acquainted with the new direction of the contemporary music.
Among several thematic lines, this year's festival looks into the development of German music, with the spotlight placed on German contemporary composers, artists and orchestras. A few events are held under umbrella of Initiative Musik aiming to present “The Legacy of Wagner and Weill.”
MaerzMusik also gives a big platform for presentation of musical and artistic riches of the creative minds from Turkey, Levant and Maghreb, along with elements from the rest of the Arab World.
The festival will also include Egyptian musician Mahmoud Refaat, a Cairo-based composer known for his experimentations with electronics. Refaat is also founder of an independent label, 100 Copies Music.
An ongoing installation titled "Polis. Istanbul – Cairo – Jerusalem – Beirut" aims to produce an audible illusion of being at four geographically separate locations simultaneously: 11am in Cairo, Beirut, Jerusalem, and Istanbul. The installation is held at Haus der Berliner Festspiele, until 24 March.
The MaerzMusik organisers explain that in this installation a technician's sound check before a concert at the Place des Martyrs in Beirut coincides with the signal of a cargo ship sounding its horn while entering Istanbul harbour, collides with the hum of traffic in downtown Cairo and an ambulance siren recorded at Mount of Olives just outside the old city of Jerusalem.
"This artificial texture immediately raised numerous questions of urban cultural sonic identity, the impact of architectural and geographic conditions on the acoustic environment of cities, the degree of acoustic presence of religious symbols such as the muezzin, the ringing of church bells, or the chant of a nearby Talmud School," say festival organisers.
Among other elements of MaerzMusik is a musical installation including video documents of Anatolian folk musicians, a musical search for cultural identity, which includes artists from the region, with Turkish and Armenian guests.
‘Wormholes,' an ongoing audiovisual project by artists from Lebanon: painter, cartoonist, author and musician, Mazen Kerbaj and guitarist Sharif Sehnaoui, presenting a free improvisation where the artist draws live on stage, projecting his painting process onto a screen accompanied by the "unusual sounds" from the guitarist.
Beirut-based musician Tarek Atoui, will present ‘Metastable Circuit,' his autonomous electroacoustic instrument, which is "a networked ensemble of desks made of computers, hard and software, controllers, touchpads, conductors and wired interface, etc."
A number of composers from Turkish, Kurdish and Jordanian origins will showcase the contemporary compositions from the region, where Western music is entwined with the influences from the musicians' homelands.
For more info and full programme of this year's MaerzMusik, visit the festival's website here.
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