Logothetis+

2021 marks the 100th anniversary of the birth of the Austrian-Greek composer Anestis Logothetis. Logothetis is regarded in Europe as the inventor of the so-called graphic notation of music. But also in the rest of Europe and in the USA in the 1960s there were a number of notable attempts to write down music differently than in the conventional symbol notation, i.e. with the means of graphics or simply as verbal playing instructions. Common to all these works is the unconventional notation, which implies that a certain degree of indeterminacy, which we compensate for in the conventional way of notation with stylistic competence, has to be sought elsewhere than usual. In this respect, the notion of improvisation usually applied to the performance of graphic music remains problematic. As promising as many of these attempts were, they all met the same fate of loss of meaning and fell more and more into the background. The reasons for this are manifold and lie partly in the inadequate preparation and performance of these pieces, which in their certain indeterminacy undoubtedly placed more responsibility on the interpreter than in conventionally notated music, but also in the rigidity of the institutions, whose orchestras to this day have not mustered the necessary flexibility and seriousness to deal with this kind of music. At the same time, the environment that graphic music or text music requires corresponds much more to today's social manners and circumstances than to the anachronistic-hierarchical ones of the usual orchestra or performance business.

This is the occasion of a concert program with the OENM, which refers to Logothetis and builds a bridge to the present with some new pieces by younger composers.

Notabene: There are a number of previously unperformed scores/graphics by Logothetis that will be played in the planned program.

In addition, there are works for various instrumentations by Maria de Alvear, Alexander Hermann, Rupert Huber and Charles Uzor. With the exception of the work by Huber, all of these works are world premieres.

Concept: Rupert Huber