Fish swim silently through the picture while György Ligeti makes passionate appeals for the contemporary behind the aquarium; the female choristers crumple up newspaper to throw it at their conductor; in the early 1970s, a naked woman or a moped is allowed on the musikprotokoll stage; Decades later, the audience marvels at objects falling from the ceiling and crashing noisily into showcases, from beef cutlets to piano keyboards; with the gates open, a duet of passing locomotives and their signal horns resounds, replaced by a sound duel between formula racing cars and trucks: The musikprotokoll looks back on countless highlights in its fifty-year history. Founded in 1968 by Emil Breisach, it is ORF's annual avant-garde project in steirischer herbst and the most traditional festival for contemporary and experimental music. The musikprotokoll functions as a kind of laboratory in which - with all artistic risk - the scouting of new developments and trends is carried out together with the audience. From orchestral music - with the ORF Radio Symphony Orchestra -, music for ensembles and chamber music to performance and sound installation, the challengingly heterogeneous field of genres presented in its nuances ranges as a matter of course, in many cases with works developed and produced especially for the festival, with premieres and first performances. Behind the more than 2,000 performances in 50 festival editions lie many experiments, successes and personalities.

The TV documentary by Günter Schilhan and Christian Scheib weaves a colorful and surprising story of the ORF-produced musikprotokoll festival from mainly those images, reports and features that ORF journalists produce annually for the television audience: an ORF double helix in the service of the latest art and music, in the service of "ORF musikprotokoll im steirischen herbst".

(This text is an excerpt from the booklet of the DVD "50 Jahre steirischer herbst + 50 Jahre musikprotkoll = 100% Kultur im ORF Steiermark", released in 2017).