musikprotokoll 2022 
6–9 October 2022 

“Whodentity” is a word we coined for musikprotokoll 2022 in order shed light on currently pressing questions about identities. What is meant by “we”, which identity is socially assigned to whom and by whom, who are “we” in a given context if most authors are men? It is a process that stretches over decades, that is as gradual as it is radical, that in some ways goes unnoticed but at the same time can shake the very foundations of society, a process that over the course of this period has also been described as such: the gradual disintegration of affiliations that were formerly accepted as unshakable and indisputable – a process of constantly searching for an ever-changing “whodentity”. 

Much of this clearly has to do with patriarchal structures and male dominance, therefore, let us for now stick to the obvious. For decades, centuries in fact, professional, public musical education in Europe has been dominated by men. But in the same breath one must add that this perhaps appears to be the case because music history was likewise under the influence of male hegemony. That a music history from, say, the Late Renaissance to Early Baroque could also be written differently, for example with female composers from Maddalena Casulana Mezari to Vittoria Raffaela Aleotti and from Leonora Duarte to Francesca Caccini, is a fact that cannot be denied and is also urgently necessary, however it would do little to alter the male (numerical and cultural) dominance that existed then and still persists to this day. 

But let us stay close to what we do, to new and contemporary music, to musikprotokoll, to contemporary ensembles, to the Vienna RSO. Here, of course, a number of counterexamples also immediately come to mind. For a long time, the Vienna RSO was with Annemarie Kläring-Ortner (since 1976) followed by Maighread McCrann the only orchestra far and wide with a female concertmaster. And since the 1990s the composer Olga Neuwirt has been challenging us with ever new, bold, boundary-pushing projects and compositions. Some important works from the early years of her career were commissioned by our festival ORF musikprotokoll in the styrian autumn. And while the alternative of a female or ceterosexual “whodentity” in a male-dominated music world may not seem completely out of the question, if we examine the musikprotokoll statistics of the early years and literally do the math, we are startled to find that in the 1960s and 1970s the number of performed works by female composers barely constituted 0.6% of all performances. Not to mention female conductors. This has had a certain sobering effect on us, even if meanwhile, that is to say over the past twenty-five years, the number of female authors at the musikprotokoll festival has risen to 30% to 40%. The fact that the boundary between the performative and the composed is becoming increasingly permeable has led to an even sharper rise in the percentage of females. 

But after almost fifty-five years in this extremely structurally conservative and still very male-dominated concert genre, we decided that for musikprotokoll 2022 and its concerts with Ensemble Modern, the vocal ensemble Cantando Admont and the ORF Vienna Radio Symphony Orchestra, which meanwhile also has a female principal conductor, we wanted to completely change course and present world and Austrian premieres by exclusively female composers. Conducting this year’s Vienna RSO concert will be Yalda Zamani, who is not only an outstanding conductor but a multifaceted artist who also distinguishes herself as a creator of experimental performances and who will be performing her Goat Song Project at musikprotokoll 2022. Among the works for orchestra and soloists being played at this concert are world premieres by the British-Iranian artist Shiva Feshareki, who will also be performing as solo turntablist, and the Croatian-Austrian composer and festival director Margareta Ferek-Petrić, whose piano concerto will be performed by the Austrian-Romanian pianist Maria Radutu. For the other half of this concert, we will be continuing musikprotokoll traditions, for example with Olga Neuwith’s Austrian premiere of a commissioned double concerto for cello and percussion. The cello part will be played by Tanja Tetzlaff. And because the word “whodentity” calls identity into question, the programme also includes a work entitled Identifications. Composed in 1970 and revised in 1996, this work is by the composer who nearly accounted for the aforementioned 0.6 percent all on her own: Luna Alcalay, who was born in Zagreb in 1928 and died in Vienna in 2012.  

This is followed by a concert with Ensemble Modern featuring Austrian and world premieres by the Croatian-Austrian composer Mirela Ivičević, the Serb-German composer Milica Djordjević, Petra Strahovnik from Slovenia, Justė Janulytė from Lithuania and Tania León, who was born in Havana, Cuba, in 1943 and has lived in the USA for the past few decades. The vocal ensemble Cantando Admont will sing Austrian and world premieres by the Austrian composer and pianist Elisabeth Harnik, the German composer Charlotte Seither, the Romanian-German composer Adriana Hölszky as well as the South Korean-German composer Younghi Pagh-Paan. 

But interesting aspects in contradictory, subtle, colourful, more radical configurations lie beneath the man-woman binary, too. We have at our disposal not only a male hegemony but markers of group belonging, such as “human being” versus “artificial intelligence”. By the 1980s we also had access to the appropriate vocabulary, provided to us by wordsmiths and idea generators like William Gibson with Neuromancer and Cyberspace or Neal Stephenson with Avatar and Metaversum. At first referred to in musikprotokoll projects as “multimedia”, then “interactive” and later “immersive”, such themes have been artistically addressed in past editions of musikprotokoll, from a sophisticated soiree in 2001 and alien city realised in Graz in 2003 to Alexander Schubert’s project planned for 2022 with the AI programme Av3ry as a non-binary persona. At any rate, Av3ry is a virtual persona who composes music, communicates with people and is capable of learning through interaction. This project has also given rise to the poster motif of musikprotokoll 2022. And the experienceable, participative installation Unity Switch makes it possible to see things through the eyes of various people and to interact on a virtual level. 

But hold on. The unforeseeable about the paradoxical search for what constitutes identity – and this brings us at least somewhere in the vicinity of what our word creation “whodentity” wants to suggest – the exciting part of this search for the markers of belonging that make up who we are does not necessarily have to involve science fiction worlds. In keeping with the notion of the search for such artistic manifestations of “whodentity” in the musikprotokoll archives, one obvious consideration might be the previously mentioned composer Olga Neuwirth, her music and her compositions, including their titles. 

Whereas the traditional, meanwhile obsolete, binary gender scheme (female–male) has been updated on health forms to include “other”, and on forms to be filled out at the Registry of Births, Marriages and Deaths one can choose between “male”, “female”, "nonbinary”, "intersex”, “questioning” and “no answer”, and while many of us have only a vague notion of the colourful range of genderfluid and sexual diverse potential beneath the surface of the ever-evolving acronym LGBTIQA+, the colourfulness, diversity, inhomogeneity and sometimes incorrectness of earlier historical genres and subgenres, humans and beasts, goddesses and gods, mythical creatures and fairy-tale figures are, at the same time, paradoxically being called into question and their very right to exist challenged. Among the contradictory aspects of the debates over what (ultimately) makes all of us who we are is precisely the charged relationship between liberation, diversity and colourfulness and the strong wind that often pushes back at the same time and gives us a hint of the crisis mode awaiting those who insist on upholding the status quo. Diversity, however, can under certain circumstances be sacrificed, especially if (more or less historical) fantasy dimensions come into play: unicorn and Greenland shark, witches and warlocks, he-devils and she-devils, gangsters, dragons and lindworms, seraphim and sea creatures, trolls, giants and monsters. Speaking of monsters: the “Vampyrotheutis infernalis” as an embodiment of an “other” world order and an “other” order of beings conceived as a non-anthropocentric alternative, ideally from an anti-anthropological point of view is shifted into the limelight in musikprotokoll performances in the early and mid-1990s with world premieres of two of Olga Neuwirth’s works, the titles of which were inspired by the Vampyrotheutis proponents Vilém Flusser and Louis Bec: Vampyrotheone and Akroate Hadal. Characteristic of her work during those years, Olga Neuwirth’s hybrid, fluid, nervous, agile music that knows no calm moments and no certainties can be heard and interpreted as an early emanation of a search for “whodentity”. But, of course, here in this brief text Olga Neuwirth’s art is mentioned as but one of many dozens, even hundreds of other art efforts that artists have undertaken at various musikprotokoll festival editions over the past decades in their attempts to understand identity more deeply. 

For more than fifty years, musikprotokoll has been an art festival for contemporary sound, for the liminal tones that linger on, and the utopian anticipation of hearing. It is not mired in philosophical-sociological theory, even if some programme entries over the past decades may suggest otherwise. And since we are interested in fathoming the concept of “whodentity” less in a sociological-philosophical than in a sonic and conceptual art context, let us not insist on “decentralised identities against the background of postmodern tendencies toward individualisation and pluralisation”1, as it might have been expressed two decades ago, nor do we want to take up the subject of an “adherence to the traditions of one’s old native country or discuss the retreat to the ghetto versus an (over)conforming to the norms of the new environment”2, as it might be expressed politically today. 

musikprotokoll takes all this into consideration, but what we are looking for are contemporary, conceptual, sound projects that in any manner whatsoever explore a modern “whodentity”, whatever that might be. In doing so, we suspect, or know, that we will most certainly end up with “whodentities” (in the plural). 

While this text is being written, many of the musikprotokoll 2022 artists have long since begun working on or are already completing their projects and works. It is hard to determine to what extent our theme “whodentity” will find its way into these works, but some telling indications are already discernible. 

As mentioned, Unity Switch by Alexander Schubert absolutely fits with the motto “whodentity”. Goat Song Project by the composer Yalda Zamani, who will also be conducting this year’s Vienna RSO concert, is a concentrated interactive, semi-improvisational chamber music version elaborating various aspects of life in the artistic in-between realm of “whodentities”. 

In cooperation with the University of Music and Performing Arts Graz, the final performance of this year’s musikprotokoll festival is the chamber opera Avatara by Christof Ressi, which centres on “two indeterminate figures who are lost in space as it were, searching for a fluid identity situated somewhere between analogue reality and digital virtuality, between authentic and simulated life.” Alluding to a larger and also historical context, the text on this opera goes on to say: “The desire to leave one’s own body and take on another physical form is an archetype, a common thread running through all epochs and cultures. It is reflected in the countless legends of shapeshifting deities, spirits and other beings and extends from Greek mythology to contemporary fantasy literature.” 

Born in Zagreb, Marco Ciciliani grew up in Germany and currently works in Graz. Here his statement on his project for musikprotokoll 2022: “WHY FRETS? applies a post-colonialist and techno-feminist free-fantasy reading of the history of the electric guitar, and that has been charged with symbolisms of masculinity, manhood and sexuality like almost no other Western instrument.” 

And maybe there really is an at first so unremarkable and yet quite striking degree of real implementation of the “whodentity” question buried in the simple fact mentioned at the beginning of this piece that three of the concerts programmed for musikprotokoll 2022, that is to say those “traditional” concerts that are conceived in the classical form with a stage and an audience, present music exclusively by female composers. 

Ukrainian postscript: The planning of this year’s festival edition was, of course, already completed way before Putin launched his mad war against Ukraine. Twice in recent years an above all fantastic, but also young, Ukrainian string quartet, the Danapris String Quartet, has played at musikprotokoll, and some of the musicians have become something like friends. We checked in with the two violinists and learned that they were trying to escape to Kyiv and that for the time being they neither could nor wanted to leave the country. Then we noticed that in March a new Ukrainian CD had been released on all digital music platforms: music by contemporary Ukrainian composers, played by Kateryna Suprun, the violist for the Danapris String Quartet. She had recorded the album during the coronavirus pandemic prior to the outbreak of the war, and now it had been released. Like Valentin Silvestrov, whose music had also been played by the Danapris String Quartet with Kateryna Suprun at musikprotokoll – Kateryna Suprun had meanwhile fled to Berlin with her mother and young daughter. We have invited the artist to present a few Ukrainian treats from her new album for solo viola at musikprotokoll 2022.  

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1,2 Rolf Eickelpasch and Claudia Rademacher (2004). Identität. Transcript Verlag, Bielefeld p. 1–9.