Weird machines, videos and even live animals – the composer and installation artist Georg Nussbaumer spares no efforts to address all of our senses with his vibrant, space-embracing acoustic artworks. The Austrian composer has structured “Ein weststeirischer Wasserfall” as another complex work of sound and hearing that – linking tradition with the present – casts a glance into the future.

For the first part of the event, seven Styrian choirs join the audience to embark on a coach trip from their respective home towns to Stainz. During the various stops at places where water flows – at the village fountain, streams and ponds – the choirs perform Nussbaumer’s composition: a long sound floating through the afternoon, continuously changing, rising and falling, branching out – with echoes of traditional folk and choir song celebrating water, that precious common property. The singers are also equipped with water bottles that serve as instruments, tuned anew at each body of water.

In 2006, when his project “Gravitational field with air impressions” kicked off the steirischer herbst festival, countless objects rained down from the ceiling for this airy composition. For “Barkarola”, six grand pianos roamed around the Polish town of Łódź for six weeks, while “Invisible Siegfrieds Marching Sunset Boulevard” in Los Angeles turned into a four-day, thirty-two-kilometre–long opera passage. This time, a resounding and whistling “bottle organ” draws near, to be received by Vocalforum Graz at the end of the afternoon in Stainz’s parish church, later flooding the sacred building with a concerted wave of voices in the second part of the event.