A gesture is nonverbal communication. So is there an image without a gesture? A gesture without an image? Music without gesture? What gestures act in music? What do we understand when we hear acoustic gestures, what does our body understand when it assimilates gestures that we have heard? Clemens Gadenstätter has sketched three compositional answers to these questions by working on musical figures and gestures that have become images with fixed meaning. He bases this work on the Baroque theory of figures and musical rhetoric, the acoustic images of 19th and 20th-century programme music (all of which seem to have lost none of their impact, for example in contemporary classical music), and the codified image sounds of contemporary film music and Gebrauchsmusik. “Iconosonics” gives these codified sound figures back their purely musical, acoustic, rhythmic and harmonic qualities and sets out in search of those yet to be discovered. While their meanings remain as memories, they can be experienced anew as a result of the transformation.

Fri 07/10, 21.30 Clemens Gadenstätter (A) Figure
Ensemble L’Instant Donné (F)

Fri 08/10, 21.30 Clemens Gadenstätter (A) Picture of an exhibition
Ensemble L’Instant Donné (F)

Fri 09/10, 21.30 Clemens Gadenstätter (A) Bodies
Yaron Deutsch (IL) & Krassimir Sterev (GB/A)