Music

2015–2019

Technosphärenklänge

The omnipresent, increasingly intelligent device-world is becoming networked to form ever larger infrastructures. How can music respond to the complex intertwining of natural, social and technical processes

2019, Mar 21 — 24

Find the File

Concerts, panels, films, lectures, installations

From record collections to streaming services, from ethnological sound archives to remixed tracks, from audiotapes of wartime radio stations to reissue hype – the way we handle musical material from the past is changing. A discursive music festival on the questions: How is music collected, preserved, selected and reactivated today? What do collections and archives represent? And what can be found in them?

Program

2019, Jul 05 — 28

Wassermusik: Black Atlantic Revisited

Concerts, films

Twenty-five years ago, in 1993, Paul Gilroy's book The Black Atlantic came out, giving a name to a culture that is not specifically African, American, Caribbean or British, but everything at once: a Black Atlantic culture. In 2004, the Black Atlantic project took place at HKW and asked how the diaspora’s history of suffering challenges/challenged art and knowledge to find new forms. For slaves, the written word was forbidden under penalty of death. Although written texts are very significant, not they, but the music are the dominant engine of the wandering cultures of the Black Atlantic. With Black Atlantic Revisited, Wassermusik curator Detlef Diederichsen refers to the HKW project and places the South Atlantic Ocean in the focus of his musical research.

2019, Nov 07 — 10

Right the Right

Music and discourse program

A battle is raging over copyright: The traditional creative industries (publishers, record labels, production companies) versus the digital economy (search engines, providers, streaming services). But what art do we really want?

Past Projects

Walk-in radio archive and platform for listening knowledge

2018, Nov 01 — Dec 10

Radiophonic Spaces

Walk-in radio archive and platform for listening knowledge

What significance does listening knowledge have in our present-day shaped by visual cultures? How are the cultures, aesthetics and politics of transmission and reception changing? In a walk-in radio archive visitors can discover more than 200 works of radio art by John Cage, Friederike Mayröcker, Milo Rau and many others.

2018, Oct 18 — 21

100 Years of Copyright

Concerts, talks, films, installations, performances, publication

A titanic struggle is currently raging over copyright: Publishers and labels are battling over exploitation and remuneration with representatives of the digital economy. Where are the interests of the artists and consumers while the future conditions for creative work are being negotiated? How is cultural production impaired when copyright and artistic freedom are played against one another?

Goodbye UK – and Thank You for the Music

2018, Jul 27 — Aug 18

Wassermusik

Goodbye UK – and Thank You for the Music
Concerts, films, talks

In 2018, Wassermusik takes the Brexit as an opportunity to pay homage to the extraordinary musical creativity that made the United Kingdom the world’s leading pop nation, alongside the US, in terms of music as well as thought, fashion, style and other concepts. Entitled Goodbye UK – and Thank You for the Music, the festival traces the “Britishness” of pop music and investigates its mode of action.

2018, Apr 26 — 29

100 Years of Beat

Concerts, DJ sets, talks, films, performances, installations

The first drum set came on the market in 1918 and triggered a musical revolution: It took over urban dance music and established the triad of bass drum, snare and hi-hat as the combination used the world over. While percussion in European music had long only had an embellishing function, now the drummed backbeat became the heartbeat of music. In others words, African diasporic beat practices in North America and the Caribbean completely realigned European-defined music.

2017, Nov 09 — 12

No! Music

Theme Days
Concerts, films, talks, installations

When there are no more gaps in the system, negation is the last resort. No! Music is searching for dissent in music: artists who work counter to the music industry, musicians who explore discomfort in the face of market mechanisms, or who even experiment with the negation of sound itself; and sounds that are not allowed to be heard – censored and forbidden music.

2017, Jul 21 — Aug 13

Wassermusik X

Festival
Concerts, films, talks

This summer festival held on the loveliest rooftop terrace in all of Berlin celebrates its tenth anniversary. This year’s Wassermusik is dedicated to all those musicians who have given us special moments over the last years, and to all those who have been in the program but were unable to make it to Berlin.

2017, Apr 06 — 09

Free! Music

Concerts, films, talks

How free can music be? Musicians, thinkers and artists dealt with this question in a variety of contexts in the twentieth century. Music should be free and should be freed again and again: freed of the restrictions that tonality or notational systems impose upon it, freed of the limitations of conventional instruments.

Music

Technosphärenklänge

Find the File

Wassermusik: Black Atlantic Revisited

Right the Right

Past Projects

Radiophonic Spaces

100 Years of Copyright

Wassermusik

100 Years of Beat

No! Music

Wassermusik X

Free! Music

Program

The HKW

Service

Social Web

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