Series: musikprotokoll 2020

Hidden Sounds
on stage – on air – online

7.10.–11.10.

It has not been an easy path to this fifty-third edition of the ORF musikprotokoll festival. Our wish is to counter the past months’ uncertainty in planning with a “planned variety.” Besides numerous live concerts, this year’s festival offers sound installations, audio walks, music drama, and projects conceived for the Internet and the radio station Österreich 1.

Sound can serve as a metaphor for omnipresence. Physiologically, we are not able to close our ears. Sound always surrounds us, but we only perceive it selectively. Our brain decides what is processed and what is blocked out. In this edition of the festival, we are presenting various approaches to detecting and working with Hidden Sounds.

Music enables us to access the reality of such sounds, which the human senses can only perceive in a rudimentary way, if at all, and which are frequently only technically measurable or even imaginary. It explores this reality, transforms it, gives rise to new worlds of sound, and leaves them behind again in a next step.

The audio and sound explorations of Hidden Sounds are performed and interpreted by the Vienna Radio Symphony Orchestra (RSO), first-rate ensembles for contemporary music, and musicians from SHAPE, the EU festival network for innovative music and audiovisual art.

Director: Elke Tschaikner

Curated by: Rainer Elstner, Susanna Niedermayr, Christian Scheib, Elke Tschaikner, and Fränk Zimmer

A production of ORF Radio Österreich 1 and ORF-Landesstudio Steiermark

In coproduction with steirischer herbst ’20

In cooperation with the University of Music and Performing Arts Graz, Ö1 Kunstradio, SHAPE – Sound, Heterogeneous Art and Performance in Europe, ICAS – International Cities of Advanced Sound, Institute for Art in Public Spaces, Museum der Wahrnehmung MUWA, Institute of Electronic Music and Acoustics (IEM), Akademie Graz, esc medien kunst labor, Conto musicale, Bildungsdirektion für Steiermark, and die andere saite

Supported by the Creative Europe program of the European Union