[last tickets] Graindelavoix

A very warm welcome to Klarafestival!

Flanders Festival Brussels, Klara and our partners are delighted to greet you once again. “I believe audiences aren’t just listening. They are actively contributing”, festival artist Barbara Hannigan remarked in an interview. Concerts are an interaction between the audience, artists and anyone who is contributing to those magic moments in front of or behind the scenes. Together we ‘become’ music. 

As a conductor and soprano, Hannigan is a global reference point. With her, classical music becomes a contemporary and unique experience. This is an inspiration to Klarafestival as the largest broadcast festival in Belgium. Her versatile talent is sure to enrapture you, as is that of the many Belgian and international artists who connect past and present with musical stories.

Klarafestival opens in style with Hannigan as conductor of the London Symphony Orchestra. After that, you will hear and see her with young musicians from her mentorship project Equilibrium Young Artists. In no fewer than 25 concerts, we present top talent including Les Talens Lyriques, the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra with Mirga Gražinytė-Tyla and Vilde Frang, and the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra with Víkingur Ólafsson. Klarafestival also treasures creation. The film concert Reich/Richter as a symbiosis of Gerhard Richter’s paintings and the music of Steve Reich; the creation Counterforces by composer Frederik Croene to text by poet Dominique de Groen; and the music theatre production Prey by Kris Verdonck with a composition by Annelies Van Parys will surprise you!

This and all other concerts are possible thanks to the collaboration with our cultural partners: Bozar, Flagey, Kaaitheater, Théâtre Varia, Muntpunt, Concertgebouw Brugge and DE SINGEL. Thanks to our private partners KPMG, Proximus, Brewery Omer Vander Ghinste, Belfius, Interparking and the players of Belgium’s National Lottery. We are grateful for the support of the Flemish Community and the Brussels Capital Region. And finally, thanks to Klara and VRT: there would be no broadcast festival without their valued collaboration.

Joost Fonteyne

Artistic director of Klarafestival

Rolling Stone: Antoine Brumel’s Earthquake Mass in times of disaster

What can art and music mean in times of disaster and crisis?

Graindelavoix consulted Pieter Bruegel, who in around 1560 painted stone-coloured grisailles as a reaction to political disasters and iconoclasm; and the French composer Antoine Brumel, whose 12-part Earthquake Mass was rediscovered in the same period. For these artists, Christ’s resurrection is not equivalent to insurrection or revolution, but to a petrifying confrontation with the thundering, the rubble and a black hole. On the ruins of present and past, Graindelavoix recreates Brumel’s composition, introduced by footage from the short neo-realistic documentary Il Culto delle Pietre (1967) by Luigi di Gianni. Add to the colour and the grit of the vocals the deliberate anachronism of four brass players and the interventions of the Portuguese avant-garde guitarist Manuel Mota, and you get an idea of Graindelavoix’ disaster atlas.

Björn, for this brand-new Graindelvoix programme, what brought you to Antoine Brumel's Missa Et ecce terrae motus, known as the Earthquake Mass?

It is an old dream of mine to perform this crazy composition for twelve voices. For Brumel’s time this work was unique: it is full of contrapuntal contradictions and is incomparable to what was composed at the start of the 16th century. I have always been fascinated by compositions of this kind, which precisely because of their exceptional position are essential to a certain historical period. By taking them seriously and regarding them as crucial, you automatically change the existing image of the past. And I am convinced that in so doing, you also change your own time. With Graindelavoix I want to take an anti-historical position: it is precisely the friction between art and the prevailing norms within the period in which this art was created that interests me. Brumel’s Earthquake Mass is literally just such an artistic breaking point.

Can you explain this in more detail?  

The French composer Antoine Brumel was a contemporary of the far better-known composer Josquin Desprez. He composed this twelve-voice Mass in around 1500, and for this took the first seven notes of the antiphonal melody Et ecce terrae motus from the Easter liturgy as a basis. Around this constantly recurring cantus firmus he wove a pattern of rising and falling lines. At first glance, it appears to be an orthodox approach to a Mass for Easter. In the Christian iconography, the resurrection of Jesus is depicted as a positive event: generally you see a triumphant Christ with a waving banner in his hand, surrounded by witnesses. But Brumel does not participate in this. He resolutely opts for the sonorous experience of the earthquake. And there is more: the voices’ continuous rise and fall not only mimic the rolling away of the gravestone; they are also full of harmonic contradictions that represent the sound of tectonic cracks. It is perhaps a cliché, but you could describe Brumel as the first eco-composer. His vision of nature is a dialectic one, one in which imperfection, destruction and disaster are, as it were, written into the very process. Hope and renewal must be imagined out of the catastrophe itself.

You believe that the Flemish painter Pieter Bruegel, a quasi-contemporary of Brumel, takes a similar position? 

Yes, I believe he does. On a conceptual level he takes this vision even further, perhaps stimulated by the political context at the time. That which is already a latent presence in Brumel’s Mass becomes even more explicit in Bruegel’s artistic project. And it is only thanks to Bruegel’s art that Brumel’s composition shows its true potential. What’s more, his Earthquake Mass is linked in a special way to Bruegel’s art: the original source of the Mass had long been lost, but right after the iconoclasm in 1566 it appeared at the Bavarian Court, thanks to the intervention of the French-Flemish composer Orlando di Lasso. And at that very same moment, Bruegel developed a new type of grisaille painting in Flanders, as a response to the destruction of the artworks, and as a form of criticism of the religious representation of art. His Resurrection Grisaille displays a similar dialectic to Brumel’s Mass: in Bruegel’s depiction, what is supposed to represent the triumph of the Christian faith is perhaps the most uncomfortable and disturbing depiction of this scene in Western art history. The figure of Christ is a marginal detail; he is floating somewhere right at the top of the painting, almost invisible, in amongst the clouds. All attention is focused on the angel who reveals a dark hole.

So how did you approach the music? 

Unfortunately the handwriting has fallen victim to its time and has become steadily less legible due to bacterial infections. But instead of reconstructing these gaps in the score in a historically accurate manner, these actually served as a new starting point for us. We began with the idea that catastrophes and distortions can be deployed as fruitful dynamics and even operative instruments. And thus we developed a simmering, slowly evolving and almost parasitic playing style for the instrumental ensemble. The electric guitar, the serpent, the cornet and the two horns are close to the singer’s skin and form an eerie reflection of their chants, infected by deviations, shifts or deflections. I wanted to create an apocalyptic sonority, which is why I chose this specific instrumentation. In addition, the choice of musicians also had to contribute to a kind of anachronistic historicity. Thus I chose serpent player Berlinde Deman not because of the historical context of the instrument, but because of the way she approaches the melancholy and ominous temperament of her instrument, based on her experience in jazz and experimental music. Of course horns with bending techniques and hand stop techniques are again unthinkable in 16th-century polyphony. But thanks to their vocal character and sliding technique they were a perfect match for Graindelavoix’s voices. And I already collaborated with guitarist Manuel Mota ten years ago. I was looking for someone who would use his intuition to only add what was absolutely necessary to the original material, based on the mood that the singers construct.

Why have you chosen to start the performance with an Italian documentary film from 1967? 

What you are shown is just a circular cut-out from the original documentary by Luigi di Gianni. In it, residents of a village in Abruzzo wallow in the dust of an underground crypt, in search of healing for their spiritual and physical ailments. They themselves become stone, by manner of speaking. Manuel Mota created a new soundtrack which is played live during the performance, and from which the Earthquake Mass was subsequently created, almost like a gently slumbering, invisible disaster. I enjoy presenting the audience with an apparent narrative, and this continues to work and throws you out of balance. This prelude to the actual Mass is essential for me, although it does not have a clear meaning: it gives the audience the opportunity to act as a seismograph for the subsequent Earthquake Mass.

interview by Graindelavoix

Graindelavoix 

Graindelavoix is an international music and art company based in Antwerp. It is led by Björn Schmelzer; was founded at the beginning of the 21st century; and offers a contemporary and critical interpretation of chiefly historical, vocal repertoires. The critical questioning of old repertoires, their aesthetic and political dimension, their shifting and alienation often leads to controversial performances in which the audience is challenged but also made complicit. Alongside the core singers, the company regularly collaborates with other musicians, visual artists, dancers or theatre makers.

Björn Schmelzer

Björn Schmelzer is an anthropologist, conductor, writer, cineast and artist. He works as artistic leader of the Antwerp-based music company Graindelavoix with which he gives concerts in both Belgium and abroad. With Graindelavoix he has also recorded more than 17 CDs with musical repertoires for which he always conducted extensive research. This research finds its way into essays, lectures and publications. The approach to and horizon of Schmelzer’s work is located on the interface of speculative theory, psychoanalysis, (music) history and art history.

Alex Fostier

Alex Fostier studied animation at the ‘Ecole supérieure des arts visuels de la Cambre’ and sound engineering at the ‘Institut des arts de diffusion’. He has been working with Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker as a sound technician since 1991. In addition, he regularly collaborates with the Ictus ensemble, Blindman Quartet, Wim Vandekeybus, Alain Platel, Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui and Graindelavoix, among others. 

Caspar Langhoff

Since 2004, Caspar Langhoff has worked as a lighting and set designer with Aurore Fattier, Matthias Langhoff, Maud Finet, Laurence Calame, Arsenic, Jean-Benoît Ugeux, Olivier Boudon, Sebastien Monfè, Lazare Gousseau, Anne Cécile Vandalem, Myriam Saduis, Christophe Sermet, Emmanuel Texeraud, and the musical ensemble Ictus.

Margarida Garcia

Portuguese bass player Margarida Garcia has been developing a very personal and distinct language for electric contrabass. In the subterraneous sound of Lisbon, she met guitarist Manuel Mota, a close collaborator since her musical beginnings. Visual arts also plays an important role in her activity. Since 2014 she lives between Lisbon and Antwerp, where she works frequently with the ensemble Graindelavoix.

Do you need to pour out your heart after a performance? Then come to De Biechtstoel [The Confessional]! An invisible confessor will ask you questions about what you have just seen and heard. The sound of these conversations is recorded and then edited with images created live during the performance by an illustrator, resulting in a compilation of audience reactions to that evening.