Passing the Baton and Participating: Keeping New Music Alive

The International Ensemble Modern Academy (IEMA) was founded in 2003 to educate a younger generation about the plethora of movements in current music and an open, creative approach to artistic processes. It offers various programmes, including education projects, master courses for instrumentalists and formats for composers. One central element is the master’s degree in contemporary music, a course with a unique concept offered since 2006 in cooperation with the Frankfurt Academy of Music and Performing Arts (HfMDK). Launched in 2003 as a one-year fellowship programme at the initiative of the Kunststiftung NRW, to this day every fellow receives a scholarship, currently financed by grants from the Kunststiftung NRW, GVL – Gesellschaft zur Verwertung von Leistungsschutzrechten, the Crespo Foundation and the KfW Stiftung. For this edition of our magazine, Stefan Fricke talked to flutist Dietmar Wiesner and double bassist Paul Cannon about the degree course.

Stefan Fricke: Dietmar, which was your exam piece when you completed your studies?

Dietmar Wiesner: I played several pieces for my exams at the Detmold Music Academy, for example by André Jolivet and Jean Françaix. A truly modern piece, however, was not on the programme.

SF: Paul, how about you?

Paul Cannon: I studied at Rice University in Houston, Texas – with a different system than in Germany; we didn’t finish with an exam. I didn’t explicitly study contemporary music in school, but I did study several modern pieces. The first one was ›Valentine‹ by Jacob Druckman at the end of my bachelor’s studies, so maybe that was the beginning of my contemporary music explorations.

SF: How important is a master’s degree course in contemporary music today?

PC: It’s important for a certain type of musician who needs more than what a conservatory or academy can offer. They need practical experience in an intense setting, quite focused on music of the 20[sup]th[/sup]/21[sup]st[/sup] century. There are very few opportunities to do that at most conservatories. This is one place where you can do that at a very high level.

DW: That said, one has to note that there are music academies where pieces such as the flute solo ›Cassandra’s Dream Song‹ by Brian Ferneyhough are taught today. The one thing that is still mostly lacking, however, is teaching »the culture of ensemble playing«. In this light, our master’s degree course is a beacon in the landscape of music academies; the manner, duration and intensity of our one-year course are all quite extraordinary.

SF: Since 2006, the master’s degree course has been offered in cooperation with the Frankfurt Academy of Music and Performing Arts, so that the fellows also receive an academic certification.

DW: It’s a master’s degree, but not in solo performance; it’s in ensemble performance.

SF: What is the teaching like? Surely, the focus is on the various facets of new music, with all its demands on the performers, which has long meant more than »only« mastering breakneck new playing techniques, but also speaking, acting, dancing.

PC: I would say it’s learning by doing. Sometimes I call the course the »experience factory«. One is confronted with a very large mass of music, very different styles and very different challenges, which is actually quite reflective of our lives in the Ensemble itself. So the students experience one year working up to the pace that Ensemble Modern works. Within one year, as the IEMA-Ensemble, they will encounter approximately 80 challenging pieces, some of which they perform at international festivals. As Ensemble Modern, we are here to show them the best methods for dealing with various situations.

DW: The IEMA-Ensemble not only plays in Frankfurt, but also at the Witten Days of New Chamber Music, the Lucerne Festival or, thanks to the Ulysses Platform, at the Gaudeamus Festival in Utrecht and at Impuls in Graz. Having a presence there is excellent for networking, which is another skill we foster. I also want to point out that all fellows can have individual lessons with any Ensemble Modern member: flutists can study with trombonists or percussionists, cellists can study with pianists, etc.

PC: We encourage them to take lessons with as many members of the Ensemble as possible, so that they encounter many different perspectives.

SF: How do I imagine ensemble coaching? Is there always someone leading the group, or do they do that amongst themselves?

DW: Both. We pass on the idea that inspired Ensemble Modern, which is grassroots democracy. They should learn to deal with one another, to reach agreements and balance their ideas. Many rehearsals, however, are also coached, by as many different Ensemble Modern members as possible. In fact, we always include pieces that are outside the familiar canon, practicing forms of improvisation and choreography which might lead – or force – people to discover quite different talents in themselves.

SF: One of the special features of the IEMA master’s degree course is the position of sound director, which is a fixture in interpretation and performance, but is a skill hardly taught anywhere.

DW: That is truly a novelty in the musical landscape.

PC: The sound directing students have an important position within an ensemble. They do the same artistic work as anyone else in the group, but they also do a lot of preparation which is invisible to the musicians – for example the technical setup.

SF: Any kind of electronics, whether audio or video, increases the effort and work required.

DW: Yes. And the repertoire requiring electronics is continuously growing.

SF: The second unique feature of the master’s degree course is that a composer is always part of the group, sometimes even two.

DW: It’s extremely important that the composers spend a whole year as members of the IEMA-Ensemble, so that they experience music from the other perspective. Not only from the perspective of writing it, but also of collaborating. We try to integrate them, especially in the pieces that are more loosely structured than others.

SF: What do the performers gain from the presence of the composers?

DW: In this exchange, they experience how composers think about music and perceive music. Often, they have very different motivations than the players.

PC: Incidentally, each composer writes two pieces for the IEMA-Ensemble during the year of the course. Of course it is very useful to see from the inside how an ensemble works.

DW: The composers can do as many try-outs as they like with individual colleagues. They can work with two, three or four people. They also have at least one, sometimes two large ensemble rehearsals as a try-out, where they can experiment with things in a group – something most music academies cannot offer, unfortunately.

SF: Music education is also a course module?

DW: The fellows also have their education projects, going into schools; every year, they do at least one project. Paul was very closely involved in developing this module together with the Frankfurt Academy of Music.

PC: Education is a big part of the master’s degree course. The students are also given training in more general presentation methods, how to present a piece by talking, for example. In our Workshop Concerts, each player has to come to the front of the room and talk nicely to the audience about the piece they’re about to play, at least once.

DW: We recently had a visit from students at the Academy. One of our current IEMA conductors was rehearsing the piece ›…fließend…‹ by Georg Friedrich Haas with the IEMA-Ensemble, which is about building up an accelerando over and over. He explained it so well to the students that they found the courage to conduct it themselves. That was a really good experience for all involved.

SF: Do you know the paths the graduates of the IEMA master’s degree course have taken – by now, there are over 300 of them?

PC: They work in very different areas. Some of them went into orchestras or became professors; others landed in other ensembles, for example in Klangforum Wien, Ensemble Recherche or Ensemble hand werk.

DW: … or they founded their own ensembles, for example MAM.manufaktur für aktuelle Musik, Broken Frames Syndicate, Fabrik Quartet and Trio Catch, which was the first to be founded among the IEMA fellows and graduates.

SF: And which composers are among IEMA’s alumni?

PC: For example Brigitta Muntendorf, Vito Žuraj, Dave Fennessy, Elnaz Seyedi, Martin Grütter, Diego Ramos Rodríguez, Vassos Nicolaou, Ying Wang, Marko Nikodijević. Most of the alumni are freelancers. Quite a lot of what this academy is training for is work in the freelancing scene. I think for the people who know about it, it’s a stamp that this person knows what they are doing, because they were part of IEMA.

SF: Thanks to the activities of IEMA, several additional new music ensembles were founded, some of them were just mentioned earlier. Isn’t that competition?

PC: Not really. Actually, I see it in a very positive sense. Even if Ensemble Modern would play a different concert every day of the year, it wouldn’t be enough. We need more ensembles to present this music at a high level, for it to be alive. There are so many great composers. We don’t have time to present them all. We can’t be everywhere every day all at once. I don’t see this as competition, on the contrary: it benefits all of us.

DW: I agree. Most ensembles founded from within the Academy have chosen very different programmatic approaches, taking avenues that are so different that we don’t even overlap.

PC: We also invite the alumni to come and play with us from time to time.

SF: How have the students changed over the course of the years?

PC: I have been with Ensemble Modern since 2014, and I have noticed a big change in a certain mentality. Ten years ago, they were not asking so many questions about the realities of the business and the market. I think today they are much better informed and much more aware of what happens when the Academy is finished. They think more strategically today.

DW: They are also much more broadly informed; IEMA is not their only source. Another big difference is that many musicians are becoming more »complete«: they are aware of the totality of music, from classical to modern, because the market demands that. The people who come to us today are no longer necessarily specialists in contemporary music, or want to become such specialists. They want to spread their capabilities across an extremely broad foundation.

SF: Where might the development of this master’s degree course be leading?

DW: The next step might be to make not only IEMA, but the entire house a place of education and training, that the house becomes much more of a place of encounter – for courses, for events of all kinds, involving all the institutions, Ensemble Modern, IEMA and Junge Deutsche Philharmonie.

SF: Could you describe that in somewhat more concrete terms?

DW: Let’s take the IEMA Workshop Concerts, for example. I think it would be great if they didn’t remain an internal event, but were open to the public. Another wish would be making the attendance of school classes or kindergarten groups at rehearsals much more common, and for a lively exchange between this house and other institutions. The other day we had a workshop where Winrich Hopp, the artistic director of Berlin’s Musikfest and musica viva at the Bavarian Radio, made an excellent remark: as experts involved in this field, we have the privilege to hear scores by Pierre Boulez, for example, thousands of times, which is an incredibly intense experience. The audience ordinarily does not have this privilege; a piece whizzes by their ears once, and they have to deal with those one-time impressions. We have to give people more opportunities to delve into these worlds, to present music to them in very different forms: for example, in an informal rehearsal situation, where perhaps they can stand next to the conductor for a bit, maybe even conduct a very short excerpt themselves, etc. And then there is the format of the semi-concert, or the semi-conversation, something we have long been practicing in our ›Happy New Ears‹ concerts. Those are things we should expand and intensify.

PC: Well said.

SF: New music as participation.

DW: Yes, as a truly organic part of life. And in times when, for example, music lessons are increasingly being cut and curtailed, the only ones who can do something about this are organizations like ours.