Happy New Ears

In order to rehearse and develop the increasingly complex scores – at times demanding unorthodox instrumentations and requiring enormous technical abilities from the performers – together with the composers and to deliver exemplary performances of these scores, during the 1970s specialist ensembles like the Ensemble Intercontemporain in France and the Kranichsteiner Ensemble and – somewhat later – the Ensemble Modern in West Germany were founded. This development also took place beyond the Iron Curtain. After the Wall was built, a younger generation of composers, including Friedrich Goldmann, Georg Katzer and Friedrich Schenker, came to attention in the GDR. However, not only were they subjected to restrictions from cultural functionaries, but also confronted with a situation in which there were hardly any qualified artists with the necessary enthusiasm to engage with new music, unpopular as it was. With the Gruppe Neue Musik Hanns Eisler in 1970, Burkhard Glaetzner and Friedrich Schenker founded the fi rst specialist ensemble for New Music; it was to remain the only in the GDR for many years.

In the second part of the series ›Divided – united‹, taking place on January 28, 2014 (8:00 pm, Frankfurt Opera), Heike Hoffmann discusses the founding and work of this ensemble with Burkhard Glaetzner and Nicolaus A. Huber, but also the diffi culties of working as a freelance ensemble under the conditions of state-directed music politics. The concert features a fictional encounter between Ensemble Modern and the Gruppe Neue Musik Hanns Eisler: in his »double role«, the EM musicians perform Georg Katzer’s ›Szene für Kammerensemble‹ and Nicolaus A. Huber’s ›Seifenoper‹. Burkhard Glaetzner interprets Friedrich Schenker’s solo piece ›Monolog‹.