Dear Friends and Colleagues,
On May 19 at Kühlhaus Berlin I will present ETHICS songs in search of a moral compass with the pianist Jacob Greenberg and filmmaker Jordan Freeman.
Hier können Sie die folgende Einladung auf Deutsch lesen.
We hope you'll join us for an evening of music that neither diverts nor clarifies, in which moral high ground dissolves in shifting harmonies and new questions emerge. We offer it as a space of communal reflection and a study of past artists who've turned their work towards the search for justice. Stay with us after the concert to connect - the bar at Kühlhaus is always a good time.
ETHICS songs in search of a moral compass
Kühlhaus Berlin
19. May 2024
19:00 bar opens / 19:30 music
The centerpiece of the program is the premiere of Berlin Verses, my adaptations of Hanns Eisler and Bertolt Brecht's Hollywooder Liederbuch. It will be accompanied by film material from old friend and fellow activist, the Los Angeles-based filmmaker Jordan Freeman, turning his camera towards the absurdities, beauties and horrors of present-day LA.
The ethical and political search that inform my adaptations of Eisler and Brecht is framed by Eisler's rarely heard setting of Brecht's An die Nachgeborenen, in its original form. Brecht's tryptic poem adopts a nearly biblical, prophetic tone at times, inviting us to program Brahms' setting of Biblical texts on mortality and ethics in the Vier ernste Gesänge. After hearing his influence in Eisler's atonal compositions, Jacob will present Arnold Schoenberg's Op. 23, Fünf Klavierstücke as a window into the composer's radical aesthetics. For fun, we throw in two songs of Ferruccio Busoni on texts from Goethe's Faust on fleas, rats, and power run amok.
We hope to see you there! You can book tickets online for 10-60€. The sliding scale ticket price asks you to balance the invaluable nature of art and music, the value of our work, and your means.
This is the first event of A Circle, a multidisciplinary collective-in-formation creating works driven by critical engagement with ecology, interconnectivity, and power. If you are interested to know more about our varied undertakings, you can get an overview of what we are doing at this link.
Hope to see you there!
Andrew Munn