The Trans-traditional Music Lab is a public, experimental, and future-oriented working process that culminates in a three-day multi-format festival and a multimedia e-book publication. The two-year music laboratory explores the question of how a multi-perspectival, post-migrant orchestra practice can be created that gives expression and visibility to Germany’s diverse 21st-century society: How can classical (chamber) music practice be connected to a post-migrant society? For this exploration, the Trickster Orchestra invites members of trans-traditional ensembles in Germany as well as other guests from the fields of composition, research, social activism, and art to work together. With this project, the Trickster Orchestra will become part of the federal program “Excellent Orchestra Landscape Germany” of the Federal Government Commissioner for Culture and the Media, as announced by Minister of State for Culture and Media Claudia Roth in January 2024.
The project comprises five Encounters, all of which focus on different aspects of trans-traditional musicking. They serve as incubators which generate musical themes and concepts that will become part of the concluding festival. In the Encounters, the Trickster Orchestra and guests develop innovative approaches to contemporary orchestral music that emerge from the radical diversity of the musical perspectives involved. The repertoire, instrumentation, structures, and performance formats of the 19th century classical European orchestral apparatus serve only as one possible point of reference among many. Each Encounter ends with a public workshop concert in which the audience can participate in the process.
> Encounter I: 13. to 15. December 2024 at Radialsystem
(Trans-traditional Music – An Attempt at Self-positioning)
> Encounter II: 3. to 5. March 2025 at Haus der Kulturen der Welt
(Trans-traditional Collectivity and Care)
> Encounter III: 14. to 16. April 2025 at Radialsystem
(Trans-traditional Comprovisation)
> Encounter IV: 3. to 5. October 2025 at Akademie der Künste (Hanseatenweg)
(Trans-traditional Microtonality)
> Encounter V: 6. to 8. February at Radialsystem
(Trans-traditional Multiperspectivity)
> »SAVE THE DATE«: 24. to 26. April 2026
Three-day Festival at Radialsystem
At the heart of the festival and the publication to be released in autumn 2026 is the musical and discursive representation of an orchestral music practice that is sensitive to ethnic, biographical, sexual, or gender-related aspects and, as composer George E. Lewis describes it, establishes a decentralized mosaic identity. The music that emerges recognizes historical, geographical, and cultural cross-connections – not to achieve diversity as an end in itself, but to enable a new musical complexity from diversity that promises greater creative depth.
In the open Encounters, an accompanying podcast, and the festival formats, questions are asked musically and discursively:
> What common but as yet undiscovered “third musical space” can be found that is neither one’s own nor foreign?
> What can an orchestra look like that corresponds to the completely transformed German society of the 21st century?
> How can such an orchestra strengthen social cohesion by building bridges and creating recognition for diverse communities?
> How can the participation of previously excluded and marginalized musicians become more common in contemporary music?
> How does the plural, post-migrant society express itself in terms of music aesthetics and at an excellent musical level?
> What is exoticism in music?
> What terms, concepts, and working methods characterize a trans-traditional orchestral practice?
> How can a decolonial and epistemologically decentralized orchestral practice succeed?
In answering these questions musically, it is not only the Trickster Orchestra itself that continues the discourse as a unique post-migrant ensemble – it also invites some of the best minds and most exciting ensembles of the trans-traditional direction of contemporary music to present themselves here for the first time as a central and sonically highly innovative scene of the German music scene.
