13 Overwhelming Instruments

In the Trickster Podcast, members and friends of the orchestra discuss questions concerning contemporary music and societies shaped by migration.

As witty as the orchestra itself, the Trickster Podcast unfolds a polyphonic and shape-shifting mosaic: introducing trans-traditional music scenes, letting global instruments speak, and offering glimpses into new artistic approaches within an interconnected global present.

To mark the TransTraditionale – the Music Festival of the Global Present hosted by the Trickster Orchestra in Berlin from April 24–26, 2026– cellist Jakob Nierenz and dramaturg Philip Geisler discuss extended playing techniques in European musical traditions and their connections to colonialism and global ways of listening. They explore technical challenges of instruments—from Niccolò Paganini, Ruth Crawford Seeger, and Helmut Lachenmann to Ravi Shankar’s North Indian raga music and the jazz of Miles Davis—and ask which sonic spaces still remain undiscovered in the interplay of instrument, body, and tradition.