Interaction and control. Lecture performance with acoustic sound generators, live electronics and a canister of vegan fake blood

Contributors

Program

The creative starting point of this lecture-performance is the question of how the experience of disorder and control can be endured and utilized in performance situations of improvised music. In addition to texts from the fields of musical improvisation, theater practice and media theory, found objects and fragments from everyday life will be used to initialize and comment on the musical and performative events on stage.

The lecture performance will last around 45 minutes, after which there will be an opportunity for discussion with the performers.

Raoul Baumgartner: musician and sound tinkerer, in the sense of a radical DIY he creates his own instruments and moves between scenes and genres under various pseudonyms.

Dr. Knut Holtsträter: musicologist and theater scholar with a focus on music and its performances in the 19th and 20th centuries, he sees his artistic work as closely intertwined with his academic research.

Nora Niethammer: theater scholar and performer, interested in chaos and collectives both academically and practically.

Thomas Wenk: Composition, piano, percussion and university lecturer for improvised music and music theory, specializing in prepared piano, instrumental object theater and works for cassette recorders and analog electronics.

The event is part of the FZM lecture series "Improvising: Spontaneous Creativity in Art and Everyday Life".

In the summer semester 2026, the Freiburg Research and Teaching Center(FZM) is organizing a lecture series on the topic of improvisation from various specialist perspectives and facets. In addition to ten lectures by members of the FZM and guests, which will take place on Wednesdays in the lecture hall of the University's Musicology Department, events with improvisational-musical performances or cross-genre performances are planned on five Monday evenings at the College of Music, two of which are part of the FZM event series "musik + wissen".

Here you will find the short program (pdf) (this file is not barrier-free) with all individual dates of the public lecture series.

The Freiburg Research and Teaching Center (FZM) is a joint institution of the College of Music and the University campus Freiburg with the aim of mutual networking in music-related research and teaching.