How long does it take for change to occur? How much can happen in a concert hall in the span of an evening? Live music often does the unimaginable – bringing sounds of a distant past to a present audience, challenging the passing of time. But what about the future? This is perhaps the question that prompted the Stegreif Orchester’s latest project, titled symphony of change. The culmination of a multi-chapter project promoted with the hashtag #bechange, the symphony merges recomposition, improvisation, performance art and political demonstration to take a stance on the climate crisis and feminism.
The scores of four female composers – Hildegard of Bingen, Wilhelmine von Bayreuth, Emilie Mayer and Clara Wieck – provide the building material of a work that reflects on our role in history and calls to action. The resulting symphony – of Mahlerian length – had its Berlin premiere on the last day of the Musikfest, meeting a success that marked a positive conclusion to the festival.
For those who have yet to meet them, the Stegreif Orchester brings together 30 musicians of disparate backgrounds, creating a chameleonic sound that blends classical, pop, rock and jazz sonorities. The ensemble has no conductors, and their performances rely on mutual coordination and feedback, doing without the typical seating of the orchestra or sheet music. Their full name – The Improvising Orchestra – communicates their modus operandi, largely based on improvisation and rearrangements. symphony of change features recompositions by five members of the ensemble, all of them women, with the intention of resuming from where their four predecessors had left off.
Like some other notable symphonies, symphony of change also outlines a programme – but rather than dealing with desperate, obsessive lovers or the coddled security of domesticity, it addresses the 17 Sustainable Development Goals, a list of objectives compiled by the United Nations as an agenda for the future. Some of the Goals’ major points confront climate concern and gender equality, and through the intersection of these two the Stegreif Orchester developed their symphony.
The opening acts of the performance – the recording of a child trying to pronounce the word Zukunft (future), light shining on a plant at the centre of the stage, and one of the cellists turning the tuning pegs of her instrument to the point of breaking the strings – instantly made its purpose clear. Perhaps naïve, these bits of symbolism were integrated into the fabric of the work, different recordings of children’s voices punctuating its duration and the plant being used as a prop on several occasions. The untuning of the cello was but the beginning of a general evasion from the etiquette of symphonic concerts; for almost one and a half hours, the orchestra moved incessantly around the hall, taking up the stage but also the stalls and the gallery. This mingling reached its height when the musicians started handing cardboard boxes to the audience, encouraging people to thump on them like rudimentary drums.
While nobody who has seen, say, live footage of The Rolling Stones would be surprised to see a musician moving restlessly in concert, it is still impressive how Stegreif managed to do that on a much larger scale, while keeping the performance at a high level. The quality of the rearrangements was matched by the technical dexterity of all members of the orchestra. When not halted for a solo or joining together in a tutti, the ensemble split into smaller groups, ensuring timbral variety but also cohesion. The transitions between sections of the symphony were smooth, pre-existent music fading into improvisation and vice versa. All the musicians proved themselves first-rate soloists but also perfectly in tune with the rest of the orchestra – evidence that change is at once an individual and collective matter.
