The Kasper Collusion: 'shifting states of songs'

The program shifting states of songs is the result of the collaboration of the experimental songwriting trio The Kasper Collusion with a classical string quartet. The trio has been working together for about 7 years, developing a thoroughly idiosyncratic music. The resulting pieces, improvisations and collective compositions refer throughout to the traditional form of the "song". But The Kasper Collusion's "songs" go beyond the common format, meandering in the nowhere between peculiar musical fragments and a reminder that they might once have been simply beautiful songs.

In this context, the string quartet will not be a "nice" accessory for easy-to-digest campfire romance, as the instrumentation might suggest. Rather, the trio's artistic musical approach of fragmenting and reassembling material will be continued in this collaboration and artistically expanded through the ensembles' mutual reference to each other. The string parts are openly conceived and written in such a way that the trio and string quartet sometimes stand side by side, like two separate projects, sometimes counteract each other, sometimes play together. This creates changing musical states (fragmented, parallel, side by side, against each other, with each other) without abandoning the overall coherence that connects three "movements" building on each other into a "great form". The ambiguity of the English term "movement" (musical section / movement, movement, flow) serves the project as an associative starting point for the compositional work.

The concert at Stadtgarten is the premiere of shifting states of songs.

Sponsored by the Landesmusikrat NRW and the Ministry of Culture and Science of the State of North Rhine-Westphalia.