|
In the present year the Academy of Arts celebrates the tenth anniversary of its co-operation with FMP.
With “Three Nights of Living Music and Minimal Art” in 1969 in the Academy of Arts a series of workshops of free music was started which have been held every year since then, mostly from Holy Thursday until Easter Monday, in the Academy’s exhibition halls and which have attracted constantly more visitors from Berlin, the Federal Republic and other European countries.
When we remember the origins of this little festival ten years ago, we cannot but be surprised at how such a constantly growing and nearly “established” event could arise out of so hard beginnings threatened by miscellaneous hazards.
In 1968 we were preparing a great project under the title “Young Generation in Great Britain” in the Academy of Arts. The point was to represent the remarkable cultural development of recent years in England with all its possibilities and facets. For the opening of the exhibition, which was part of the project, we wished to present something being characteristic of the London scene and had the idea of inviting an ensemble belonging to the modern jazz scene in England. While preparing the project in London I happened to become acquainted with some musicians of the Spontaneous Music Ensemble, above all with the head and percussionist John Stevens, and with the bassist Dave Holland. While talking in the street we arranged a guest performance for this group, which on the opening Sunday of the exhibition then indeed played on the stage and in the exhibition hall of the Academy.
In the Berlin newspaper Der Tagesspiegel it was stated at that time: “As Free Jazz is not so everybody’s taste, the handful of admirers was not too numerous in the auditorium of the Academy.”
We, however, were very glad about this form of opening the exhibition and in the following time we tried to get in touch with jazz musicians also in Berlin in order to enable further performances in the Academy.
By Donata Höffer, who was at the same time rehearsing on the Academy’s stage in a production of Willi Schmidt, we were introduced to Jost Gebers, who was then still a bassist. Together we planned a function unter the title “Three Days of Music Festival”, which was later on renamed “3 Nights of Living…”, because we wished the musicians to play within the framework of the exhibition “Minimal Art”.
But this function would nearly already have meant the end of further planning, too. For while the group was appearing in the midst of the works of art exhibited, a highly embarrassing situation arose – which might be explained from the atmosphere of those days being full of suspense - , when listeners – at first in a quite unsystematic and nearly unintended way – started to use the works of arts as seating accommodations, to walk across them and also to beat and knock on them as if they were percussion instruments. When we tried to put a stop to them, violent quarries happened, and I remember downright fights. The damages to the works of art insured were so immense that even many years later we were not yet able to organize functions within exhibitions. The Berlin newspaper Der Abend wrote: “People were heedlessly plucking reed grasses in an inner court, and during an intermission they passed on to hold a noisy happening; it predominantly consisted in fists and feet hammering onto the exhibition pieces made out of tin in the rhythms of the old Lansquenets’ drums. Minimal music.”
We were fortunate to recover rather quickly from this disaster, and after one year the first Easter workshop took place from the 25th to the 30th March, 1970, which has laid the foundations for a tradition of many years, and which thus certainly has contributed to finding an audience for the “Free Music”, which takes notice of all developments with pleasure and interest.
Besides the workshop itself we have also tried other forms of functions together with FMP, as the meeting between musicians and children in the halls of the Academy or also in Berlin schools; and in the spring of 1977, within the framework of the series of functions “Berlin Now” performed in New York, we sent the duos Brötzmann/Bennink and Schlippenbach/Johansson to some gallery concerts in New York. In the present year, too, a Free Jazz musician managed for the first time to be accepted into the Berlin artist’s programme of the DAAD. So John Tchicai will be able to live and work in Berlin for some months and thus also impart additional experiences to Berlin musicians.
We hope to see further co-operation, also after this noteworthy tenth anniversary.
Translator unknown
|