Brigitta Muntendorf: Orbit

A concert without a stage or visible musicians: the audience sits dispersed about the room for »Orbit – A War Series«, the sound appears to come from everywhere. The magazine Groove describes its premiere at the Venice Biennale in 2023 as an »impressive synthesis of the arts« – and it revolves around a serious subject. At the centre: immortal warriors in a post-human, techno-futuristic choir. Using electronic music between techno and a celestial expansive sound, composer Brigitta Muntendorf places alienated voices cloned by AI. They tell of structural sexualised violence against women as a weapon of war. Detached from their individual fate and from any physicality due to their alienation, the voices encircle the audience with haunting testimonies of wars and power struggles as conducted against the female body for millennia. »I wanted to create a space where we can approach these themes and ›embrace‹ them, where the violence is not passed on to the audience or reproduced in the concert hall«, the composer says. Here, space is literally meant as »sound space«. The sound comes from loudspeakers, arranged around the audience – sometimes, it seems to circle like a helicopter; then, to come from a specific direction or from everywhere. The latest 3D-sound technology, recently obscured in the Recital Hall of the Elbphilharmonie, enables this.

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Keywords: Contemporary