A family member of mine once kept a sculpture from Ancient Egypt in his institute for scientific research. I have never seen it in person, but an image has been burned into my mind since my childhood, namely how that sculpture stands on a desk among papers and paperweights. Is it then near or far, a cultural object that still speaks to us, or already a foreign thing that remains inaccessible?

 

There is a refugee dormitory opposite my Munich apartment. When the windows are open in summer, there is a mixture of sounds in the courtyard between Muslim prayer chants, noise music, African songs, live recordings from the Bayreuth Festival and my own occasional sounds.

 

When slogans like “We are the people” were shouted across squares in German cities in the fall of 2014, I was struck not only by their content, but also by their sound. I began to think about how the political could be articulated in contemporary music if it understood itself less as a translation of content and more as a form of listening and witnessing to contemporary forms of expression. But what does listening to and witnessing political realities have to do with a piano, what with tempered tuning or an atonal chord? And what kind of communicative potential do they have in our society with its diverse cultural backgrounds, such as in my neighborhood?

 

(Isabel Mundry)