Music festival on freedom

“I felt released, freed”, recalled composer Ruth Crawford Seeger after visiting the Bauhaus Dessau in 1931.

Freedom is more relevant than ever before and was the central theme of the 2024 “Bauhaus Music” festival. With a spotlight on “exile”, the three-day festival highlighted artistic and political positions and forms of expression surrounding the concept of freedom, past and present. The moderated concerts included works by Arnold Schönberg, Kurt Schwitters, Johann Sebastian Bach, Béla Bartók, Alban Berg, Stefan Wolpe, Cathy Milliken and Ruth Crawford Seeger. Numerous artists and renowned soloists like Claudia Barainsky, Kolja Blacher, Gunnar Brandt-Sigurdsson and Jocelyn B. Smith, and the Deutsches Kammerorchester Berlin came together over three days to explore the musical life and work at the Bauhaus.

“Bauhaus Music” is part of an interdisciplinary research project at the Bauhaus-Archiv / Museum für Gestaltung, which has been studying the relationship of the Bauhaus and music since 2021. This year’s festival was also part of the series Opera & Democracy: Transatlantic Conversations & Concerts which was curated by Kai Hinrich Müller, co-presented by the Thomas Mann House, Los Angeles and institutional partners in Germany and the United States.

Workshops with pupils
Various workshops were being offered to school-aged children in the lead-up to the festival. For example, composer Cathy Milliken had had the pupils tell their stories and made them audible using very simple means. In another project, artists Alexandre Decoupigny and Claire Fristot worked with 11th-graders from the Carl von Ossietzky comprehensive school to grasp the principles of the Bauhaus by means of musical composition. Here, too, the focus lied in exploring how music relates to the lives and reality of the young participants. The results of the various projects were presented at the festival.

Artistic Directors
Kai Hinrich Müller, Michal Friedländer and Karl-Heinz Steffens

Cooperation and media partners: Berliner Künstlerprogramm des DAAD, Deutsches Kammerorchester Berlin, Kulturagenten, Kultur Büro Elisabeth, Monopol, Thomas Mann House, Tip Berlin, Radio 3

Bauhaus Music 2024 was made possible with the generous support of the Capital Cultural Fund.

For more information on the Bauhaus Music Festival 2024, insights from the previous year, and all related details, click here.

Bauhaus Music
17–19 October 2024
the temporary bauhaus-archiv
St. Elisabeth + Villa Elisabeth