Under new festival direction by Lydia Rilling, the closing concert of the 2023 Donaueschinger Musiktage will see the premiere of works from Younghi Pagh-Paan and Francesca Verunelli. In her composition „Frau, warum weinst du? Wen suchst du?" (Woman, why are you weeping? Who do you seek?), Pagh-Paan is primarily concerned with "that great consolation that a person who is weeping and searching experiences, and the strength that comes therein." In Tune and Retune II Francesca Verunelli – who also takes center stage at the Venice Biennale five days later – deals with the question "Can the internal time of sound and the semantic time of its listening be heard through each other?" Both premieres are performed by the SWR Symphony Orchestra under the direction of Ingo Metzmacher.

The entire concert can be watched from home on the SWR livestream.

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Younghi Pagh-Paan – "Frau, warum weinst du? Wen suchst du?"

It was a long time before I came to the title and situation from which the music should emerge. “Woman, why are you weeping? "Who do you seek?” – these are the words with which Jesus addressed Mary Magdalene, who wept by his empty burial cave (John 20:15). She is the first person that the risen lord reaches out to, calling her by her name Maria, and telling her what is to come. I am not concerned with the story of resurrection, but with that great consolation that a person who is weeping and searching experiences, and the strength that comes therein. I think of those people crying from need now, especially women. And I think of them out of my own weakness. It is a consolation that makes one’s own desire for life and for existence strong once more. View work details

Francesca Verunelli – Tune and Retune II

An important question from which this work arose is: can the internal time of sound and the semantic time of its listening be heard through each other? I was interested in shifting transparently from one more microscopic time-being – that of sound in itself, very linked to what we call timbre – and the one more macroscopic time-being – the one we approach as form, the time of the listening.

Perhaps the most striking listening experience is to be precisely at the point of transition from the microscopic to the macroscopic. That is to say: how it happens that the microscopic persists and forms the macroscopic, and how the macroscopic is a place of unfolding of the microscopic.
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