music on the threshold: Muziek als...

Is it here or there? where is the music? where is it not? is it humorous? is it related to something? is it a lamp or an instrument? is it more than a concert? is that actual playing? is that acting? is that a sound? is that a gesture? is that an echo? where does it start? where does it end? seeing and hearing together? not together? tangentially? is it a lion? is it a lion's roar? is it evocative? is it abstract? is it a time machine? is it a cassette player? is it just a repetition? is it something that will continue in your mind? is it just a page turn or a turn within the piece? is it hidden? is it a mirror? is it reflected music? is it a symbol? is it a blackboard or a magical synesthetic map where sound and image inevitably coexist? is drawing musical? is it a piano étude or a pianist trying to find her way in the world? is it a glass of water or a filter? is it just an encapsulated song or a space for alchemy within a loudspeaker? is it a decontextualized object? is it a real one? is it sounding in your head as a recollection? is it new? is it ironic? is it fragile? is it about you/he/me/us/you/they?

Most average contemporary concerts do not raise such questions because they display such ritualistic structures that empty the actual content of the pieces of most of their intentionality. All expectations are fulfilled. Nothing to declare.
The music generally follows that pattern as well... references to a certain academic background, a safe model, a justifiable array of choices that generates conforting certainties, answers instead of questions,'happy endings'.

Luckily, there is still some scope for difference. The three concerts proposed by Stichting Plan B in the Netherlands (http://muziekalsbehindthescene.blogspot.com/) function as a laboratory for question marks... For me that is one of the most beautiful aspects of this project. The very definition of a 'concert' is put under question, reformulated all the time. The formats are variable, transportable, constituted by daily life objects and low-tech devices, no expensive, massive productions but intimate, fragile and musically-complex universes. These are able to sustain quite unique and solid pieces through deep musical thought instead of technological façades. The concerts work as a laboratory in which the objects are turned into unpredictable artifacts, sometimes they relate to the actual world, creating a certain nostalgia, sometimes they lose completely that function and adopt a fresh significance. Gesture, lights, casette players... they all become ingredients of the musical discourse which is sometimes extended, reflected and frozen in space by different installations.The concerts don't work as a casual overlap of pieces but stay within a particular aesthetic universe. I like to think that the music in this project  inhabits the threshold of things: it lives in the ambiguous realm between the world of reality and its reproductions, between memory and the still unknown, between space and music, between daily life objects and traditional instruments, between acting and playing, between visibility and invisibility, between the dreamed and the experienced.