Ensemble Recherche

As part of its “A Postcolonial Recherche” project, Ensemble Recherche invited ten composers and sound artists from developing countries and emerging economies to an artistic exchange. They discussed (post-)colonialism and condensed their knowledge into artistic results, moderated by the South African composer Bongani Ndodana-Breen, a 2021-2022 fellow at Yale and Harvard. Now at the end of the one-year project period, there are  musical performances and hopefully some insight in our own patterns of evaluation.

Ensemble Recherche performs five of the resulting works interspersed with video statements from the composers, who share their stories and learnings from this intensely collaboartive experience.

Program
Rojin Monibi – Qabz-o-Bast
Macri Cáceres – Micrography
Monthati Masebe – Mba
Adrian Mokanu – Les chevaux de feu
Njabulo Phungula – a tap releases the new harmony

Ensemble Recherche
The members of the ensemble recherche have been dedicated to the new and unknown since 1985. The Freiburg-based ensemble has shaped contemporary music and written musical history during this period of more than three decades – with in excess of 600 premiers and more than 50 CD recordings. The eight musicians, all internationally known soloists in the field of contemporary music, combine immense pleasure in experimentation with enthusiasm for intensive consideration of the present time. The eight soloists place their enormous musicality and their individual personalities at the service of the collective so that they can research the musical present together, as an ensemble . The considerable energy and personal commitment of each and every explains why the independent ensemble has been recognised as one of the most important players of contemporary music for more than three decades.