Our online listening club is held monthly from 7.30-8.30pm on the last Tuesday of the month, and is a chance to come together regularly to listen to new music and find out more about a selection of contemporary composers.
We will invite a variety of different guest hosts who will explore the music of a new contemporary composer each session. You'll be invited to spend some time listening to one of the composer's works before we meet, but there will also be an opportunity to listen to the work during the session if you don't get around to it beforehand.
Like a book club but with less homework!
For this month's listening club we'll be exploring Peter Ablinger 'Membrane, Regen (weiss/wisslich 31e)'
You can listen to the piece here:
Biography
Peter Ablinger was born in Schwanenstadt, Austria in 1959. He first studied graphic arts and became enthused by free jazz. He completed his studies in composition with Gösta Neuwirth and Roman Haubenstock-Ramati in Graz and Vienna. Since 1982 he has lived in Berlin, where he has initiated and conducted numerous festivals and concerts. In 1988 he founded the Ensemble Zwischentöne. In 1993 he was a visiting professor at the University of Music, Graz. He has been guest conductor of 'Klangforum Wien', 'United Berlin' and the 'Insel Musik Ensemble'. Since 1990 Peter Ablinger has worked as a freelance musician. From 2012-2017 he was Research Professor at the University of Huddersfield. In 2019 he was Guest Professor at the Royal Conservatory in The Hague and Leiden University. Since 2000 he has been engaged in various forms of non-institutional teaching and work with private students.
Festivals at which Peter Ablinger's compositions have been performed include the Berlin and Vienna Festwochen, Darmstadt, Donaueschingen, and festivals in Istanbul, Los Angeles, Oslo, Buenos Aires, Hong Kong, London, New York.The Offenes Kulturhaus Linz, the Diözesanmuseum Köln, Kunsthalle Wien, Neue Galerie der Stadt Graz, the Kunsthaus Graz, the Akademie der Künste Berlin, the Haus am Waldsee Berlin, the Santa Monica Museum of the Arts have showed his installation work over the last few years. Peter Ablinger is one of the few artists today who uses noise without any kind of symbolism - not as a signifier for chaos, energy, entropy, disorder, or uproar; not for opposing something, or being disobedient or destructive; not for everything, for eternity, or for what-have-you. As in all these cases of music deliberately involving noise, noise is the case, but for Ablinger: this alone. Peter Ablinger has also come a long way in questioning the nature of sound, time, and space (the components usually thought central to music), and his findings have jeopardized and made dubious conventions usually thought irrefutable. These insights pertain to repetition and monotony, reduction and redundancy, density and entropy. (Christian Scheib)
"Sounds are not sounds! They are here to distract the intellect and to soothe the senses. Not once is hearing 'hearing': hearing is that which creates me." The composer Peter Ablinger (born in Schwanenstadt, Austria in 1959) is, as Christian Scheib once put it, a "mystic of enlightenment" whose "calls and litanies are aimed at cognition." At the same time, the composer, who - after studying graphic arts - studied with Gösta Neuwirth and Roman Haubenstock-Ramati, and since 1982 lives in Berlin, is also a skeptic who understands the cultural rules and (destructive) habits enforced by tradition: "So let us play further and say: sounds are here to hear (-but not to be heard. That's something else). And that hearing is here to be ceased ('Das Hören ist da um aufzuhören'). More I can't say." (Text: Christian Baier, translated by Bill Dietz)
© Peter Ablinger 2025
Please register in advance by clicking BOOK on the right hand side. After registering you will receive a confirmation email containing information about joining the session.
You can join the session on Zoom via an internet browser on your computer or mobile device or you can phone in on either a mobile or landline to listen using the Dial by your location number.
Zoom's closed captions feature will be enabled if you require any further information or if you need to contact us about access requirements please email info@sound-scotland.co.uk
