How do we want to live as a community in the future? What do we want our cities to look like, how will our communities function, what kind of music will we hear? These questions, and many others, will be explored by the unparallelled Viennese ensemble Klangforum Wien in collaboration with a select group of movers and shakers, when they play their ‘urban opera’ urbo kune. Urbo Kune, which is Esperanto for ‘common city’, is the utopian capital of the United States of Europe. The full title of the performance is ein tag und eine stunde in urbo kune (one day and one hour in urbo kune), which is exactly what the audience is offered: during 25 hours the Muziekgebouw aan ’t IJ hosts an event during which Urbo Kune is established by means of a mix of concert, conference, film, installation and research laboratory. Audience members can come and go, eat, drink, even stay the night, and are challenged to contribute their ideas about the city and the Europe of the future. Urbo Kune’s soundtrack includes works by Xenakis, Furrer and Donatoni. Composer Rozalie Hirs will write a new work for the occasion. The international speakers include a number of Dutch keynotes: Arnon Grunberg (presenting a new short story), mayor of Amsterdam Eberhard van der Laan and architect Francine Houben. And, there’s food from all the corners of Europe. So do come and visit us in Urbo Kune! programme
dates
Sat June 6 2015 12:12 PM
information
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Dutch
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Duration of performance unknown (Gedurende deze 25 uur kunt in- en uitlopen met uw toegangsbewijs. Er is doorlopend eten en drinken verkrijgbaar.)
Europe needs a capital. A unifying metropolis dedicated to science, education, the arts and celebration, a city that is open and accessible to everyone. Where this city will arise and who will live there, what it will look like and how it will smell and sound – these are questions that a day and an hour in urbo kune attempts to explore with the means of music theatre.
a day and an hour in urbo kune is a 25-hour-long project about European identity, urban planning, history, art, politics and architecture. Using music, film, photography, visual art, narrators and gastronomy, the production gives us a look at life in the fictional capital of the United States of Europe. There’s no getting around the fact that a United States of Europe is a must, declares the very first sentence of the manifesto drawn up by the makers of this project, and its realisation should start with the capital: Urbo Kune. In order for people to identify with the ‘spiritual and intellectual space’ that the United States of Europe represents, the European Community first of all needs to have a spiritual and intellectual centre. Urbo Kune means ‘common city’ in Esperanto, the language conceived for the purpose of uniting all peoples. This city is an ideal, of course – but as a teaser for the future, it will become a reality in the Muziekgebouw aan ’t IJ in a 25-hour-long time travel journey to 4 July 2025.
Urban opera urbo kune is a joint project by the music theatre company netzzeit and experimental architecture forum (f.e.a.). The project was initiated by the Czech-Austrian architectural theorist Jan Tabor (b. 1944), greatly inspired by the work of the Iraqi-British architect Zaha Hadid (b. 1950). Within the framework of this opera, Zaha Hadid´s designs will provide the basis for improvisations developed by Swedish free-jazz saxophonist Mats Gustafsson (b.1964) in collaboration with musicians of the Klangforum Wien. Prior to this project, Zaha Hadid was a guest at the Holland Festival in 2010, when she designed a special ribbon-shaped pavilion for performances of Bach´s solo works. a day an an hour in urbo kune is an ongoing programme which the audience can walk in and out of, in order to get a bite to eat or catch some sleep.
The founding of the city Urbo Kune, which goes on from December 2013 to May 2015, is a musical process. As the spiritual and intellectual centre of a continent, Urbo Kune will be built from a single, unique material: music. Or, to be more precise, the music of our times. The urban design functions as a score; through the process of mixture, amalgamation and interpretation, sound will solidify to become a city.
How does this work in practice? An outstanding example is urbo kune: Konstellation no. 4, realized on 6 September 2014 at the Library & Learning Center of the Vienna University of Economics and Business. Zaha Hadid designed a library for this university, which has not yet been built. Part of that programme was a musical interpretation of her designs for the building by saxophonist Mats Gustafsson, together with members of Klangforum Wien; the musicians used the graphic work as a score and erected the library as a piece of music – certainly a very unusual premiere.
In the run-up to the completed 25-hour-long opera, the project is taking shape in a variety of such ‘constellations’, in which the mainstays of the plan are separately investigated. The Konstellations are symposium-like music theatre performances, but at the same time also research sessions that are open to the public – since the European capital belongs to all of us, we should design it collectively. Some of the themes keep coming back, others are one-off excursions into architecture and urban history, music theory, visual art and the performing arts, urban development, European research, performance art or literature. Together these different research productions comprise the large-scale, 25 hour-long music theatre piece. The complete work will have its world premiere in May 2015 in Cologne and be presented at the Holland Festival on 6 and 7 June 2015, as the event takes longer than one day. In addition to the programme developed in Austria and Germany, in Amsterdam there will be contributions by Arnon Grunberg and Francine Houben, among others.
