TEMPO OF RECOLLECTION - Hosfeld Artist Management
TEMPO OF RECOLLECTION - Hosfeld Artist Management
TEMPO OF RECOLLECTION - Hosfeld Artist Management
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<strong>TEMPO</strong> <strong>OF</strong> <strong>RECOLLECTION</strong><br />
Music of Erwin Schulhoff<br />
Based upon the music of Erwin Schulhoff<br />
Tempo of Recollection draws upon a range of work by Erwin Schulhoff, and incorporates<br />
movement and theatrical design, to create a staged performance culminating in<br />
Schulhoff’s 2 nd String Quartet, featuring the St. Helen’s String Quartet. The piece employs<br />
an ensemble of musicians, actors, and dancers (approximately 10 altogether), integrated<br />
with projection, sound, lighting and minimal scenery to create a performance<br />
that provides historical, cultural and aesthetic contexts for Schulhoff’s work, and uses<br />
these performative elements and multiple contexts to lead into and inform the St.<br />
Helen’s performance of the Schulhoff 2 nd String Quartet.<br />
Schulhoff was a fascinating and significant artistic presence in the Central Europe of the<br />
1920s and 30s, as a concert pianist, jazz improviser and composer. He was born in Prague<br />
in 1894 and discovered at the age of 7 by Antonin Dvorak. He subsequently studied<br />
in Vienna, Leipzig, Paris (with Debussy) and Koln, before moving to Dresden following<br />
World War I. He launched a successful career as a concert performer, becoming<br />
friendly with many of the noted composers of his day, including Berg and Janacek, but<br />
he is perhaps best known to us as one of the first composers to successfully integrate<br />
jazz and neoclassical approaches. Following his death in a Nazi labor camp in 1942 (he<br />
was a German-speaking Czech Jew and a Communist), his works largely disappeared<br />
until the Glasnost period of the later 1980s, during which they were rediscovered and<br />
championed by Gidon Kremer and James Conlon, among others, although the bulk of<br />
his compositions still remain largely unknown to contemporary audiences.<br />
Intellectually, this piece is deeply informed by an understanding of the tremendous,<br />
generative cultural world of the 1920s & 30s Mitteleuropa, described by Milan Kundera<br />
and others; a cultural world, of which Schulhoff was a part, and which was lost to us -<br />
eliminated by the Nazi genocides, World War II and the period of the Cold War, which<br />
only began to end with the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and other events. This was a<br />
world that spanned the languages and cultures of Germany and the former Austro-<br />
Hungarian Empire, as well as France. Among the most easily recognized cultural<br />
movements from the period are Dada, Expressionism, late Jugenstil (Secession), but<br />
more importantly it was a period of great experimentation, easily the equal of (or exceeding)<br />
and the precursor to the ferment in Western arts since World War II. Schulhoff’s<br />
works, encompassing sophisticated neoclassical approaches, jazz and popular<br />
dance music, while also reflecting his affiliations with important visual artist movements,<br />
especially Dada and Expressionism, embodies the artistic milieu of Central<br />
Europe’s last great period of cultural flowering and destruction.<br />
visit www.TempoOfRecollection.com<br />
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