Discussique: Metaphor and Re-learning Listening for New Performance Practices in Transcultural Music

The "Discussique: Hearing Flowers" project follows the floral metaphors in various culture's music to unfold new forms of listening, music-making, and exchange for 12 musicians representing 7 different traditions of music. Over the course of the year, the project takes place at the botanical Garden, historical Eggenberg Palace, and Kunsthaus Graz in turn. Here the comparison of floral metaphors guide fellow musicians and audience members to understand for what to listen in each tradition, in order to acquire a differentiated and insightful appreciation. Only after a process of learning how to listen to each other do the musicians begin to make music together, looking for hybrid performance practices together which can accommodate, rather than homogenize the unique aspects of the different music. At the Akademie der Künste in Berlin, a group of seven other singers took on a partner project, "Discussique: Listening to the Days" wherein they spent an entire week learning each other's songs all with the theme of days of the week, and premiered a short piece which contrasts the tones of their voices as they sound while singing the other traditions' music in contrast to how they sound singing "their own" songs. Here metaphors with the underlying theme of special events of daily life, and ultimately, the passing of time, helped the singers differentiate, contextualize and inhabit other tones of voice.